In Review: Didion's 'Notes to John'

by Roy Shinar Cohen

Notes to John

Joan Didion, 4th Estate, 2025

Joan Didion was not merely an author but a personality. Ever since the 60s, the world has known her as a discerning and versatile author; her minimalistic style and iconic sunglasses (round, big) could be found anywhere from drug dens in California to political circles in Washington, DC. In 2021, four years before her passing, a new generation got to know her through the Netflix documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. After decades of crafting an impeccable image, Didion exposed her fragility as an 83-year-old woman. She was no longer the essayist who wrote winding sentences and minimalistic prose. Her self-exposed fragility on Netflix, though, pales in comparison to what is revealed to the reader in Notes to John—a recently published posthumous book based on a detailed journal recording of Didion’s meetings with her psychiatrist. From it, we learn just how much we did not know about Didion.

Throughout Notes to John, Didion addresses you, indicating, we are told, that she wrote to her husband, the author John Gregory Dunne. Dunne, also a writer, met Didion in the late 50s, and they were married for about 40 years. As a couple, they did everything together, both personally and professionally. They were each other’s ‘super editors’, wrote scripts together and raised a daughter. Dr. MacKinnon describes Didion and Dunne as ‘sharing a skin’ during one of their sessions. Needless to say, such intimacy usually stays private, even in the case of public personalities.

In the journal entries, Didion updates Dunne about her meetings with her psychiatrist, Dr. MacKinnon, between December 1999 and January 2002. Because the journal is detailed, Didion’s reflections on MacKinnon’s advice, addressing them to Dunne, the editors or publishers chose the title ‘Notes to John’. According to the journal entries, Didion spoke to MacKinnon about everything on her mind: the early childhood during World War II; her relationship with her parents; an abusive boyfriend in her twenties; treatments for breast cancer which she has never made public; and, of course, reflections on her own motherhood.

More than anything else, Didion’s entries revolve around her adopted daughter, Quintana. Quintana struggled with depression and alcoholism and went through repeated rounds of rehab and hospitalisation. At times, Didion and Dunne feared for her life. This worry, though, does more than show us what was on Didion’s mind at the time: it reveals details about the personal life of a third party who has not asked to be famous or exposed. The entries in the journal detail nearly every one of the most challenging aspects of life. It is five times intimate: someone’s personal diary; the conversation of a patient and their psychiatrist; what a wife shares with her husband; how a parent deals with their struggling child; and a writer’s private drafts.

In some ways, Notes to John is not too different from other books by Didion: its style is direct and literary, albeit to a lesser extent, and it deals with uncomfortable subject matters. It is unique, though, in one sense: reading it felt wrong. Almost every book I have ever read has made me feel something, but in no other book did I feel guilty for reading, doing what was expected of me. That is, I believe, for the simple reason that Didion did not expect me to read it.

Although I did not know Didion, when reading Notes to John, I felt I betrayed many layers of her trust. Hence my guilt. At some points, like when Didion admits she occasionally does not like her daughter, it felt as if I were peeping into her life rather than reading. From cover to cover, I got a near-unobstructed view into the life of Joan Didion. The only thing shielding her from complete vulnerability was the fear that one day, after her passing, her writings would be published. 

Indeed, Notes to John is the first book to realise that possibility, the first posthumous Didion work. It brings to mind an earlier piece she wrote for The New Yorker, “Last Words”. In it, Didion discusses, and vehemently objects to, the publication of Hemingway’s unfinished works and letters, many of which he has demanded not be published. She writes, “His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.” She adds that the posthumous publishing of unfinished work “is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it.”

Didion wrote “Last Words” just fourteen months before the journal’s first entry, in October 1998. She must have been well aware, then, of the prospect of her private writing being published after her death. Moreover, although “Last Words” was written some twenty-three years before her passing, perhaps this was Didion’s message to future editors who may seek her work posthumously. She clearly thought it is the writer’s job to choose if and when to publish her. Notes to John robs Didion of the opportunity to be survived only by the words she saw fit for publication.

An anonymous voice writing the introduction for the book lightly argues in favour of the journal’s publication, indicating that Didion did not actually write the journal for her husband. “It includes an account of a session with MacKinnon that John [Dunne] participated in, on June 7, 2000, so one can assume that the reports were not simply for the purpose of bringing him up to speed. He didn’t need to be informed about what was discussed that day. He was there.” It is somewhat odd to update someone on a meeting which they attended, but taking it as an unarticulated desire, or quiet approval, for publication is a stretch. 

The simplest explanation for the journal is one her literary trustees must have known. Under the title “Why I Write”, she told the world in 1976, “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Thus, Didion wrote about her meetings with a psychiatrist to understand what she thinks and feels, to process, without intending for it to be published. Mystery solved?

A second option could be that Didion was working on a book based on these meetings, collecting quotes, impressions and notes as part of the writing process. Since she never mentioned it to her agents, this seems unlikely, but one could still argue this is an early draft of an unfinished manuscript. As she writes in “Last Words”, though, “there comes a point at which every writer knows when a book is not working, and every writer also knows when the reserves of will and energy and memory and concentration required to make the thing work simply may not be available”. Didion could have started a book and decided not to finish it. As she tells us in “Last Words”, only she would have known if her writing was good enough to publish, and she sees publication decisions as part of the author’s job. 

The book is not compiled, edited or cleared for publication by Didion herself, tasks she evidently regards as essential to the author’s art. Its commercial configuration as “just another” Didion book is confusing and, quite honestly, deceptive. Thus, instead of Notes to John, it should be named something along the lines of “Notes to John: Joan Didion’s Journal from December 1999 to January 2002”. But, because Notes to John is presented as a book, the editors try to make it as digestible and readable as possible. I do not know who will reap the benefits of this move, but it definitely will not be Didion.

At the end of the manuscript, the publishers have added an entry that they found on Didion’s computer after her death. The entry is dated to January 2003, a year after the journal ends and details a meeting between Quintana and her psychiatrist, Dr. Kass, that Didion attended. They discuss Quintana’s drinking habits, who lately had been drinking so much that her mother and doctor agree that she ‘was killing herself day by day’. In response, Quintana’s psychiatrists suspended her treatments. “[S]he was not making the decision to stop drinking”. “He could not continue to prescribe medication for her knowing how much she was drinking. It was too dangerous”. Reading this eases the peeper’s nerves, giving them a sense of closure. False closure. 

So much could have happened in the fifty-three weeks between the final journal entry and the one found on Didion’s computer. So much must have happened. The daily drama of someone struggling with addiction is, after all, why one becomes morbidly hooked on Notes to John. The publishers should know better than to believe this entry is some sort of ‘natural continuation’ of the journal which Didion kept. The function of this entry is twofold: it acknowledges that this journal is not a book—it is not interesting enough without an ending—and reveals the true motives of everyone involved. Notes to John is not about knowing Didion or uncovering an unpublished book. It is about making money, wringing out an author’s fame to sell a few more copies.

Anyone who likes a beautiful cover picture and the name Joan Didion on their shelf would also enjoy the book immensely—it is stunning. They should wonder, though, if it is worth the moral dubiousness of becoming a peeper. Others, however, should stick to books by Didion, and not her private journal. They would get to know Didion as she chose to present herself, and as she deserves to be seen. Read The White Album, Play It As It Lays, Where I Was From, or The Year of Magical Thinking. There, you will find Didion the writer, not Didion, the self-conscious mother. And, you would save yourself the guilt of peeping.

ROY SHINAR COHEN was afraid of telling his parents he wants to be a writer, so he’s studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford.

Art by Cordelia Wilson