Your editorial is right to state that Joan Didion, “that most reticent of people and exacting of writers”, is unlikely to have welcomed the posthumous publication of her record of her therapy sessions (The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: Goodbye to all that, 25 April). But as her UK editor at 4th Estate from 2004 until I left in 2015, and a friend until her death in 2021, I cannot agree with your conclusion that “it is implausible that she would have been unaware of the inevitability of their publication”.
Joan Didion never left anything to chance with regard to her publishing. She was utterly meticulous: no detail was too insignificant for her attention. That she “left no instructions” regarding Notes to John indicates with the utmost clarity that she did not intend these notes to be published. Extremely private herself, she was equally protective of her daughter Quintana, and it should not be forgotten that this publication is also a breach of Quintana’s privacy, and indeed that of her late therapist, Dr Roger MacKinnon.
In the last years of her life, Joan Didion was very unwell with Parkinson’s disease. What is plausible, given her physical condition, is that she was unable to destroy these notes, or simply forgot about them, trusting her executors to act in accordance with what they knew of her and – at the very least – embargo them for an indefinite period.
What is not plausible is your assertion that she would have accepted the inevitability of their publication, thereby implying a sort of endorsement by default. Nothing Joan Didion ever said or did, in my experience of knowing her, supports this view.
Clare Reihill
London
