To read after ‘Notes to John'

Express Tribune

05-05-2025

Joan Didion's posthumous Notes to John, published by Knopf, is a brief but shattering collection of journal entries from the early 1970s, written during one of the most psychologically turbulent periods of her life. Addressed to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, the entries trace Didion's experience with psychiatric treatment, her wavering sense of self, and a constant, looping grief. It's Didion stripped to the nerve; less polished essayist, more private woman in crisis.
If Notes to John leaves you breathless, or looking for more books that explore the brain's breaking points with raw honesty, here are four that resonate deeply with its intimate, searching voice (and which are not The Bell Jar).
'Blue Nights'
If Notes to John is the emotional wound still bleeding, Blue Nights, also by Didion, is the scar you can't stop tracing. Written after the death of her daughter, Didion's prose is skeletal, looping, and disarmingly quiet; it murmurs. This is a slow, devastating read for anyone obsessed with the passage of time, the terror of memory loss, and the impossibility of preparing for grief. Best read alone, in low light, with a mug or lemon water you're not enjoying.
'The Diaries of Virginia Woolf'
Imagine live-tweeting your inner chaos in the 1920s as an upper-class white woman, but doing it with genius-level prose. Woolf's diaries are a wild ride through literary ambition, mental illness, domestic life, and social gossip. Her entries shift from biting to blissful in a paragraph. The pace is sprawling, but the voice is familiar and addictive. For readers who love the messiness of a mind at work, and aren't afraid to wade into the weeds of art, ego, and despair. Basically, if you highlight half your books, bring a second pen.
'The Noonday Demon'
Think of this as depression with footnotes, but make it incredibly honest and beautiful. Unlike the massively dated The Body Keeps the Score, Andrew Solomon blends memoir, science, history, and politics into a doorstop of a book that somehow never drags. It's personal but expansive, structured yet digressive, like taking a college course and a therapy session at once. For readers who want to understand mood disorders from every angle and aren't scared off by pages of nuance.
'Hurry Down Sunshine'
This memoir reads like a slow-motion car crash; impossible to look away from, even as it devastates. Michael Greenberg captures the summer his teenage daughter suffers a psychotic break with startling clarity and restraint. The writing is quick and clean, with bursts of lyrical beauty, and it builds tension like fiction. Perfect for readers who want emotional depth without melodrama, and who are curious about how mental illness fractures family, time, and trust. It's heartbreakingly observational; no big speeches, just brutal presence.
These books don't offer easy answers, but neither does life inside the mind. Like Notes to John, they prove that the act of writing through suffering is its own kind of survival.
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