Notes to John (Joan Didion)

In December 1999, around her 65th birthday, Joan Didion started writing a journal after sessions with her psychiatrist. Over the next year or so, she kept notes about their conversations, which covered her struggles with anxiety, guilt and depression, her sometimes fraught relationship with her daughter, and her thoughts about her work and legacy.

Shortly after Didion’s death in 2021, her three literary trustees found the diary while going through her papers in her Manhattan apartment. There were 46 entries stashed in an unlabeled folder and addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Didion left no instructions about how to handle the journal after her death, and no one in her professional orbit knew of its existence. But her trustees saw that she had printed and stored them in chronological order. The notes formed a complete narrative, one that seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published.

Knopf, 2025. Hardcover, 224 Pages, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4