Notes to John - Large Print by Joan Didion (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 unprecedentededly 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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

JOAN DIDION was born in California. She died at her home in New York City on December 23, 2021. She was the author of five novels, twelve books of nonfiction, a play, and many screenplays.