Della Sears is a nineteen-year-old girl from Fort Worth, Texas, and I have read every page of her diary. Her writing is intensely personal; we hear about her burgeoning love affairs, her New Year’s resolutions, and even small, but deeply poignant, observations of her day-to-day life. This diary is part of the American Diary Project, who preserve “diaries and journals from everyday Americans,” creating a resource that “supports diarists” and “archives history.” They emphasise complete public access to their collections, meaning Sears’ diary is just one of thousands I can scour. However, Sears certainly passed away before the publication of her diaries and thereby presumably had little say in my unrestricted access to her innermost thoughts. These entries are being proliferated through a public she never knew or understood and, whilst writing, she couldn’t possibly have imagined where they would end up — with me, across the Atlantic, in the LLC library on my Macbook.
Equally, the publication of these diaries is an important form of social history. Informal, personal documents like journals, but also sketchbooks and cookbooks, have been amazing tools for preserving lived experiences and lives we don’t necessarily hear about in academic history, such as young women like Sears. Additionally, despite their intimate, personal tone, these diaries can retain anonymity; the reader doesn’t actually know the reality of what Sears’ life looked like, who her friends and family were, where they are now. We simply know what Sears thought about it all. Therefore, the historical significance of a text (written in stirring, beautiful prose) that offers an unusually detailed introspection into the reality of young women’s lives in religious, patriarchal 1910s Texas would suggest the invasion into Sears’ privacy is well-worth it.
However, what happens when posthumous publications cannot possibly retain anonymity? This is particularly pertinent for authors, whose letters, diaries and unfinished works are often published posthumously and without consent. Notable examples include Kafka’s The Trial, the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath and, most recently Joan Didion’s Notes to John.
The decision to release Notes to John was particularly outrageous because Didion was so critical of posthumous publication during her lifetime. In 1988, she vehemently attacked the publication of Hemingway’s private letters, arguing that this constructed “a discrete body of work in kind from, and in fact intending to obscure, the body of work published by Hemingway in his lifetime.” Here, she suggests Hemingway’s personal letters being published catalysed a loss of control over his life’s work, as he had no say over the editing and distribution, and this thereby ‘obscured’ the meaning and value of his previous works.
This is the tragedy of posthumous publication – it allows for writers’ legacies and lifetimes of work to be manipulated and undermined. Nabokov is an extreme example; his final book — The Original of Laura — was published after his death, despite having been unfinished, and has come to be known as his worst piece of writing. However, Nabokov was renowned for being a compulsive perfectionist, writing hundreds of drafts for every novel. His legacy having potentially been tarnished as a result of a first-draft he never would’ve wanted to see the light of day is incredibly depressing.
Didion’s Notes to John is a complete invasion of her right to, like Nabokov, control her literary legacy, but also to any semblance of privacy and personhood. The book, published in April 2025, is a series of notes written to her husband — they were found in the drawers of her private desk, without instruction of what to do with them, arguably implying she didn’t think them fit for publication. These notes are incredibly intimate medical documents, recording both Didion’s own mental health struggles as well as her daughter’s. Her status as a writer means Didion couldn’t possibly retain any anonymity, and nor could her daughter. Any writing inevitably alters her public image; the searing truths revealed in Notes are markedly different from other Didion texts, even ones like The White Album and Blue Nights that also discuss psychiatric treatment. It’s a harrowing discussion of motherhood, and how one ultimately cannot save their children. Unlike Della Sears’ diary, which conserves an overlooked women’s social history, we see how posthumous publication can potentially exploit and obscure women’s personal writing through the altering of the public’s vision of Didion, who had a very controlled, intellectual image as a writer.
Ultimately, the image of Didion created by Notes to John isn’t necessarily negative but just deeply complex — however, it’s not the image she intended and spent a lifelong career formulating. There are infinite examples of this happening throughout literary history, and thereby it’s a dilemma we return to again and again. We have to ask ourselves — how much brilliant writing are we willing to give up in exchange for the respect of privacy and legacy?
Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash.
