Joan Didion, American author and journalist, was known for her intimate novels and essays such as Goodbye to All That and The White Album, while her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2005. Now, four years after her passing in 2021, a private journal was found in her home, and is set to be published this April.
'Notes to John' by Joan Didion
Notes to John by Joan Didion
The journal, titled Notes to John, reflects on Didion's years with her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. The entries also detail her time speaking with a psychiatrist, discussing her childhood, alcoholism, and depression. The journal also recounts her relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana Roo, who struggled with mental illness and alcoholism before passing away in 2005.
These diary entries are set to be made public, with the only edits being corrected typos and added footnotes. This intimate release, which will be the first new material of Didion’s published since 2011, will raise questions behind the ethics of publishing such personal written thoughts, as the writer had left no notes on how to handle the material.
The journal, which was discovered in a filing cabinet next to the California native’s desk, contains 49 entries, all of which are addressed to her late husband, and date back to December 1999. Didion once said of her work, ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’
Notes to John by Joan Didion will be released on 22 April 2025, and is available to pre-order via penguinrandomhouse.com as well as directly from Amazon and Barnes & Noble
-
Step inside Casa Moncler, the brand’s sustainable and highly creative Milanese HQCasa Moncler opens its doors in a masterfully reimagined Milanese industrial site, blending modern minimalism and heritage, courtesy of ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel
-
Rains Amsterdam is slick and cocooning – the brand’s ‘store of the future’Danish lifestyle brand Rains opens its first Amsterdam store, marking its refined approach with a fresh flagship interior designed by Stamuli
-
Itapororoca House is nestled in the Brazilian forest overlooking its leafy coastal contextDesigned by Bloco Arquitetos, Itapororoca House is a treetop residence in Bahia, Brazil, offering a large wrap-around veranda to invite nature in
-
Jamel Shabazz’s photographs are a love letter to Prospect ParkIn a new book, ‘Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025’, Jamel Shabazz discovers a warmer side of human nature
-
A life’s work: Hans Ulrich Obrist on art, meaning and being drivenAs the curator, critic and artistic director of Serpentine Galleries publishes his memoir, ‘Life in Progress’, he tells us what gets him out of bed in the morning
-
Ed Ruscha and Ruthie Rogers team up on zingy new cookbookEd Ruscha and friend Ruthie Rogers, chef and River Café co-founder, have teamed up on a cookbook with a difference
-
Thomas Prior’s photography captures the uncanny fragility of American lifeA new book unites two decades of the photographer’s piercing, uneasy work
-
Cult classic ‘Teenagers in Their Bedrooms’ captures the angst of being a teenAre 1990s teens so different? Three decades after its original release, this photography book by Adrienne Salinger has been published again, by DAP
-
Make the Booker Prize shortlist your new reading listThis year’s Booker Prize shortlist captures the emotional complexity of our times, with stories of fractured families, shifting identities and the search for meaning in unfamiliar places
-
How to be butch: Clark Henley’s sharp, satirical and playful manual is back in printThe 1982 classic, ‘The Butch Manual: The Current Drag and How to Do It’, full of tongue-in-cheek advice, is available once again
-
We are all fetishists, says Anastasiia Fedorova in her new book, which takes a deep dive into kinkIn ‘Second Skin’, writer and curator Fedorova takes a tour through the materials, objects and power dynamics we have fetishised
