Literary gold … or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion journal opens ethical minefield

Soon we can all read the late author's private notes about her therapy. But should we?

In 1998, the late journalist Joan Didion wrote a scathing essay about the posthumous publication of True at First Light, a travel journal and fictional memoir by Ernest Hemingway, 38 years after the author killed himself. This is a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them," Didion wrote. His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough."

Just over a year later, in December 1999, Didion began writing her own journal about her sessions with a psychiatrist. She addressed these notes - detailing her struggles with alcoholism, anxiety, guilt and depression, a sometimes fraught relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana and reflections on her childhood and legacy - to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.