Joan Didion, who died in 2021, never intended Notes to John to be published. They are, as the title intimates, notes to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and they are about meetings with her psychiatrist, Dr Roger MacKinnon, over the course of a little more than a year, beginning in 1999. These 150 pages of notes were in her archive and, given that there wasn’t going to be any more Didion fiction or journalism, someone must have thought that this was a way to continue her story.
