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.
