Is it right to publish Joan Didion's diary posthumously, without her consent?
Publishing a writer's journals after they've died throws up ethical questions around consent and privacy. And the difference between journal writing for oneself and writing memoir for an audience.
This week I snatched a bit of a radio programme on BBC Radio 4 about Joan Didion’s new book, Notes to John (due to be published in April), which is her journal written during a fractious time when she was seeing a psychiatrist and working through aspects of her childhood, her alcoholism and her troubled relationship with her and her husband’s adopted daughter, Quintana. On the radio there was a debate about whether or not it was okay to publish the private works of a writer after they have died. One of them was a scholar who felt it was an important contribution to our understanding of Didion as an artist, and the other highlighted what a stylist Didion was, and questioned whether she would have wanted such raw thoughts and feeling out in the world for all to read.
Much of what is in Notes to John was the genesis of the books that followed, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights - and so, you might question, what is the use of revealing these journal notes, beyond just an exercise in marketing for someone else’s gain?
I have just delivered to my publisher my book on the craft of memoir, Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform in which I quote at length from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and memoirs, which she wrote simply for herself, or the small monthly memoir group that made up her sister and closest allies, with no mind that they would be published. I know how important these works are for our understanding of Woolf - as there is a freeness and directness to them, coming straight from the heart, unprocessed, or edited. But I wonder what Woolf would think of having such intimate details out in the public eye (she writes about her half-brother, Gerald’s abuse of her when she was 6 and he was 18).
But then again, if I was related to Woolf and came across the raw truth that fills her diaries and her memoirs, how could I stop myself from wanting to share them and for them to join the canon of literature that represents her posthumously? At least they are in the author’s words, untampered with (Notes to John is as they were found, with only the addition of footnotes), compared to a biography, which often reveals not seen before details of a person’s life - because that is the kind of thing that gets a commission - but driven by the opinions of the author, who has made the choice of what to select and what to omit, depending on the argument they are making, or the angle being revealed.
It got me thinking about my own diaries and their intimate details. How buried in amongst notes on my reading, or plans for the week, are snippets of love or anguish or pain. I have written in every state - late at night after too much wine, my dreams, my darkest thoughts, fantasies. It is an unmediated state - more intimate and private even than the therapist’s office. And how fleeting often these emotions are, how they are with us, they are written down, they are released. We don’t need to set them in stone for all to read, because probably by the next day the thoughts or feeling will have changed anyway, on to something else. The purpose of a journal for many is for self expression, for working through what plagues the heart or mind. It’s not written for the public at all. In contrast, a published memoir is a slice of a life, constructed, curated, stylised with an audience in mind.
Essayist and memoirist, Vivian Gornick captures the difference succinctly in her brilliant book on the personal narrative, The Situation and the Story:
‘To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing…. It’s like lying down on the couch in public - and while a writer may be willing to do just that, it is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without the whining and complaining, the self hatred and the self justification that makes the analysand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low level self interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.’
The ‘detached empathy required of a piece of writing to be of value to the disinterested reader.’ The key words here are ‘of value’ - if we publish, it is because what we publish will be of value. It will reveal something, teach our readers something. Be original in some way.
Of course, Didion doesn’t need to work that hard because she has already stolen the hearts of many many readers with her brilliant essays and prose, but Gornick’s quote also highlights the stark difference between being yourself on the page, and taking the role as narrator of a story, however close to real life it might be.
But this question of value also came up recently, after I had finished reading a memoir called Molly, written by her husband Blake Butler, after Molly had committed suicide. She went into the wood at the back of their garden and put a gun to her head, and her husband found her body. Molly Brodak was a poet who had written a memoir, Bandit, about her relationship with her father, who was a bank robber, a fugitive, who lived a secret life, of which Molly and her mother were a product. It’s a beautiful and poetic memoir, full of heart and personal excavation. But it is not the whole truth.
The whole truth, or at least as her husband Blake Butler presented it, was that Molly had herself been living a secret life, which involved affairs with her students, who she sent nudies to; she also suffered from a cripping anxiety about herself and from depression. In a beautiful essay in the London Review of Books author and poet Patricia Lockwood wrote about Molly, the book, but more importantly the person, a woman she was friends with, but who she had struggled to write about since her death. The piece is full of acceptance and forgiveness, and ambiguity, her own version of her friend: ‘If you have been born into a secret life maybe you will always have one. It is like having the wardrobe you can walk all the way through, parting layers with your hands until you are unencumbered, free. Stolen clothes. Getaway cars, police sirens. It’s so much WORK to have a secret life. But work is what she loved.’
But, she questions - would Molly have wanted that secret life out there for all to read? She barely touched on it in her memoir (there is a brief section where she writes about a phase of kleptomania). Lockwood does not know the answer. On Molly’s suicide note she wrote to Blake - ‘Don’t go down there to see it,’ but, Lockwood states, she must have known he would. ‘Please make art for me,’ she told him, too. ‘I will read it all.’ Blake uses this as reason to write this memoir, as if Molly had asked him to do it. Did she really mean write about me? Couldn’t he have kept it simply about himself? One criticism I have of Molly, the book, not the person, is that Blake Butler is harsh about his wife, a woman he clearly loved and who he was clearly deeply hurt by, and yet he is not as harsh about himself. In an interview with me, memoirist Marina Benjamin stated when talking about ethics and showing her work to her family members: ‘One of my own ‘rules’ for writing about family is that I apply the same techniques of exposure in equal measure to myself: if I’m going to scrutinise a family member or take them to task, then I must put myself through the very same hoops and with the same merciless rigour. If I portray [my mother] being selfish or mean, then I need to show me being resentful and careless, or unkind. We have to come off looking equally bad in order to read as equally human.’ I feel that the biggest failing of Molly, is that Blake Butler doesn’t do this, and that, unfortunately feels like a betrayal.
As Lockwood reads more and more of the book, she feels more and more estranged from Molly as she knew her, ‘Gradually the things I read in Molly seemed less and less like her. Fistfights, possibly fabricated gunmen. The shape of her face changing as she says: “This is a perfect example of why I say you have little respect for me ..” When I read this, I think, it’s someone else saying that, some other voice. Blake calls it Other Molly at the same time as I think Not Molly.’
Of course, a journal is different. It is the words of the author, unedited, untampered with, but they are words that belong to one part of that author, not the whole of her, and sometimes those private aspects of ourselves are very private places, that we have a right to keep to ourselves. I remember when writing the final draft of my memoir, Sins of My Father, my editor reassuring me that I must keep back parts for myself. And I am so grateful for that. It was what helped me get through the fraught and crazy time of post publication when you feel as if your skin has been peeled right off you, and there is a cold sharp wind; other people, they are pissing in that wind, and the acid from their piss stings those raw parts of open flesh.