Inside Joan Didion’s unseen diary of personal relationships and post-therapy notes

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

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