There is strong international interest in a new book by the celebrated American writer and journalist Joan Didion who died in 2021. Entitled Notes to John, the manuscript was discovered in a portable filing cabinet next to her desk after her death. The book is a journal in which she describes sessions with a psychiatrist. The reports are addressed to her husband, the fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
The book will be published by Fourth Estate in the UK where it was acquired by Publishing Director Kishani Widyaratna from Claire Paterson Conrad of Janklow & Nesbit UK. The book will publish simultaneously with Knopf in the US where it was acquired by Jordan Pavlin, Knopf EVP, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief. International rights sales are unfolding rapidly including deals with Grasset (France), Gyldendal (Denmark), Ullstein (Germany), Il Saggiatore (Italy), De Arbeidespers (The Netherlands), Grupa Wydawnicza Relacja (Poland), Infinito Particular (Portugal), PRH Spain and Natur Och Kultur (Sweden), with more underway. It is sure to be a much talked about title at Frankfurt.
Kishani Widyaratna said, “At 4th Estate we are immensely proud to be Joan Didion’s long-time UK publisher, and it is a great honour to be bringing this extraordinary new book to readers. Notes to John offers us a deeply moving and astonishingly intimate portrait of the person behind the revered literary persona, and rare insight into the genesis of some Didion’s most treasured works. This is an unmissable publication from one of the most iconic writers of our time.”
Notes to John opens in December 1999, shortly after Didion began seeing the psychiatrist. As she wrote to a friend, her family had been having “a rough few years.” For several months, she recorded the sessions with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. 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. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.”
The conversations were central to Didion’s understanding of the themes she turned to in her brilliant late works, Where I Was From, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights.
The book will be published in hardcover, ebook and audio on April 22, 2025.
The hardback cover features a portrait of Joan Didion in her office taken by acclaimed photographer Annie Leibovitz.
