Last week it was announced that Joan Didion’s personal diaries, which were found inside her recently-sold home, are to be published by her long-time publishing house Knopf this April. Didion, a prolific writer and chronicler of her times throughout the 60s and 70s in Los Angeles, passed away in December of 2021, the last of her immediate family to go.

The announcement of the posthumous publishing of her diary conflicted me. As an admirer of Didion’s writing and devourer of her books, the prospect of fresh and intimate prose to ingest was exciting. But that thought quickly faltered into a sense of invasiveness, of greed. What gives us the right to publish an artist's work after they’ve died?

It’s a question I’ve long pondered. I’m someone who has kept journals since I was in high school that contain some of my deepest, most intimate thoughts; half-baked and wholly inappropriate to share with anyone. I often joke to close friends that, on the occasion of my sudden death, they are instructed to find and burn all of these journals, lest they see the light of day and my funeral be boycotted by all whom I love.

So, to see someone like Didion’s innermost private writings be offered up like a pig to a slaughter in the name of profit is saddening. And this practice has become quite commonplace. Just last month, the late Mac Miller had an album released by his estate: Balloonerism. Miller, who passed away in 2018 of an accidental overdose, has now had two albums released posthumously. The first, Circles, released in January 2020, was an album Miller was close to finishing as a companion to a previous release, Swimming. It’s completion and publication after his death felt like the fulfilment of a wish – an album Miller had already run the race with, his team simply carrying it over the finish line. It gets more complicated with Balloonerism. It’s speculated the songs were written years before his death, but remained unfinished, and this speculation coexists with rumours of his wish for the album to be released if he died. The real answer is – when fragments of unfinished art are patchworked together after someone’s death, packaged up and sold for profit, morality and the intention of the artist becomes murkier and murkier. And who are we to tell families, or those who now run artists’ estates, how to honour them? We know even less than they do what someone like Miller or Didion would have wanted.

To Kill A Mockingbird novelist Harper Lee had a posthumous novel published in 2015 by HarperCollins – one that was discovered in a safe-deposit box in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. There’s discourse to suggest that Lee had every intention to publish the novel eventually, but that argument does get shakier when we learn that she hadn’t worked on the pages of Go Set a Watchman since submitting them to her agents in 1957. A former publisher even came forward to denounce the publication, stating that Lee never had any intention to publish the novel, that it was simply regarded as a first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Consent is really central to the morality of this argument. And in really black-and-white terms: a person who is dead cannot give consent. Written consent in a will, or the finishing of a work on the brink of completion are one thing, but it’s trickier to decipher whether an artist’s intent is clear when these are not the case. This is also not to say that all posthumous work is published for the sole purpose of greed and profit – it's just that we'll never really be able to tell the apples from the oranges, will we?

The more you search for it, the more you'll find examples of posthumous publishing. Whether it's an album of Prince demos, an AI-generated (and Grammy-nominated) new Beatles song, a newly published novel by Richard Wright, or even resurrecting dead actors with CGI like Paul Walker in Fast and Furious, or Carrie Fisher for Star Wars. There's something distinctly dystopic – almost like a Black Mirror episode – about the fact that we can keep putting these artists to work after they're gone. But not everyone agrees with this principle. Director Francis Lawrence chose not to use CGI to replace Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay because he felt it would be distasteful to recreate Hoffman's performance. "He had two scenes with dialogue that were left," Lawrence told Huffington Post at the time," And we decided we didn’t want to try any kind of digital trickery with him, so we rewrote his scenes and gave his dialogue to other actors."

But when we think of the momentous contributions posthumous art has made to the world, it can also be tricky to admonish its value. Franz Kafka, on his death bed, asked his best friend Max Brod to burn his work, but Brod ignored his friend's request, and The Trial was published. Emily Dickinson had told her sister Lavinia to destroy her works when she died, a request denied and resulting in the publication of almost all of her known poems and letters. Sylvia Plath's Ariel won a Pulitzer (even after her husband Ted Hughes made some of his own rearrangements and cuts from the text). And of course, The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) published two years after her death by her father.

Posthumous publishing, then, seems to sit at the fault line between reverence and exploitation, between legacy and intrusion. It forces us to ask not just what the artist would have wanted, but what we owe to art itself. Are these works, once committed to paper, canvas, or tape, already outside the realm of personal ownership, existing instead as cultural artefacts that belong to all of us? Or do we preserve their sanctity by allowing their incompletion to stand, by resisting the urge to fill in the gaps that death has left?

The answer is neither definite nor comfortable. As much as we might recoil at the idea of Didion’s diary becoming public record, or Miller’s sonic fragments being stitched into a polished album, we also recognise that art – perhaps more than anything else – refuses to remain buried.

To deny the world the works of Kafka, Dickinson, or Plath in the name of posthumous consent is to deny us of unearthing voices that still might have something to say, even in that voice's absence. And yet, the distinction between preservation and exploitation remains a fine and fragile one.

Perhaps the real question is not whether these works should be published, but whether we approach them with the right spirit – with curiosity rather than entitlement, with humility rather than possession. Didion, after all, spent her life writing about the way we construct memory, how we shape and reshape our histories. Now, in death, her own narrative is being rewritten – whether in service of her legacy or in defiance of it, only time will tell.