Notes to John

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, substance use, addiction, illness, and death.

Joan Didion was an American author and literary icon. She was born in California in 1934 and died in New York in 2021. In Notes to John, the executors of her estate have made her personal diary entries on her psychiatric sessions public for the first time. The notes were “found in a small portable file near her desk” and detail Didion’s conversations with Dr. Roger MacKinnon during the first year or so of their work together (v). Although Didion would go on to work with Dr. MacKinnon until 2012 (shortly before he stopped practicing psychiatry), her heirs only uncovered this brief era of journalistic accounting in her things after her death. The literary world has debated the ethics of this publication, as Notes to John presents a vulnerable look at Didion’s private life that she never intended for public consumption.

The intimacy of the diary entries is reflected both in their content and Didion’s stylistic choices. Didion has written all of the notes to her late husband John Gregory Dunne, referring to him as “you” throughout the text. Her use of the direct address affects an intimate