A new book from the late Joan Didion is coming later this year.
Knopf will publish the journalist and author’s Notes to John in the spring, the press announced in a news release. The book is “a journal in which she describes sessions with a psychiatrist. The reports are addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.”
Didion, who published her first book, the novel Run River, in 1963, was one of the country’s most respected writers and a crucial player in the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and ’70s. She is known for her novels, including Play It as It Laysand A Book of Common Prayer, and works of nonfiction, most notably Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Her last book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, was published less than a year before her death in 2021 at the age of 87.
Notes to John, Knopf says, “opens in December 1999, shortly after Didion began seeing the psychiatrist.…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.”
Jordan Pavlin, Knopf’s publisher and editor in chief, called the book “an extraordinarily intimate record of a painful and courageous journey in the life of one of the greatest writers of our time.”
Notes to John is scheduled for publication on April 22.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
