Didion taught us that narratives are weapons: for the powerful, a way to conceal; for the powerless, a last act of defence.
In Notes to John, she is caught without her weapons. The posthumous collection, drawn from private notes she left behind after her death, lays bare the internal terrain she so often disguised with wit and froideur. For admirers of her political journalism. The savage elegance of Miami, Salvador, Political Fictions — it makes for a jarring encounter: Didion not dissecting ideology, but struggling helplessly inside her own.
Published in 2025 by Harper Collins, Notes to John is not a finished work. It is a loose assemblage of psychiatric session reports, diary entries, and private letters addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. The notes span from late 1999 through 2001, as Didion grapples with her depression, her daughter Quintana’s escalating troubles, and the slow disintegration of the defensive structures. Work, control, irony. That had sustained her for decades.
The manuscript was discovered after her death, tucked among drafts, receipts, and passwords. There is no indication that Didion ever intended it to be published. That we are reading it at all feels, inescapably, like a transgression. Didion, who spent her career demonstrating how narratives are shaped. By individuals, by states, by ideologies, surely understood too that publication is itself an act of control. Notes to John was never shaped by her hand.
What emerges is a different Didion: stripped of her usual armour, prone to repetition, riven by guilt and fear. The voice that once described America’s crumbling myths with surgical precision is here reduced to a kind of desperate internal monologue. Early on, she writes:
“I realized that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.”
Her psychiatrist sees it even more starkly:
“You control the situation through your work and your competency. But the fear is still there.”
That fear runs like a hidden current through all her work. Reading Notes to John against Didion’s political essays reveals not a new voice but the unmasked one behind her earlier brilliance. In Miami, she charted the ruins of American imperial narratives. In Salvador, she wrote out of a near hallucinatory proximity to collapse. In Political Fictions, she eviscerated the hollow ceremonies of American democracy, already unravelling under the weight of their own inertia.
In those books, the detachment of the prose. Its cool distance, its refusal of comfort. Was often mistaken for cynicism. In Notes to John, we see what that detachment cost. It was not a pose but a survival strategy, and it is a strategy that by 1999 is failing. The foundations Didion built to hold herself together. Professional mastery, emotional distance, narrative control, are breaking apart, just as the national myths she once chronicled were already in collapse.
Throughout these notes, the psychic injuries of childhood surface and resurface: the constant wartime relocations, the fear of losing her father, the ambient dread that happiness is always provisional. In one passing memory, she confesses:
“My earliest picture of myself being ‘married’ was myself getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark glasses and getting my picture taken.”
No illusions, even in childhood dreams. No trust that anything would hold.
The heart of the book, however, is her relationship with Quintana. Didion is acutely aware of the ways in which parental anxiety can be both love and burden. She traces. Almost clinically. The way her own lifelong anticipation of disaster has shaped her daughter’s difficulties, how their love for each other risks becoming a trap. At times the notes read less like therapy than a slow, painful anatomy of helplessness.
There are flashes of the old clarity. When discussing the experience of naming Quintana’s illness, of labelling her alcoholism and depression. Didion observes:
“I often find myself wishing we could go back to before Hazelden, before the whole problem got named and medicalized and she started thinking she had to hide it.”
Naming, she understands, does not necessarily liberate; it can entrench shame and secrecy. This is the same insight that drove her great political writing: the idea that narratives, once created, are not neutral. They control as much as they explain.
The ethics of publication remain uneasy. Didion, who curated her public voice so meticulously, would surely have hesitated to allow these pages. Fragmentary, unedited, painfully exposed, into the world. And yet Notes to John completes the picture she spent a lifetime constructing: not as a work of craft, but as a work of witness.
There is no triumph in Notes to John, no consolation in revelation. Didion does not master her fears; she merely endures them, records them, bears their weight. The woman who once shaped chaos into crystalline prose can, by the end of these notes, only bear witness to the slow failure of her old strategies. And yet that act. The refusal to look away, even from herself. Is itself a final act of courage. In the end, Didion knew what she had always known: the centre does not hold. We live with the fear. We go on.
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