Notes to John

Praise for Notes to John:

‘Utterly fascinating … shares with Blue Nights the subject of mother and daughter, generational trauma and general anxiety, and both are written with Didion’s constitutional meticulousness’ New York Times

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

‘The most direct book Didion wrote – or rather, pointedly didn’t write … The quantity of arresting and widely applicable insights makes Notes to John a profound, rich document’ New Statesman

‘An act of intimate storytelling … the diehard Didion fans (we know who we are) will feel hypnotized by these pages, not quite sure they should exist as a book, but leveled by the writer who produced them, by her honesty and heartbreak’ Vogue

‘Written with the immediacy of fresh recollection … Readers of her memoirs will recognise how these notes inform those final books – the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it’ New Yorker

‘Uncomfortable but compulsive reading … shows Didion the reporter at work … what an experience it is, watching Didion beat back tragedy with her brilliant mind, as the hurricane hurtles her family’s way’ Telegraph

‘It’s fascinating to see her making connections and presenting evidence of misremembered parts of her past … offers insight into her work’ iPaper

‘Offers readers a key to Didion’s persona and her work … Writing was how she processed everything’ NPR

‘A tour de force from one of the best’ People

‘Offers an unfiltered glimpse into the mind … perhaps for the first time, we can hope to see Didion as she saw the world: unwavering and unflinching, straight down the line’ AnOther

‘What emerges is the portrait of a life, or lives, in progress … We get the fuller story, so alive and febrile that it is not a story but instead a reckoning with what one can and can’t accept or change’ Alta

‘An unexpected parting gift to biographers and civilian readers … direct and personal, shorn of vanity’ Airmail

Joan Didion is one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she has produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.