If someone published my diary after I died, I’d die again – of shame…

One of the scariest things I’ve ever done is read my diary out loud to a room full of strangers. Perhaps that says more about the kind of soft-handed life I’ve led than it does about the source material, but regardless – I’ve rarely known terror like it.

A friend of mine had organised a charity fundraising event, selling tickets to hear people ritually humiliate themselves by reading out excerpts from the journals of their youth. I gamely agreed to participate as a performer before I cracked open the musings of my teenage years and early twenties for the first time in a decade. By the time I’d actually looked at them, it was too late to change my mind. I couldn’t renege now – it was for charity – but oh, how I wanted to.

I don’t embarrass easily, but there’s something about seeing it in black and white – or purple and cream, during that stint I had splashed out on a coloured fountain pen cartridge and embossed Paperblanks notebook – that plunges you right back into all the searing insecurities and heartaches of a thankfully bygone era. All that secret yearning and humiliation and pain and angst – so much angst! – poured out in ink and held fast by paper, done so in the firm belief that no one, not in this lifetime or the next, would ever read them. Little did 18-year-old me imagine that her older self would betray that confidence, exposing her most vulnerable parts and poking fun of them in a London pub for cheap laughs.

But at least I had some choice in the matter. I signed up to read aloud voluntarily, I was the one in control of what made the cut. Picking my extracts with care, I opted for funnier passages while redacting the more troubling or shameful elements. Joan Didion, the celebrated American writer and journalist, was given no such choice – a fact that doesn’t sit particularly comfortably.

It’s been announced that the late Didion’s incredibly personal notes on her therapy sessions are to be published in April this year. Addressed to her now-deceased husband, John Gregory Dunne, the 46 entries of “meticulous” notes penned from 1999 onwards were seemingly not intended for anyone else’s eyes. They detail her struggles with alcoholism, with anxiety, with guilt, with depression; they describe the sometimes challenging relationship she had with her adopted daughter, Quintana. It doesn’t get more intimate or raw than that.

The notes were discovered by Didion’s literary executors not long after her death from Parkinson’s complications in 2021, tucked into an unlabelled folder in a filing cabinet. As Didion had left no instructions about what to do with them, legally they’re “fair game”. But should they be? Is anyone really under the impression that someone would want their most private thoughts and feelings, written in response to probing psychiatry sessions, to be revealed to the world?

The late author’s loved ones certainly don’t seem to think so. One anonymous friend told The Observer: “I have no doubt that this document will further our collective astonishment at Joan’s work, but I also cannot think of anything more private than notes kept about one’s psychiatry sessions. It’s not my place to say what Joan would have wanted, but as someone who loved her very much, the publication of these pages makes me terrifically sad.”

They added that Didion’s inner circle were equally horrified, believing that her “privacy has been betrayed”: “Joan was nothing if not meticulous and intentional with the details she decided to share – and not share – in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Anything beyond that seems to me a tremendous betrayal of her privacy by the people she trusted the most.”

This, for me, is at the crux of the matter. While nearly all of us would balk at the idea of our most intimate jottings being rounded up and put in print for anyone to read, the notion is perhaps even more abhorrent to a writer. Part of what made reading my old diaries so excruciating was the fact that they were so appallingly written: poorly constructed, desperately self-conscious, marked by their awkward attempts to ape the style of both Bridget Jones’s Diary and Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging, and peppered with so many exclamation marks that I was seemingly on the constant cusp of hysteria (“The new school year beginneth at last – Callooh Callay!!!” starts one particularly hard-to-stomach entry).

Even in later stream-of-consciousness exercises undertaken as an adult, I am struck by how differently I write when there is no intended audience. When you work with words for a living, language is hugely important – a tool that you use, exactly and precisely, to convey something very specific to an outside reader. You tinker and play around and you refine and refine and refine until you’re satisfied with the result; only then do you show it to anyone. Writing that’s intended for an audience of one – or even zero, if the intention is to simply purge the emotions onto the page and never read them again – is completely different. It allows you to explore and express without the need to impress anyone or edit your thoughts as you go for an external, critical eye. It’s the difference between belting out your favourite song in the shower and performing on stage – one is designed for public consumption, the other is not.

Didion was well versed in this distinction. In 1998, she criticised the decision to posthumously publish Ernest Hemingway’s True at First Light memoir, 38 years after his death: “This is a man to whom words mattered,” she wrote. “He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them. His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.” It’s staggering to read this and pretend that Didion would have wanted her own private notes to be splashed and paraded as “an unmissable publication”.

It’s not the first case to shine a spotlight on the ethics of art being released without the artist’s explicit consent. The decision to publish Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in 2015, for example, was dogged by controversy. Although Lee was still alive, there were questions around whether she truly had the mental capacity to approve the publication of what was initially marketed as a “sequel” to her seminal work, To Kill a Mockingbird. These questions remain; Lee died the following year. Edward Burlingame, who was an executive editor at Lippincott when her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was released, claimed that there had never been any intention on Lee’s part to publish Go Set a Watchman – it was simply regarded as a first draft that she then reworked into Mockingbird. Reviews of the “new” book were patchy at best; readers worried it would sully her legacy.

These issues aren’t confined to literature either, with musicians’ work often falling prey to their estates’ questionable choices. It’s hard to believe that some of our late musical heavyweights would really want unfinished recordings or B-sides that they hadn’t deemed fit for release to suddenly be put out into the world, eroding their reputation one sub-par demo at a time. Lioness: Hidden Treasures, for example, came out just six months after Amy Winehouse’s death – a collection of demos and unreleased songs that feels nothing but a pale imitation of her era-defining, award-winning albums Frank and Back to Black. And then there’s An American Prayer, the woefully misguided Doors album cobbled together seven years after lead singer Jim Morrison died by putting some of his spoken-word recordings to music.

Clearly, there’s moral ambiguity woven into all of this. If an author suddenly dies after submitting a years-in-the-making manuscript to their editor, it’s arguably in everyone’s interest to publish what might be the next great work of literature. And, while the ethics of publishing someone’s private writings may be murky, we’d understand a lot less about London society in 17th-century England without the rich historical source material of Samuel Pepys’s diary.

But I do think we need to start examining why we’re publishing artists’ work posthumously. If the motivation is to line pockets rather than honour legacies, that hardly seems a good enough justification for invading someone’s privacy in the most brutal of ways. In the meantime, until there’s better legal protection for the dead, perhaps we’re all better off doing a Henry James or Charles Dickens and burning our personal papers while we’re still alive to ensure they never get into the wrong hands. Excuse me while I find a lighter…