Books

Joan Didion
Notes to John

The cover image of Notes to John, a photograph by Annie Leibovitz, captures Joan Didion seated in an office, gazing up towards the camera in a sweater that engulfs her slender frame. She appears apprehensive of what the camera might reveal. Behind her is a copy of her first essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, this cover displaying a Didion decades younger, shielded by oversized sunglasses but gazing determinedly towards the camera. Notes to John dramatises the contrast between this earlier Didion of popular imagination – an essayist and novelist of unflinching incisiveness – and the more tentative Didion we encounter in its pages.

Notes to John collects documents from a “small portable file” found after Didion’s death in 2021. An uncredited preface describes the contents as “a sort of journal in which Didion reported on sessions with a psychiatrist, most of them in 2000”. These dated entries, addressed to Didion’s husband, John Dunne, largely concern their daughter Quintana’s struggles with debilitating alcoholism, and Didion and Dunne’s desire to parent well. The mode is generally reportorial, Didion summarising what was discussed, often quoting herself and her psychiatrist, Dr Roger MacKinnon, at length.

Unsurprisingly the writing lacks Didion’s typical elegance, but it retains her sparkling capacity to identify the sharp detail from which the reader can extrapolate a universe of meaning. Describing her mother as being embarrassed by displays of affection, Didion recalls: “after the war Daddy bought her a hat, a very glamorous movie-star kind of hat, big brim, lacy black veiling. She returned it to the shop.” Encouraged to examine her childhood, she reveals that her earliest fantasy of being married “was myself getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark glasses and getting my picture taken”. Dr MacKinnon notes that “I’ve never encountered a childhood divorce fantasy”.

The prose is an exemplary exercise in straining for clarity and is unmistakably Didion’s. This is the same woman who, in 1976, said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” In a therapy journal, this impulse buzzes with more urgency, replacing the cultivation of a literary and intellectual sensibility with questions of survival.

This is not the first book in which Didion has presented as vulnerable. The deaths of her husband and daughter, which both occurred within three years of the final entry in Notes to John (written in 2003), were recorded in The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. What distinguishes Notes to John from Didion’s other writing is that we are not encountering the work on Didion’s terms.

Even in The White Album (1979), when Didion describes herself as a “thirty-four year old woman … with bad nerves” and excerpts a psychiatric report diagnosing her as someone who “feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure”, she reveals these details within a framework of her own design. Reading Notes to John, it feels instead as though we are listening at the door.

There is Didion’s admission that, at one juncture, she “didn’t like [Quintana]”, a revelation she found “extremely upsetting”. There is the mention of a breast cancer diagnosis about which she and her husband “didn’t tell anyone”, going so far as to organise radiation treatment in a part of New York where she was less likely to be seen by people she knew. To read about her desperate desire for privacy in a posthumously published journal is unavoidably unseemly.

The blurb advertises Notes to John as “unprecedentedly intimate”. The book delivers on this promise by pulling back the curtain on the exceptionally private space of talk therapy. This intimacy is troubled by the fact that neither the therapist nor patient invited us to this encounter. Didion would have known that any of her writing that wasn’t destroyed would likely be archived, and therefore potentially widely read, after her death. But too much of this book’s power, riveting as it is, depends on the thrill of discovering Didion unguarded.

There are moments that appear to affirm the vision of Didion as an avatar of wealth and privilege, removed from ordinary experience. When discussing the possibility of Quintana undertaking menial work to support her career in photography, Dr MacKinnon jarringly offers Didion and Dunne as role models: “She knows you and John write movies to support your other work.” Didion simply notes: “I said she didn’t seem to get it.”

Part of Didion’s appeal is that the atmosphere of chaos and anxiety that is so often her subject is made manageable by the genius of her analysis and style. In the case of Notes to John, there is no such release valve. The coming deaths of Dunne and Quintana haunt the book. References to Dunne’s health and Quintana’s drinking are freighted with the impending tragedy, as are the moments of optimism, where Didion expresses hope for the family’s future. Knowing what awaits them makes the book extraordinarily sad, a sadness intensified by the suspicion that we have intruded upon a woman in crisis.

This is not to say the Didion exposed here is an object of pity. Quintana, Didion says, had “always thought of me as fragile”. Dr MacKinnon replies: “everything about your emotional tone seems fragile. But you’re not. You’re really extremely strong.” Didion agrees, citing a friend who “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.”

This remarkable inner strength is familiar to any reader of Didion and that her daughter didn’t see it is curious. But more curious still is the belief that an author’s intimacies reveal something more authentic or meaningful than we might find in the work for which we first came to admire them.

Fourth Estate, 224pp, $17.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "Note to John".

For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.

All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.

There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.

Purchase this book

Notes to John

By Joan Didion

BUY NOW

When you purchase a book through this link, Schwartz Media earns a commission. This commission does not influence our criticism, which is entirely independent.

Purchase this book

Notes to John

Send this article to a friend for free.