by Joan Didion
First published 2025
Joan Didion sits across from her psychiatrist in November 1999. Her family has weathered difficult years, and she needs help processing what happened. After each session, she returns home to write detailed accounts in a journal meant for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. She records conversations about alcoholism and adoption, her struggles with depression and anxiety, and the painful complexities surrounding her relationship with her daughter Quintana. The sessions probe her childhood misunderstandings with her parents and her lifelong tendency to expect disaster. As months turn to years, the analysis continues for over a decade. Didion examines her work life, which has become harder to sustain, and grapples with questions of legacy and meaning. Through precise, unflinching prose, she documents an intimate journey of self-examination that reveals previously hidden aspects of her inner life while maintaining the questioning, courageous voice that defines her perspective on a deeply personal reckoning.
Genres: mental-health, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Period: 1999, 2010s
208 pages · Paperback · Fourth Estate
Content warnings: anxiety, depression, mental-illness