In 2021, shortly after Joan Didion’s death, her literary trustees found 46 journal entries stashed in an unlabeled folder in her desk (per The New York Times). The legendary journalist and screenwriter had begun writing the entries—all addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne—in December 1999 (around her 65th birthday) after “a rough few years” for their family, according to a letter she sent to a friend at the time (per The Guardian). Each was written after a session with her psychiatrist, and explores the writer’s experience with anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and motherhood.
Now, Knopf is making those diary entries public. The book, titled Notes To John, is set for an April 22 release. Other than some corrected typos and added footnotes, the pages have not been edited at all. The originals will also be on view as part of Didion and Dunne’s joint archives, opening at the New York Public Library on March 26.
Any posthumous release—especially one as intimate as this—is sure to bring up some thorny ethical quandaries. NYT notes that Didion left no instructions for how the diary should be handled, but the entries were organized chronologically and did form a seemingly complete narrative. “She likely anticipated that they would be gathered in her archives and read by the public and scholars,” the outlet surmised. At the same time, Didion’s editor never knew about the diary and she never sought to have it published during her lifetime. In a 1998 essay, she also wrote of a posthumous Ernesty Hemingway novel, “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t.”
We’ll never know what Didion actually wanted done with this writing, but fans and scholars will soon be able to re-enter her world regardless. (This will be the first new material of Didion’s published since 2011.) “[The journal] fills in great gaps in our understanding of her thinking,” Knopf’s publisher and editor in chief, Jordan Pavlin, said of the collection. “Didion’s art has always derived part of its electricity from what she reveals and what she withholds… Notes to John is unique in its lack of elision.”
