Book Review: How would Joan Didion feel about her therapy session notes being published as a book?

REVIEW. The series of uneventful therapy sessions becomes a bit boring, but at one point Joan Didion's cool facade cracks. Andres Lokko reads a book that is characterized by distance, but which still unleashes a hurricane of emotions.

Review: Joan Didion's 'Notes to John' may be a gift. And yet, I wish her the privacy she relished

The question haunting Joan Didion's 'Notes to John' is whether such a private person would have wanted her intimate, unedited reflections (including parental doubts) to be shared with readers.

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

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).

Book Review: How would Joan Didion feel about her therapy session notes being published as a book?

What would Joan think? Reading the newly released “Notes to John,” it’s hard not to wonder how the late author Joan Didion would feel about having her personal notes from a series of painful therapy sessions converted into a book after her death. Discovered in a small filing cabinet in Didion’s office after she died in 2021 at age 87, the 150 loose pages formed a kind of journal she kept for her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, about her meet…

What Hid Under the Surface of the Didion-Dunne Marriage?

The “Notes to John” aren’t really for John Gregory Dunne—but they do reveal him, if you read carefully.

Joan Didion’s Books Should Have Been Enough

The publication of the essayist’s private letters undermines a writer famous for her control.