Literary gold ... or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion diary opens an ethical minefield

Soon we can all read the late author's private notes about her therapy sessions. But should we, asks Donna Ferguson

- Donna Ferguson

In 1998, the late journalist Joan Didion wrote a scathing essay about the posthumous publication of True at First Light, a travel journal and fictional memoir by Ernest Hemingway. “This is a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them,” Didion wrote. “His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.”

Just over a year later, Didion began writing her own journal about her sessions with a psychiatrist. She addressed these notes – detailing her struggles with alcoholism, anxiety, guilt and depression, a sometimes fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana and reflections on her childhood and legacy – to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

The announcement that these post-psychiatry notes, discovered by Didion's literary executors in an unlabelled folder shortly after she died in 2021, are to be published in April has raised questions around the ethics of posthumous publishing.

Didion left no instructions to her trustees – her literary editor Lynn Nesbit, and longtime editors Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano – about how to handle the deeply private journal after her death from complications of Parkinson's disease.

In total, 46 entries were found – printed out and placed in chronological order – in a portable filing cabinet next to her desk. They will be published, with only minimal editing, such as footnotes and corrections of typos, under the title Notes to John.