25 Years Ago, Joan Didion Kept a Diary. It’s About to Become Public.


In December 1999, around her 65th birthday, Joan Didion started writing a journal after sessions with her psychiatrist. Over the next year or so, she kept notes about their conversations, which covered her struggles with anxiety, guilt and depression, her sometimes fraught relationship with her daughter, and her thoughts about her work and legacy.

Shortly after Didion’s death in 2021, her three literary trustees found the diary while going through her papers in her Manhattan apartment. There were 46 entries stashed an unlabeled folder and addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

Didion left no instructions about how to handle the journal after her death, and no one in her professional orbit knew of its existence. But her trustees — her literary agent Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano — saw that she had printed and stored them in chronological order. The notes formed a complete narrative, one that seemed more intimate and unfiltered than anything she had published.

On April 22, Didion’s journal will be published by Knopf as a 208-page book, “Notes to John.” Other than correcting typos and adding occasional footnotes for context, the pages will be published exactly as they were found, according to the Didion Dunne Literary Trust. The originals will also be available to the public and scholars as part of Didion and Dunne’s joint archives, which the New York Public Library will open to the public on March 26, 2025.

“Notes to John” marks the first publication of new material by Didion since she stopped releasing new work in 2011, a decade before her death.

Jordan Pavlin, Knopf’s publisher and editor in chief, described the journal as “a moving and profound record of a life of ferocious intellectual engagement,” and as a raw, vulnerable account from a writer who was acutely conscious of her public image.

“It fills in great gaps in our understanding of her thinking,” Pavlin said. “Didion’s art has always derived part of its electricity from what she reveals and what she withholds,” she continued. “‘Notes to John’ is unique in its lack of elision.”

The release of Didion’s post-therapy notes as a discrete literary work will likely raise questions about whether she would have approved of the project. Since she kept the papers carefully organized and filed in a small cabinet next to her desk, she likely anticipated that they would be gathered in her archives and read by the public and scholars.

But Didion, who had published plenty of personal and intimate writing, didn’t tell her agent or publisher about the pages, or seek to have them published during her lifetime. And she occasionally expressed disapproval of literary estates’ impulses to put out every last scrap of a famous author’s work.

In a 1998 essay about the release of a posthumous novel by Ernest Hemingway, a writer she idolized, Didion cast the publication as a betrayal of the author’s wishes. “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,” she wrote.

Throughout her life and even in death, Didion remained an enigmatic figure, revered for her elusive, skeptical demeanor and her chiseled, penetrating prose. She rose to fame chronicling the turbulent cultural upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, which she captured in groundbreaking essays that were collected in works like “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.”

She also wrote extensively, often with the same cool detachment, about herself. She revealed her mental health struggles, back when such disclosures were rare, and included excerpts from her own psychiatric evaluation in the title essay of “The White Album,” which described how, in 1968, an attack of vertigo and nausea left her feeling unmoored.

Later in her career, she explored the aftermath of personal tragedies. In her blockbuster memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking,” she described the shock and dislocation she felt following the sudden death of her husband in 2003.

That book was followed by a second memoir, “Blue Nights,” describing her grief after her adopted daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, who suffered from alcohol addiction, died in 2005 at age 39 of acute pancreatitis. In “Blue Nights,” Didion wrote about her anxieties concerning motherhood and aging, and her fear that writing no longer came to her as easily as it once did.

Didion addresses many of those same themes in the writing collected in “Notes to John,” according to her trustees and publisher. The early entries describe sessions in which she discussed her feelings about adoption, alcoholism and the complexities of her relationship with Quintana.

In later notes, she reveals conversations about her childhood and her distant relationship with her parents, her struggles to write and her reflections on her literary legacy. Didion addresses Dunne directly in her notes, and refers to conversations she had with him about her sessions.

When Didion died in December 2021 at age 87, she left behind copious records of her life and work. Her archives, together with Dunne’s, arrived at the New York Public Library in 354 boxes, which include photographs, letters, research material, dinner party menus, datebooks, manuscripts and family material.

There are no immediate plans to publish more material from her archives, though it will take time to assess it all, said Paul Bogaards, a spokesperson for the Didion Dunne Literary Trust.

The diaries that make up “Notes to John” stood out as “an important contribution to the posthumous view of Didion’s work,” Bogaards said.

“It stands alone as a narrative,” he said. “There is nothing else like it in her archive.”



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