Notes to John

by Joan Didion

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Whether this is your first time reading Joan Didion (welcome!) or your hundredth, this is an essential exploration of the human condition from an irreplaceable voice. Deeply personal yet objectively universal, it’s as much a lens into Didion’s life as it is an invitation to turn the scope inward on our own lives.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.” The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers—questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593803684
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

A new book coming from the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

December 5, 1934

Date of Death:

December 23, 2021

Place of Birth:

Sacramento, California

Education:

B.A., University of California at Berkeley, 1956

Editorial Reviews

"Utterly fascinating. . . . Notes to John shares with Blue Nights the subject of mother and daughter, generational trauma and general anxiety, and both are written with Didion's constitutional meticulousness." —The New York Times

"More than direct, Notes to John is naked, unadorned. It's Didion but 'unprecedentedly intimate,' just as the copy on the book jacket promises." —The Atlantic

“An intimate chronicle of [Didion’s] struggle to help her daughter. . . . Written with her signature precision though without her usual stylistic, incantatory repetitions, it is the least guarded of Didion’s writing.” —NPR

“A tour de force from one of the best." —People

“Full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. . . . Readers of her memoirs will recognize how these notes inform those final books—the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it.” —The New Yorker

"An act of intimate storytelling. . . . Didion fans (we know who we are) will feel hypnotized by these pages, not quite sure they should exist as a book, but leveled by the writer who produced them, by her honesty and heartbreak." —Vogue

"For all its rawness, its sense of open-endedness, Notes to John has the feeling of an integrated work. . . . We get the fuller story, so alive and febrile that it is not a story but instead a reckoning with what one can and can't accept or change." —Alta

"Notes to John makes for compulsive reading. . . . What an experience it is, watching Didion beat back tragedy with her brilliant mind." —The Telegraph

"The quantity of arresting and widely applicable insight makes Notes to John a profound, rich document. . . . Didion herself has rarely seemed so sympathetic in her own writing." —The New Statesman

"[Didion's] previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression, and creativity." —The Guardian

From the Publisher

2025-04-21
The late novelist and journalist records her innermost, deeply personal struggles.

Didion died in 2021. Afterward, a file of private notes was discovered among her things, including notes addressed to her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, recounting sessions with the noted Freudian psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, “a staunch defender of talk therapy.” Talk they do, with Didion serving up a battery of problems and MacKinnon offering wise if perhaps non-actionable responses to them, for instance, “Nothing about families turns out to be easy, does it.” It’s not easy, for sure, and Didion’s chief concern throughout is her daughter, Quintana Roo, who died after a long illness, the subject of Didion’s 2011 memoirBlue Nights. Indeed, so many of the conversations concern Quintana that Didion—by design, one supposes—skirts her own issues, although MacKinnon identifies some: “I did think you might have developed more self-­awareness,” he says, referring to Didion’s habit of squirreling herself away whenever difficult subjects arose. Didion counters that she cherishes privacy, adding that she sometimes left her own parties to shelter in her office and admitting that her long habit of overwork was a means of emotional distancing. It’s not wholly that Didion lacks that self-awareness, but that the keenest insights about her come from others, as when she records, “I said a friend had once remarked that while most people she knew had very strong competent exteriors and were bowls of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.” That Didion was constantly anxious, sometimes to the point of needing medication, will come as no surprise to close readers of her work, but the depth of her anguish and guilt over her inability to save her daughter—she threw plenty of money at her, but little in the way of love—is both affecting and saddening.

Of great interest to Didion completists, though a minor entry in the body of her work.

Kirkus Reviews