Joan Didion's NOTES TO JOHN to be published in April

It was announced today that 4th Estate (UK) and Knopf (US) will publish a new nonfiction work by Joan Didion. NOTES TO JOHN is an electrifying, previously unpublished work - a moving and profound journal written to her husband John Gregory Dunne.

The book will be published in hardcover, eBook and audio on 22 April 2025. ✒️

Discovered in a portable filing cabinet next to Didion’s desk after her death, Notes to John is a journal in which she describes sessions with a psychiatrist. The reports are addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

NOTES TO JOHN opens in December 1999, shortly after Didion began seeing the psychiatrist. As she wrote to a friend, her family had been having “a rough few years.” For several months, she recorded the sessions 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 conversations were central to Didion’s understanding of the themes she turned to in her brilliant late works, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.

The hardback cover features a portrait of Joan Didion in her office taken by acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz.