The headlines say it all: “Who thought this was a good idea?” asked Literary Hub. The Times of London thundered, “This new Joan Didion book should never have been published.” A friend of Didion wrote to The Guardian, which headlined the letter, “My friend Joan Didion wouldn’t have wanted her therapy notes to be published”.
When Didion’s Notes to John was published in April 2025, the publication unleashed a storm of controversy. Didion died in 2021, at the age of 87, leaving behind a considerable body of work, from novels to collected essays, to her two late-in-life memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. These were meticulously crafted books that explored the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003 of a heart attack, and then her daughter, Quintana, at the age of 39 two years later.
And then came Notes to John, which hadn’t been authorised before her death. It comprises 150 loose typed pages of Didion’s therapy from December 1999 to early 2002. Didion had left no instructions about them. Instead, she and Dunne had left behind a neatly organised archive, now at the New York Public Library, which was opened to the public in 2025. It houses 336 boxes of notes, manuscripts, correspondence and personal items, among them the notes that make up the publication of this book.
The controversy arose because Didion had left no instructions for the notes. There was no directive not to publish them, but they hadn’t been destroyed, they were there, ready for the reading, as it were.
Speaking to NPR podcast host Scott Detrow, Didion’s editor Shelley Wanger detailed how she and the literary executors found the notes in Didion’s office. Her thought was that the notes looked “interesting, like nothing we’d ever seen before”. Wanger contends that the notes read as a complete document, touch on the subjects in the memoirs and are a “wonderful read”.
Also on this podcast is Knopf publisher Jordan Pavlin, who states that Notes to John illuminates what is discussed in the memoirs, filling in the gaps. For example, Quintana’s illness is never exactly described in Blue Nights, but in this book the heart-wrenching details are on full display.
Reviews of the volume point to this not being the polished work we are used to seeing from Didion. Reviewers and writers have pointed out leaden sentences and said it is embarrassing. Alongside these negative views are those who have said the book is fascinating, moving and illuminating. There has been an emphasis on the fact that all Didion wrote was well crafted, and some have questioned the publication. This is, so many seem to indicate, sub-par Didion.
But what if there is another way to read these notes?
As a keeper of journals since the age of 11, and an admirer, in particular, of Didion’s essays and almost iconic cool style, I looked forward to the volume. There is a voyeuristic element to reading someone’s private journals. It is enhanced when the author is famous and you want to know more about them. In addition, there is something so startlingly immediate about the reading: you are there with the writer through the vicissitudes of their days. You see them on a bad day, expressing one opinion about a particular matter, and on a good day expressing a different opinion on the same matter. It’s the way we live our lives, riding waves of our emotions, up and down.
The book is titled Notes to John as they are notes written to Dunne, who attended only one session. The book opens in medias res with the laconic and startling words: “Re not taking Zoloft, [an anti-depressant] I said it made me feel for about an hour after taking it that I’d lost my organising principle, rather like having a planters’ punch before lunch in the tropics.”
She is in therapy with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon on the advice of Quintana, who herself is in therapy. Quintana had told her therapist, a Dr Kass, that her mother was depressed and should talk to someone. Kass is also of the opinion that some of Quintana’s problems stem from the tight bond she shares with Didion.
At the time Quintana is 33 and spiralling deeper into alcoholism. A photographer with magazines, she hasn’t yet had her own gallery showing and loses a job on a publication during the course of therapy. Didion and Dunne have propped her up by giving her an apartment near them, and in the course of the book they also give her $100,000, which she speedily blows through. The notes are a heartbreaking revelation of a mother’s anguish.
Didion and Dunne don’t know what to do. There is a lot of back and forth between Didion and MacKinnon about Didion’s ambivalence around Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), yet she desperately wants to see her daughter get back on her feet, and circles around the topic of whether she should attend Al-Anon meetings (for the families and friends of alcoholics), how to encourage Quintana to go to AA, and whether Quintana is actually an alcoholic. There are descriptions of Quintana answering the phone drunk, slurring her words. Didion and Dunne are in the middle of a push-pull psychological dynamic with her.
They struggle with how much to encourage their daughter, and how much they should step back and allow Quintana to come to her own decisions in a step towards healing. There is also a real fear of Quintana committing suicide, and MacKinnon notes the connection between alcoholics and suicide. MacKinnon hammers home the point that Didion and Dunne should emphasise how much they need Quintana in their lives.
It’s also important to note that Quintana was adopted, as some of that dynamic also plays a role in the lack of “separation” between her and Didion. This plays into Didion’s own fears: “I said I had always been afraid we would lose her. He said that just as all adoptive children have a deep fear that they will be given away again, all adoptive parents have a deep fear that the child will be taken from them.”
Through their meetings Didion gains insight, too, into her own experience of being mothered, of growing up with a suicidal father. MacKinnon points out how Didion has kept her own life together through her strong work ethic; it is a way of coping. She has also kept people away.
These details of Didion’s upbringing, her own psychology and the factors that shaped her are a revelation. I stopped thinking of the controversy about the journals and wondering if they should have been published. They are therapy journals, and to those going through some of the issues Didion and her family did, these journals might offer insight and even guidance. After all, the other reason we read other peoples’ journals and memoirs is also to see our own selves reflected.
When you stop thinking of this book as “sub-par Didion” and instead reframe it as a journal, I believe the issues of stylistic writing brilliance fall away. A journal is written in the rush of life; rarely do we journalers go back and revise. What if we stop thinking of the publication of Didion’s diaries in the reflected light of what else she published? They have a value in and of themselves — yes, Didion fans will have a chance to peer beyond the mystique, and they offer something beyond polished sentences.
It was something I spoke about to André P Brink’s widow, Karina M Szczurek, a writer and publisher. Also a life-long keeper of journals, she agreed that journals are not polished documents. She did mention, though, that it’s important to state in your will what you would like to be done with your diaries. She also said that this is something she is thinking about in terms of Brink’s diaries, which he also kept throughout his life. She described them as “exquisite”, taking in his career and personal life. Whether or not they will be published is under consideration.
South African poet, academic and novelist Joan Hambidge had a wry take on the controversy over publishing Didion’s therapy notes and whether they will “ruin” her reputation. “This furore reminds me of the famous line: you work hard to become a movie celebrity and then wear sunglasses not to be recognised. I maintain being a public person (writer, actor, novelist) unfortunately means the end of your private life,” she said. “I really fail to see how the letters can harm Joan Didion’s reputation. Merely a footnote to her work.”
However, in contrast to this, another strong opinion comes from Susan Mann, a Cape Town-based novelist and part-time academic, who emphasised that “ethically and artistically the publication of Notes to John is a fail. Truthful observation is a constant in Didion’s body of work. Every sentence is meticulous and exact — a form of literary acupuncture. She spent the length of her writing career working to maintain this standard. She was not only a respected writer, but an artist, a master craftsman.
“This precision is not at all evident in Notes to John. Not because Didion suddenly forgot her craft. But because she did not intend it to be a book, but [because it is] a jotter, a record, a download of vulnerability.
“There is a valuable place for the anxious meanderings of one’s therapeutic process. But, as Didion possibly knew, it’s in a notebook or a journal, not for sale to voyeurs, ogling the fault lines of someone no longer here to defend themselves.”
Coming back to the furore, I am reminded of other controversies that have erupted due to publishing an author’s work after their death. In 2024 we witnessed the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumous Until August. The novel was not completed in his lifetime. He developed dementia and could no longer follow the plot. It was published to mixed reviews, with García Márquez’s sons saying they had done so against their father’s wishes. There’s also the famous case of Franz Kafka requesting that his friend and editor Max Brod destroy his writings. Instead, Brod published them and championed and cemented Kafka’s literary reputation. And speaking of journals, as Szczurek reminded me, Virginia Woolf’s detailed volumes only saw the light of day after her death, too.
While reading, I also wondered about the therapeutic value of writing about therapy process. In recent years, there has been an explosion in the rise of courses and workshops dedicated to learning how to journal, or furthering one’s diary writing habit. It is also, sometimes, a tool used in therapy. One such psychologist who uses it in her Johannesburg-based practice is Ronelle Hart. A practitioner of the form since age 12, Hart has found it especially beneficial in her own life: “I’m interested in memory and memoir writing and having kept a journal for over 50 years now, I feel that writing down my life has offered me a coherent life story.”
As to her own therapy techniques, she said, “Journalling is a narrative process that can help bring an awareness of the emotional themes in our lives, and when we write down our thoughts and feelings and observations, it can help lower anxiety especially about so-called negative or unwanted emotions: in the writing down we simply acknowledge and express the feeling, and so learn to simply observe without judgment things about our inner life which we often feel ashamed of.
“For people who have been traumatised, writing down what happened is extremely beneficial in the mental processing and memory integration of painful and scary experiences. Being able to have a coherent narrative of one’s life is at the core of mental health, so journalling can be a powerful tool for mental well-being.”
I carried on reading hungrily through Notes to John. At one point I put the book down, thinking back on linked incidents in my own childhood, and had my own epiphany triggered, or encouraged by the reading. It was as if a weighted blanket had been lifted off my back; I felt lighter, relieved and surprised. Perhaps there’s the answer. Notes to John is published, it’s out there in the world, clunky sentences or not. Its value, I believe, lies in what it offers as a portal to understanding, whether you are grappling with the issues Didion and her family did or not. It also offers a gripping, immensely interesting account of the therapeutic process, and how that works, and may even serve as an encouragement for others to try therapy.
Early on in the sessions, MacKinnon says to Didion, “You’re becoming a great deal more open. I think as you become more open you find other people are more open around you.”
Perhaps, in the end, Didion did intend that these notes might be published, after all.
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