Jennifer Horgan: I really admire Joan Didion’s work — that's why I won’t buy her new book
Her personal notes were written in 1999, following therapy sessions. She died in 2021. She had 22 years to decide to release them and she didn’t. Her final book was not this book
Writer Joan Didion receives an Honorary Doctor of Letters in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2009.
In the foreword of the last book she published months before her death, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is a quotation from its author, Joan Didion. “The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” Didion must have assumed this was to be the last time she’d experience such a thing, and it was. But it wasn’t the last time the world would see her words in print for the first time.
No, that will happen in a few weeks, when a new Didion book will hit our shelves, a book she never chose to publish.
This is exclusive subscriber content. Already a subscriber? Sign in
