In December 1999, on his 65th birthday, John Didion began writing his diary after a session with a psychiatrist. The following year or so, she kept a note about their conversation. It's anxiety, guilt, depression, sometimes FRUP with her daughter, and her thoughts on her work and heritage.
Immediately after the death of Didion in 2021, her three literary councils found a diary while passing her dissertation in her Manhattan apartment. The 46 entry hid an invalid folder and addressed her husband, John Gregolianidan.
DIDION did not leave any instructions on how to handle her postpartum journal. Nobody in her specialty orbit did not know its existence. However, her councilor -her literary agent Lin Nesbit and her two long -standing editors Sherry Wengers and Sharon Derano saw that she printed them and preserved them in chronological order. 。 The memo has formed a complete story. The story seemed to be more intimate and filtered than what she published.
On April 22, the Dide's journal will be released from Knopf as a 208 -page book “Notes To John”. According to the DIDION DUNNE LITERAL Trust, pages are released as discovered, besides modifying type mistakes and occasionally adding footnotes for context. The original will be available to the general public as a part of the Didion and Dan's shared archives, commonly published by the New York Public Library on March 26, 2025.
“Note to John” marks the first publication of a new material by Didion, as she stopped releasing a new work ten years before she died.
Jordan Pavlin, a publisher, editor, and editor of Knopf, is a “impressive and profound record of a violent intellectual associative life”, from a writer who is aware of her public image. Explained as a vulnerable explanation of raw.
“It will fill a big gap to understand her thoughts,” Publin said. “Didion's art has always brought some of the electricity from what she revealed and what she refrained from,” she continued. “The memo to John” is unique in its lack of omission. “
Release of diddion's memo as an individual literary work will question if she has approved the project. She was carefully organized the dissertation and submitted to the small cabinet next to the desk, so she probably gathered in her archive and read by the general public.
However, DIDION, which published a lot of personal and intimate sentences, did not talk to her agents or publishers about pages or to publish it for a lifetime. She occasionally, she expressed her disclosure of literature's impulse to give all the last scraps of the famous author's work.
In a 1998 essay, in the release of a novel after death by Ernest Hemingway, Didion, a writer she was an idol, cast a publication as a betrayal of the author's wish. “I don't think you should be public, you don't do that, and I didn't do Hemingway,” she wrote.
Through her life, even in his death, Didion was a mysterious person, respected her unbearable, skeptical attitude and her engraved prose. She stood up in a reputation that recorded a turbulent cultural change in the 1960s and 70s. This was shot in a groundbreaking essay collected from works such as “Kagami to Bethlehem” and “White Album”.
She also often wrote about herself with the same cool separation. She revealed her mental health struggle when such disclosure was rarely disclosed, and explained how dizziness and nausea disabled her senses in 1968. Included an excerpt from her own psychiatric evaluation. 。
In the second half of her career, she explored the aftermath of a personal tragedy. She explained the shock and dislocation that she felt after her husband's sudden death in 2003 in her huge hit memoir, “The Year of Magic Thinking.”
After the book, the second remote record “Blue Night” explained her sadness after dying of acute pancreatitis in 2005 after her daughter, Kintana Lou Dan, who was suffering from alcohol poisoning. I did it. In “Blue Night”, Didion wrote about his anxiety about motherhood and aging, and the fear that she would not come to her as easily as before.
DIDION is working on many of the same themes collected by the trustee and publishers. The early entry explains sessions discussing the emotions of adoption, alcoholism, and the complexity of Kintana.
In the later memo, she has a hard time talking about a distant relationship between her childhood and her parents, and reveals her reflection on literature heritage. DIDION handles Dunne directly into notes and refers to a conversation with him about sessions.
When DIDION died in December 2021 at the age of 87, she left a wealth of life and work. Her archive arrived with the Dan's 354 Boxes, including photos, letters, research materials, dinner party menus, dating books, manuscripts, and family materials.
Paul Bogaards, a spokesman of the DIDION DUNNE Literature Trust, has no immediate plan to publish more materials from her archive, but it takes time to evaluate everything.
Bogard said that the diary, which made up of the memo to John, was outstanding as an “important contribution to the post -death Didion's work.”
“It's standing alone as a story,” he said. “There is nothing else in her archive.”
