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Irish Independent

Joan Didion's therapy diaries reveal her doubts as a mother following her daughter's unravelling

Notes to John provides a valuable look behind the scenes of the late author's meetings with her psychiatrist and her own turmoil at the turn of the century It seems unlikely that Notes to John, a new and posthumous work by Joan Didion, was originally intended as a 'book'. Next to her other titles, it lacks the cohesion and ambition, the form and poetry that established her as a legendary essayist (The White Album), an influential novelist (Play It as It Lays) and a memoirist of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking). Instead, Notes to John is a record of Didion's meetings with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, beginning in December 1999 and ending in January 2002, with entries composed from memory after every session. These 150 pages, typewritten and chronologically ordered, were discovered by Didion's estate after her death in 2021, and are part of the Didion-Dunne Archive, made public at the New York Library last month.