Just when you thought American novelist Joan Didion had disappeared forever, she has returned from a half-open drawer. Following her death in 2021, her publishers and literary agent discovered an unnamed file in her office. Inside were 46 entries addressed to her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne (1932-2003).

Written beginning in 1999 in the aftermath of her sessions with a psychiatrist, these pages offer raw material. Childhood, alcohol, depression, and her tumultuous relationship with her adopted daughter, Quintana. Never did the author mention this piece. There was no indication, even implicit, of her desire for it to be published posthumously. Nonetheless, it was released in the United States on April 22 by Knopf under the title Notes to John, and it will be published in France by Grasset in October.

According to The New York Times, the pages of Notes to John, originally handwritten, were printed by Didion herself and then carefully arranged in chronological order. Was this a deliberate gesture, a tacit consent to their publication? Some find the idea compelling, but it falters in light of an article by the author in 1998 in The New Yorker in which she criticized the posthumous publication of True at First Light, an unfinished narrative by Ernest Hemingway.

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