Notes to John

Joan Didion is an American author, writer, and journalist. She was born in 1934 in Sacramento, California. Because her father was in the army, Didion and her family traveled throughout Didion’s early childhood. A bookish child, Didion later identified herself as a perpetual outsider because of how often she and her family moved. Didion went on to attend the University of California, Berkeley. After her graduation in 1956, Didion entered and won an essay contest hosted by Vogue, and the magazine offered her a job in New York. Didion relocated to the city and worked for Vogue for seven years. While there, she met and became close with John Gregory Dunne, whom she married in 1964.

Didion and John eventually moved back to California, where they created a life together for the next 20 years. Both writers, the couple’s work was often entangled. They had separate careers, but they collaborated on several feature films, including The Panic in Needle Park, A Star Is Born, and Up Close & Personal. Amidst Didion’s screenwriting and authorial career, she and John adopted their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. Didion’s experiences as a mother appear throughout her works of fiction and nonfiction and remain the central focus of Notes to John, which explores the challenges of Navigating Mother-Daughter Relationships.

Throughout her career, Didion published five novels, 12 works of nonfiction, a play, and several screenplays and essay collections. She received many awards and commendations for her work including the 2005 National Book Award for her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking in which she reckons with her grief over her husband’s death. The deeply personal and vulnerable tone of that work underscores Didion’s view of Writing as a Means of Survival, a key theme of the diary entries and therapeutic sessions detailed in this compilation.

Didion is best known for her writings about Hollywood culture, motherhood, loss, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, her fiction and nonfiction also assumed a political stance on American foreign policy and the American justice system. She not only wrote about the United States’ relations with Latin America but was one of the first journalists to publicly assert that the Central Park Five were innocent. Didion’s work has been criticized as self-indulgent, but it is her syntactic experimentation and consistently bald voice that continue to attract readers to her now iconic style.