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The Latest Breaking News from Joan Didion

Should Joan Didion’s therapy notes to her husband about their daughter have been published?

Joan Didion died, aged 87, in 2021. When a new volume of her diaries was announced, anticipation was high: her personal nonfiction is the foundation of her formidable literary legacy. But as details emerged, readers began to question the ethics of its publication.

The Conversation

The boom in health memoirs and what they can tell us about being human

IN FOCUS: Nick Duerden speaks to the writers who’ve spilled their vulnerabilities onto the page, and asks why readers are flocking to books about the spirit of survival

The Independent UK

Like Lena Dunham, I left my hometown. She’ll learn that what drives us away is often what draws us back

The Girls creator has moved from New York to London – and I did the reverse. Until one day I realised I didn’t want to die there, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

The Guardian - UK

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Notes to John by Joan Didion: Dispatches from the therapist’s chair are a guilty pleasure

Joan Didion, who died in 2021, never intended Notes to John to be published. They are, as the title intimates, notes to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and they are about meetings with her psychiatrist, Dr Roger MacKinnon, over the course of a little more than a year, beginning in…

Evening Standard

My friend Joan Didion wouldn’t have wanted her therapy notes to be published

Letter: Responding to an editorial about the publication of Notes to John, Clare Reihill writes that the late American writer never left anything to chance

The Guardian - UK

Notes to John by Joan Didion review – an invasion of privacy

There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but no one comes out of it well

The Guardian - UK

I’ve never kept a diary. But if I had, I’d want it destroyed when I die

From Samuel Pepys to Joan Didion, many literary greats wrote for no one but themselves – then found posterity pawing through their secrets. Trust me: you don’t want to know my innermost thoughts

The Guardian - UK

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The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that

Editorial: Would the legendary American writer have welcomed the publication of her therapy notes? It seems unlikely

The Guardian - UK

‘I dealt with everyone at a distance’: what do Joan Didion’s therapy diaries reveal about guilt, motherhood and writing?

The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativity

The Guardian - UK

“Sacramento” captures the city's majesty

As Joan Didion said, "Sacramento is the least typical of the Valley towns," and this film is a testament to why

Salon

Without Woodstock, There'd Be No ID.Buzz

The Volkswagen ID.Buzz might come from Germany, but it may not exist if not for what happened in Bethel, New York over half a century ago.

Motor1

If someone published my diary after I died, I’d die again – of shame…

COMMENT: With the announcement that Joan Didion’s deeply private therapy notes are being released, Helen Coffey questions the ethics of putting out artists’ work posthumously when it was never intended for a public audience

The Independent UK

First Thing: Zelenskyy hails ‘three years of resistance’ on anniversary of Russian invasion

It follows Russia’s biggest ever aerial attack on Ukraine. Plus, far-right AfD doubles support in German election

The Guardian - UK

Literary gold … or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion journal opens ethical minefield

Soon we can all read the late author’s private notes about her therapy. But should we?

The Guardian - UK

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The Guardian - UK

Joan Didion’s ‘astonishingly intimate’ diary to be published

The author recorded her thoughts on alcoholism, depression and her complex relationship with her daughter Quintana in the book, Notes to John

The Guardian - US

‘I’m literally Joan Baez right now’: gen Z women relate to Bob Dylan’s toxic situationship

The film A Complete Unknown has sparked interest in the folk singers’ doomed romance, and with it the realization that a similar dynamic is ‘happening to girls everywhere’

The Conversation

Secret twins? A casually brutal biography of Joan Didion and ‘soul mate’ Eve Babitz blurs ethical boundaries, but exhilarates

Lili Anolik admits her first book on Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, was a way of “driving a stake” through her subject’s heart, hoping to end her self-confessed “unbalanced, fetishistic” obsession with the bohemian LA writer.

The Guardian - UK

The best biographies and memoirs of 2024

Salman Rushdie’s account of his near-fatal stabbing, a 360-degree view of Queen Elizabeth II and Al Pacino’s rags to riches career are among this year’s most compelling personal histories

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The Independent UK

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz: The uneasy bond between two very different literary ‘it girls’

THE READING LIST: A new book explores the friendship and rivalry between two very different chroniclers of Sixties and Seventies Los Angeles – and shines a light upon why a new generation of readers are still obsessed with Didion and Babitz decades later, writes Katie Rosseinsky

The Guardian - US

Eve Babitz and Joan Didion may be dead. But their feud isn’t

A new book on the Los Angeles authors leaves no petty stone unturned as it explores their fraught friendship

The Guardian - UK

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik review –the seductress and the sphinx

This account of the purported bond between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two fascinating chroniclers of late 20th-century America, is titillating but diminishes both writers

The Independent UK

The best biographies and memoirs of 2024: Literary It-girls, art world intrigue and sociopathy

THE LIST: Catch up on 2024’s most illuminating life stories, encompassing tales of recovery, literary feuds and devastating betrayal, with Katie Rosseinsky’s edit of the best memoirs and biographies

The Guardian - UK

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik review – friendship and rivalry in LA

The journalist and author of Hollywood’s Eve makes no pretence of impartiality as she charts the difficult relationship between two chroniclers of California

The Guardian - UK

The big picture: Marvin E Newman’s Californian dreamers

A retrospective of the work of the prolific US street photographer reveals a singular gift for investing everyday moments with lasting drama

Evening Standard

Joni Mitchell's LA homecoming: a glorious night that no one there will ever forget

The 17,500-strong crowd knew this would be a momentous show – they were not disappointed

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