This new Joan Didion book should never have been published
This is Joan Didion's last book, until her estate finds something else on her hard drive. The publication of Notes to John, three years after the journalist, essayist and novelist's death in December 2021, comes as a surprise to those of us who thought she had published her last book of new writing a decade earlier. Blue Nights (2011) was Didion's account of her relationship with her adopted daughter Quintana, who died in 2005 at the age of 39 after a 'cascade of medical crises'. After that, she published only books that repackaged older work.
And that is what Notes to John is — sort of. It is not like any other Joan Didion book. In an important sense, it is not a Joan
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