a list of events that would almost definitely happen if my diaries were posthumously published

A couple of weeks ago, Knopf announced that Joan Didion's private diary, written by the author following sessions with her psychiatrist and addressed to her husband, will be published in April. I know the Substack servers are shaking.

The diary was found in an unlabeled folder by Didion's literary trustees shortly following her death in 2021. The New York Times reports:

Didion left no instructions about how to handle the journal after her death, and no one in her professional orbit knew of its existence. But her trustees — her literary agent Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano — saw that she had printed and stored them in chronological order. The notes formed a complete narrative, one that seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published.

I am sure the author’s trustees knew Didion well, certainly better than most of us knew her. But if I can be honest, and this is after all my newsletter, there's something very odd about this. Could it be that the "narrative ... seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published" because the diary entries following her therapy sessions were never meant to be published? Yes, Didion's published work was often personal and revelatory, but isn't there a difference between planned, edited vulnerability and publish-your-diaries-posthumously-without-your-consent vulnerability? Shouldn't there be?

Lately I’ve been working more seriously on my fiction and other non-newsletter writing, so forgive me for what might be slight defensiveness, but the thought that a writer would want their unedited words published strikes me as wishful. So much of writing is editing, and editing with an audience beyond the self in mind.

The Times also quotes Jordan Pavlin, Knopf's editor-in-chief:

“It fills in great gaps in our understanding of her thinking ... Didion’s art has always derived part of its electricity from what she reveals and what she withholds ... ‘Notes to John’ is unique in its lack of elision.”

This may not be what most bothers me about the diary’s publication, but it's up there, for somehow implying that an author's intentionally-published work is an act of obfuscation simply by virtue of being written for publication. It treats Didion the author and Didion the person as a character, fictionalized by her own work and brand, ripe for an intrepid reader's background research.

I find it a tad too encouraging of laziness. What happened to interpretation? What happened to drawing your own conclusions from your own reading and your own thinking and your own experiences? The notion that to decipher an author’s meaning, even one about whom as much has been written as Didion, we require a view into their private diaries … well, it’s depressing. It makes reading into some sort of scavenger hunt.