A pool of lamplight, a steaming cup of tea, a pen in the hand. Writing in one’s journal is the essence of privacy, unburdening oneself of tangled thoughts and feelings in a stream of words onto the page. But will it remain private once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil?
The naive optimism of this question has been answered by the literary trustees of Joan Didion’s estate with their decision to publish part of her journal, just three years after her death. The book, titled Notes to John, will be released by Knopf on April 22, and comprises the notes she made during sessions with a psychiatrist at a troublesome time in her family life. Ordinarily the interactions of a psychiatric session are protected by the law of doctor/patient confidentiality, but somehow now that does not pertain.
I can’t imagine Joan Didion would approve of the disclosure of her unfiltered thoughts. News of this upcoming book has ignited the perpetual debate about whether the public has a right to the private material of famous people. As always it is explained there is merit in expanding her literary canon now that she is gone. It is reported that the notes were found printed and arranged by date, thereby making a complete narrative. Without clear instructions from Joan, it is assumed this might speak to an expectation of eventual publication, though to my mind it could be merely a sign of a fastidious attention to her archives. But without a doubt, there is money to be made.
I am as curious as the next person about how to live and like many of us I go to books and art, music and movies for clues. When the process behind the artistic creation is revealed it is like catnip to other creative minds to see behind the curtain. But publishing the unvarnished journals of writers is a tender subject, for they are, in their nobler form, the incubators of finished writing, at the worst, the detritus of unhinged narcissism.
We like to believe that “notebooks and journals are repositories of safety and sanction, places where we allow ourselves with humility to stumble and fall,” writes Elissa Altman in her upcoming book Permission. Journals are trusted confidantes, nonjudgmental listeners, sometimes seedbeds for writing something larger, but always secret, personal, rudimentary. In her essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan herself wrote, “…we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker … your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”
I first discovered the writing of Joan Didion with the 1979 publication of her second book of essays, The White Album. I was electrified from the first sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” How had I never heard of her in the university creative writing program I had finished three years earlier? Night after night I sat in the light of my single lamp next to my mattress on the floor in my second floor Sacramento apartment, unaware yet of living in her hometown, reading her clear-eyed observations about the culture and time I lived in. I became a lifelong admirer of her work, moving backward to pick up her 1968 Slouching Toward Bethlehem and forward into her voluminous output that continued up until her death in December of 2021 at the age of 87. She spoke from and to a generation of writers who still invoke her, study her, and imitate her if they dare.
She was never one to “let it all hang out,” her persona as precise and polished as her sentences. She trained herself to such exactness when she taught herself to type beginning at age fifteen by transcribing the stories of Ernest Hemingway letter by letter. Years later, she claimed him as her most important influence. He wrote “very direct sentences,” she said in a 1978 Paris Review interview, “smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.”
Joan Didion considered it a travesty when Ernest Hemingway’s unfinished manuscripts were published after his death, in flagrant disregard of his express wishes. Her scathing essay was titled “Last Words” and appeared first in The New Yorker in 1998 and later included in her last book of essays, Let Me Tell You What I Mean. She castigated the ultimate insolence of using his work for the “systematic creation of a marketable product” which did indeed ultimately lead to, among other insults, the creation of a brand of furniture. Claims that it was his own prose “except for punctuation and the obviously overlooked ‘ands’ and ‘buts’” were rebutted by her in no uncertain terms: “You care about the punctuation or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You care about the “ands” and the “buts” or you don’t, and Hemingway did. You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t.”
Joan Didion with her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana Roo at home in Malibu, 1976. Photo by John Bryson for Getty Images.
I love this candid capture of Joan in an unguarded moment with her family. In most images of her, she is serious, wary, often with a slight furrow in her brow. Whatever troubles came later, in this moment she is relaxed and smiling.
If you wish to see into Joan Didion’s soul, there is nothing more aching or revealing than The Year of Magical Thinking, published in 2005 about her husband’s death two years earlier, and the 2011 book, Blue Nights, about her daughter’s illness and death two years after John’s. Here is the distillation of every feeling she had about those two profound losses in her life. It has the occasional spareness of journal writing, lists of words, fragments of thoughts, and the strange detachment that attends grief. In other words, it feels rough, though it is purely Joan’s voice on the page. The soon-to-be-published psychiatric session notes were recorded in her journal in 1999-2000, only a few years before John and Quintana died, and were perhaps a source of regret for her later. It would be only natural that she might have written things about each of them that she felt unworthy or ignoble after they were gone.
Other profoundly important writers have had their full journals published long after their explicit requests for continued privacy had expired. Carl Jung’s The Red Book was hidden away for many decades according to his wish that it remain secret, which ended with the eventual death of the heirs who honored his wishes and the advent of a younger generation with no such strictures or accountability. Forty-eight years passed before it was finally released to the public.
Sylvia Plath, who took her own life, had her complete diaries published nineteen years later, available for the prying eyes of anyone who cared to read them. Her most famous book of poetry, Ariel, in rough draft form at her death, was edited and published by her husband Ted Hughes soon afterward; more than forty years later Airel was published in its original form.
When I returned to Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary last year, I understood that Leonard Woolf had been careful, in his mind, to present only those parts of Virginia’s diaries that had to do with her writing life. Anything further would have been a violation, even twelve years after her death by suicide. It would be a full thirty-six years before her unabridged diaries began to be published.
Those who survive us will be hard-pressed to let us be ourselves in the pages of our own diaries when they could oh-so-gently tweak this or erase that and create a better, more acceptable version of us. We are told that Joan Didion’s journal will be published as she wrote it. This does little to relieve the sadness that it is being published at all. It feels like a violation of an author who gave us such a wealth of herself in her books, but who, to the end, maintained a necessary mystique of privacy.
I didn’t choose to read Virginia’s complete diaries, though at one point, I did look to see what she wrote in the days before she filled her pockets with rocks and waded into the stream. In that, I see that I am not so different than Joan Didion’s editors. I am voracious, I devour words, can’t get enough of them, save every tidbit I can of the great flood of writing that goes by me every day, drowning in archives, just to have, have, have.
I sit and write in the quiet morning hour and then close the book and begin the day. I tell myself that surely my heirs will have little patience for wading through my handwritten ramblings and will shut my journals in exasperation, maybe with a touch of respect for the dead who leave behind this raw stuff of life.
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Notes:
Writing about Joan Didion is daunting, trying mightily to avoid the “sinkholes,” but it has also been an opportunity to read her work again, which is a sheer pleasure. If you want to dip in, you might try the essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean for an overview of her subjects and style from 1968 to 2000.
In searching for other writers who have written about posthumously publishing the journals of writers, I thoroughly enjoyed this thoughtful article by Kathryn Hemmila, a young writer who grew up in the fish bowl of the internet, which has helped foster the expectation that it’s all up for grabs.
Elissa Altman’s new book, Permission, The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, is available here.
This post would not complete without a link to the comprehensive bibliography of Joan Didion’s writings, on its own Wikipedia page. While you’re there consider making a donation to this invaluable resource.
