Notes to John
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
‘Utterly fascinating’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘An act of intimate storytelling’VOGUE
‘A profound, rich document’NEW STATESMAN
A deeply moving, newly discovered journal from one of America’s most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.
A pile of neatly typed pages was found in Joan Didion’s office after her death. She had meticulously recorded her weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. As far as anyone knows, the pages had been read by only one other person: Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne.
The sessions began as a method of dealing with the heartbreaking alcoholism of their adult daughter, Quintana. Discussions broadened into revelations about Didion’s own childhood, marriage, work and ‘what’s been worth’.
Writing was the way Didion dealt with life. Notes to John presents a riveting account of the therapeutic process, crafted with the singular intelligence, precision and elegance that characterise all of her work.
‘Compulsive … what an experience it is, watching Didion beat back tragedy with her brilliant mind’TELEGRAPH
‘So moving … a record of trying to save a life, and understand her own’NEW YORK TIMES
‘An incredibly intimate insight’GUARDIAN
‘A chance to meet Didion’s gaze head-on, eye to eye, with only a waft of cigarette smoke breaking the silence’ANOTHER
‘An intimate chronicle … offers readers a key to Didion’s persona and her work’NPR
‘A tour de force from one of the best’ PEOPLE
‘Notes to John’ was a New York Times bestseller w/c 2025-04-28.
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the subject of mother and daughter, generational trauma and general anxiety, and both are written with Didion's constitutional meticulousness’ -
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An act of intimate storytelling -
… the diehard Didion fans (we know who we are) will feel hypnotized by these pages’ -
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… An unfiltered stream of brutal self-examination from a writer who was painfully conscious about shaping her public image’ -
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‘Has a candour which refutes any charges of exploitation’ Julian Barnes, author of -
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… Readers of her memoirs will recognise how these notes inform those final books – the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it’ -
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glimpse into domestic distress, the unavoidable guilt of motherhood, and the great burden of legacy’ -
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, a study of how her outlook, and the weight of her talent, factored into life off the page’ -
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An unfiltered glimpse into the mind of the New Journalism poster girl -
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will feel familiar to anyone who’s coped with a loved one cycling between recovery and relapses. Her notes capture the maddening, circular nature of this dilemma’ -
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‘A reckoning with what one can and can't accept or change’ -
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