‘A profound, rich document’ NEW STATESMAN

‘An act of intimate storytelling’ VOGUE

A recently discovered journal from one of America’s most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had ‘a rough few years’. She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood – misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe – and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, ‘what it’s been worth’. The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedently intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers – questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.

‘An incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression, and creativity’ GUARDIAN

‘Written with the immediacy of fresh recollection ? and with the cool, forensic clarity she was known for’ NEW YORKER

‘Compulsive ? it shows Didion the reporter at work’ TELEGRAPH

‘An intimate chronicle ? Notes to John offers readers a key to Didion’s persona and her work’ NPR

‘Perhaps for the first time, we can hope to see Didion as she saw the world: unwavering and unflinching, straight down the line’ AnOTHER

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon, and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas, and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.

Here are subjects Didion has long written about – the press, politics, California robber baronsac, women, the act of writing, and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive and, in new light, stunningly prescient.

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, Didion writes about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas, and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe, Martha Stewart and Ernest Hemingway.  

With an Introduction by Hilton Als, this stunning collection reveals what would become her subjects: the press, politics, California robber barons, women, the act of writing, and her own self-doubt. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later – the night before New Year’s Eve -the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of 40 years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LA airport, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Centre to relieve a massive hematoma.

This powerful book is Didion’s ‘attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ? about marriage and children and memory ? about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’. The result is an exploration of an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage, and a life, in good times and bad.