“Notes to John” gives Joan Didion a worthy opponent: herself

It’s a bit awkward to give a “best of” accolade to a book when you’re not entirely sure it should exist. There were only a few months between the announcement that a folder of journal entries had been found in Joan Didion’s office shortly after her death and the publication of them as “Notes to John” (Knopf, April 2025), and the book was greeted with roughly equal amounts of excitement and concern. On the one hand, this was very personal, unpublished work from a famously private writer; if Didion wanted the journal published, wouldn’t she have already made that known? On the other, this was very personal writing that Joan Didion perhaps never intended to publish — but if she didn’t want it in the hands of nosy readers, wouldn’t she have destroyed the papers or instructed someone else to do so? 

Without confirmation either way, reviewers have batted the book around an ethical blank space. Some believe it’s a cynical cash grab by the author’s heirs, some that it’s simply a troubling betrayal of privacy. Others are confident that Didion purposely left their fate up to, well, fate. But everyone who cares enough to have an opinion about these deeply personal chronicles seems, regardless, to be reading them.

“Notes to John,” for what it’s worth, is unquestionably a narrative, one that takes place over a little more than a year, from 1999 to 2002. The notes are all addressed to John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband and lifelong writing partner. Each is a meticulous account of a session with a psychiatrist, volleys of “I said” and “he said” with little exposition or context save for an occasional footnote. Almost all the notes center on Didion and Dunne’s daughter, Quintana, who in her own sessions with a psychiatrist had expressed concern that Didion was depressed and should “see someone.” 

This format—”what I did in therapy today,” more or less—is raw and occasionally repetitive. It gets unwieldy at times: Though the dialogue recreated in each note is between the author and her doctor, Didion is also talking directly to John (“you”), and the doctor is talking to Joan (also “you”) as well as reporting things to Didion that were said about Quintana by her own doctor.

The narrative isn’t one of progression, but of volatile stasis as Didion and Dunne attempt to help Quintana, then in her 30s and grappling with depression, isolation and alcoholism. But the sessions are about Didion, both because she is consumed by the fear of losing Quintana (both doctors had by that time identified her as a suicide risk), and because she’s reckoning with what “helping” can look like within a deeply codependent mother-daughter relationship that itself has unfolded against a chaotic family background.

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Didion and Dunne, who adopted Quintana as a newborn, were loving parents who folded their new daughter into the life they lived in tandem — editing each other’s writing and collaborating on screenplays, throwing parties and taking gossipy phone calls from separate offices in the same house. In casting her mind back to Quintana’s early life, Didion is at times comically disingenuous: She recalls “never ever” feeling guilty about working; rather, she says, the guilt was about “not engaging, not being there emotionally” — which she couldn’t be, because working “was the way I found to not be there emotionally.” She’s aware that Quintana was raised in a home where alcohol was a constant accessory and sometimes a visible problem. And she’s aware that her enmeshment with Quintana is compounded by a relationship with Dunne that left their daughter feeling like an interloper. 

Quintana Roo Dunne, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, 1976 (John Bryson/Getty Images)

The notes recount dinners and discussions, arguments and détante. There is confrontation and denial, improvements followed by backslides. The notes to John tell Dunne nothing he didn’t already know; what’s chronicled is a process by which a set of fresh eyes pushes Didion to accept that she can’t control every narrative.  

It’s a setup that wouldn’t work if the psychiatrist resembled the detached, slightly sinister Freudians who populated the milieus most familiar to Didion and Dunne — Hollywood films, cartoons in The New Yorker, their own fiction and nonfiction. “Notes to John” requires a compelling foil for Didion, and Roger MacKinnon is that: Director of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, former president of the New York Psychiatric Society, author, revered clinician. “If you can imagine John Wayne in a blue suit playing a psychiatrist, you begin to get the feel,” is how MacKinnon was introduced in a 1992 New York Times article about the impact of new drugs on emergency-psychiatry training protocols. And even a casual Didion reader probably knows how large Wayne loomed in her life and work. 

What makes “Notes to John” so worth reading — what to me, at least, justifies its publication — is something that also makes it unavoidably meta: The patient/doctor interplay in which MacKinnon recognizes the stories Didion tells herself in order to live and calls them out: 

“I said I may have been overprotective, but I never thought [Quintana] saw me that way. In fact she once described me, as a mother, as ‘a little remote.’ Dr. MacKinnon: “You don’t think she saw your remoteness as a defense? When she uses remoteness herself as a defense. Didn’t you just tell me? She never looks back?”

MacKinnon is fact-checking Didion in real time, refusing to let her apply her fearsome talent for story-spinning to her own life. Another dramatic touch is that the mother’s and daughter’s psychiatrists are in close contact, but often approach key pain points differently. MacKinnon encourages Didion to load parental guilt onto Quintana so she’ll reconsider self-destructive habits, while Quintana’s doctor thinks this is a bad idea. It can’t end well; as we already know, it doesn’t. 

John Gregory Dunne died in 2003; Quintana Roo Dunne died two years later. Didion’s final two books, 2005’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and 2011’s “Blue Nights,” are her most personal, and “Notes to John” gives further context to both. Didion once wrote that “writers are always selling somebody out,” but her husband and daughter were, for her, not among them. She didn’t put the word “abuse” to the resentments and rages Dunne was well known for; she didn’t acknowledge alcohol’s role in the cascade of illnesses preceding Quintana’s death. “Notes to John” was never going to be a tell-all. But what it shows — contradictions, failings, rationalizations, self-delusion, despair — is moving, particularly if you’re familiar with the neon-bright dread of addictions that can’t be loved away. Concluding that Didion left these pages behind so they would eventually take shape as the penance of an unreliable narrator is surely too tidy. By saving as much of the truth as she could bear until none of those involved were around to feel the impact, though, she was right on brand.