Joan Didion’s writing lives on again three years after her death in a new book, Notes to John, chronicling her notes to her late husba.
The storied writer and legendary journalist kept a journal of her sessions with a psychiatrist starting in December 1999, with entries addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The series of notes converge in Notes to John, a nonfiction account of her journey through her work, alcoholism, adoption and motherhood, as well as how she grappled with persistent depression, anxiety and guilt.
She also lingers on the idea of legacy — “what it’s been worth,” she wrote.
“Everything we revere about Joan Didion is instantly apparent in these pages — the precision, the fierce intelligence, the piercing insights, the withering interrogation of her own motives,” writes Knopf Editor-in-Chief Jordan Pavlin, which will publish the book.
“Yet this is also Joan Didion as we have never seen her before — open, vulnerable, wrestling with raw emotion,” she continues. “Notes to John is an extraordinarily intimate record of a painful and courageous journey in the life of one of the greatest writers of our time.”
In her notes, Didion also chronicles breakthroughs about her childhood — the gap in communication and understanding between her and her parents, as well as her “early tendency to anticipate catastrophe,” teases press release shared with PEOPLE.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” Didion said of her writing.
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Didion is the author of numerous books, including A Book of Common Prayer and the era-defining The White Album. In 2005, she was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Belles Lettres and Criticism, and in the same year, also won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.
In 2007, when she was awarded the National Book Foundations Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the foundation wrote of her: “An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than 45 years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.”
Notes to John will be available April 22, 2025 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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