It’s a bit awkward to give a “best of” accolade to a book when you’re not entirely sure it should exist. There were only a few months between the announcement that a folder of journal entries had been found in Joan Didion’s office shortly after her death and the publication of them as “Notes to John” (Knopf, April 2025), and the book was greeted with roughly equal amounts of excitement and concern. On the one hand, this was very personal, unpublished work from a famously private writer; if Didion wanted the journal published, wouldn’t she have already made that known? On the other, this was very personal writing that Joan Didion perhaps never intended to publish — but if she didn’t want it in the hands of nosy readers, wouldn’t she have destroyed the papers or instructed someone else to do so?
Without confirmation either way, reviewers have batted the book around an ethical blank space. Some believe it’s a cynical cash grab by the author’s heirs, some that it’s simply a troubling betrayal of privacy. Others are confident that Didion purposely left their fate up to, well, fate. But everyone who cares enough to have an opinion about these deeply personal chronicles seems, regardless, to be reading them.
