"Utterly fascinating. Notes to John shares with Blue Nights the subject of mother and daughter, generational trauma and general anxiety, and both are written with Didion's constitutional meticulousness." -- The New York Times "More than direct, Notes to John is naked, unadorned. It's Didion but 'unprecedentedly intimate,' just as the copy on the book jacket promises." -- The Atlantic "An act of intimate storytelling. Didion fans (we know who we are) will feel hypnotized by these pages, not quite sure they should exist as a book, but leveled by the writer who produced them, by her honesty and heartbreak." -- Vogue "For all its rawness, its sense of open-endedness, Notes to John has the feeling of an integrated work. We get the fuller story, so alive and febrile that it is not a story but instead a reckoning with what one can and can't accept or change.

" -- Alta " Notes to John makes for compulsive reading. What an experience it is, watching Didion beat back tragedy with her brilliant mind." -- The Telegraph "The quantity of arresting and widely applicable insight makes Notes to John a profound, rich document. Didion herself has rarely seemed so sympathetic in her own writing." -- The New Statesman "[Didion's] previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression, and creativity."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.