Knopf to Publish New Nonfiction by Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf will publish a new nonfiction work by Joan Didion, Notes to John, on April 22, 2025. The book will be published in hardcover and e-book by Knopf, and in audio by Penguin Random House. An announced first printing of 250,000 copies has been set.
Discovered in a portable filing cabinet next to Didion’s desk after her death, Notes to John is a journal in which the late writer, who died in December 2021, describes sessions with a psychiatrist beginning in late 1999. The reports are addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
“Everything we revere about Joan Didion is instantly apparent in these pages—the precision, the fierce intelligence, the piercing insights, the withering interrogation of her own motives," said Knopf EVP, publisher, and editor-in-chief Jordan Pavlin. "Yet this is also Joan Didion as we have never seen her before—open, vulnerable, wrestling with raw emotion."
The hardback cover features a portrait of Didion in her office taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz.
