Joan Didion’s unpublished therapy notes reveal raw portrait of grief, motherhood, and control

Posthumous release of Joan Didion’s ‘Notes to John’ reveals private therapy sessions and deepens her legacy of public mourning.

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne in 1977. © AP

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

When Notes to John, a posthumous release of Joan Didion’s private therapy notes, emerged from a box near her desk, it instantly reignited questions about privacy, legacy, and the ethics of literary postmortems. But beyond those debates, the slim volume offers something even more potent: an unfiltered glimpse into Didion’s psyche as she grappled with loss, motherhood, and her own capacity for control — all through the prism of psychiatric dialogue.

For fans of her earlier autobiographical works The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Joan Didion Notes to John serves as a de facto third chapter in a trilogy of mourning. But unlike the crafted prose of her bestselling memoirs, Notes to John is unvarnished. These journal-like entries, addressed to her late husband John Gregory Dunne, chronicle Didion’s sessions with Dr. Roger MacKinnon between 1999 and 2002 — years marked by emotional turbulence and growing concern for her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo.

A confessional unearthed

The existence of these sessions might never have come to light if not for a fortunate discovery among Didion’s personal papers after her death. Though such material might initially seem off-limits, the fact that it was not destroyed — and is now also part of an unrestricted archive at the New York Public Library — suggests at least tacit permission. Didion, ever aware of the power of narrative, may have understood that this document, stripped of polish, could someday serve as a companion to her published grief.

As readers, we’re granted an intimate seat beside the author as she processes some of the most agonizing events of her life. Her notes to MacKinnon reveal a woman who, despite her reputation for precision and detachment, wrestled with overwhelming emotion and spiraling uncertainty.

Family trauma laid bare

In Joan Didion Notes to John, the focus repeatedly returns to Quintana, whose struggles with alcoholism and mental health formed the emotional backbone of Blue Nights. Through her sessions with MacKinnon, Didion exposes moments of maternal panic and helplessness — raw, unfiltered thoughts that were never meant for public consumption.

We learn that Didion had shown Night of the Living Dead to a 7-year-old Quintana late at night, an admission that visibly shook MacKinnon. She responds defensively, noting that the alternative didn’t seem fun. These moments expose the contradictions in Didion’s parenting — the tension between being permissive and seeking control, between protecting her daughter and imposing structure.

MacKinnon and other doctors in Quintana’s life often offered conflicting advice. While MacKinnon encouraged Didion to “play the guilt card” in moments of suicidal ideation, another therapist, Dr. Kass, warned against emotional pressure. The psychiatric tug-of-war reveals not just the medical uncertainty surrounding Quintana’s condition, but also Didion’s struggle to navigate it while staying emotionally intact.

Revisiting past trauma and personal memory

Didion doesn’t stop at her daughter. The therapy notes also include flashbacks to her own early brushes with mental health. She revisits a session from 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley, where she debated leaving her sorority and worried about her father. Such moments tie Notes to John to The White Album, where a psychiatric report following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy — an event that left her physically sick — makes an appearance.

These returns to the past are often precise to an uncanny degree, prompting speculation about whether she had recorded her sessions or reconstructed them from memory. Considering Didion’s New Journalistic style and her known use of tape recorders during reporting, the reconstruction seems less surprising — a natural extension of her drive to document, to narrate, and to process through writing.

A new window into Didion’s obsession with control

What becomes immediately apparent in Joan Didion Notes to John is her lifelong preoccupation with control. The word appears dozens of times throughout the text. Whether she’s discussing parenting, grief, or her inability to change Quintana’s path, Didion returns to this theme repeatedly. The book underscores her self-awareness — she knows her inclination to control is futile and yet cannot abandon it.

Even in the form of the book itself, we see this tension play out. While Notes to John lacks the refined sheen of her more public-facing works, its structure — short entries, observations, conversations reconstructed with journalistic precision — reflect her desire to shape the narrative, even when emotionally unraveling.

The glamour and grit of Didion’s world

Though the book is deeply confessional, it also contains glimpses of the glamorous world Didion and Dunne inhabited. There are references to rehab at Canyon Ranch, dinners at the Four Seasons, and flying the Concorde to Paris for family financial discussions. These moments don't distract from the emotional stakes; rather, they add texture to the contrast between their public stature and private grief.

In one chilling passage, Didion reflects on Alcoholics Anonymous, a program Quintana attempted multiple times. She critiques its theatricality, saying that a relapse in “real life” might result in guilt or a hangover — not the dramatic downfall the program often assumes. It’s an observation both cold and deeply insightful, characteristic of Didion’s journalistic eye and maternal frustration.

Rough but revealing

Ultimately, Joan Didion Notes to John is not a polished memoir. It is fragmentary, repetitive at times, and emotionally exhausting. But its rawness is its strength. Readers expecting another literary gem will find instead a cloudy window into a powerful mind at its most vulnerable — a reminder that grief resists narrative neatness.

Didion did not intend for this material to be her final word, but it extends and complicates her body of work in compelling ways. For a writer so often in control of her image, this book paradoxically strengthens her legacy. It invites readers into the space between public mourning and private breakdown, where even the most celebrated authors wrestle with pain, failure, and self-doubt.

A final gift from a writer who chronicled loss

That Notes to John exists at all is a testament to Didion’s instinct to document — not just what was happening, but how she felt about it. As with her reporting, she brings a razor-sharp awareness to even her most intimate confessions. And while it’s tempting to feel voyeuristic reading this book, its inclusion in a public archive and release through her trusted publisher Knopf suggest this was not an invasion, but an offering.

In 2025, when attention spans are fickle and memoirs often feel manufactured, Joan Didion Notes to John stands as a rare example of unpolished emotional truth. It’s a difficult book, sometimes unsettling, always honest. And for those who’ve followed Didion through her journeys of grief and remembrance, it offers one more conversation — tender, searching, and painfully real.