It has now, in 2025, been almost twenty years since the publication of The Year of Magical Thinking, writer Joan Didion’s prickly, spare nonfiction account of her husband’s unexpected death during New Year’s week in 2003. It arrived in the mail on a day I was home sick from work, and I lay in bed with my head pounding and read the whole thing within hours.

I’d long been a fan of Didion’s essays, from the time I was in high school and picked up a mass-market paperback of The White Album at my brother’s house in Jackson, Mississippi. That book, and its predecessor Slouching Toward Bethlehem, had become companions for me, their curious juxtapositions of 1960s counterculture (Jim Morrison!), public paranoia (the Manson murders), and mannered, aristocratic domesticity (ironed linens and martinis at 5)—talismanic, their sentences grooving a path in the strophe and antistrophe of my breathing. I can still point to sentences I’ve written and tell you which Didion reference inspired them.

The Year of Magical Thinking, and its successor Blue Nights, an account of the also-untimely death of her daughter Quintana, marked a fundamental departure in tone, less meticulously structured and/or, depending on how you felt about it, sloppy and past her prime. (Though my friend Sherry Zivley held that Didion was already past her prime with the publication in 1992 of After Henry, her first volume of essays after the death of her long-term editor Henry Robbins.)

You see that we are well into the Didion weeds now. That probably explains why The Year of Magical Thinking became a standard book I would buy for any friend in the early months of the loss of a loved one. It’s an exceptional book for this purpose—its staccato and interrogative chapters building slowly towards an accommodation of loss, if not exactly a resolution.

I am not alone in my tendency to be a little too into the Didion weeds. There have been a whole coterie of women writers—at least, I don’t know of any male ones—who have followed in the Didion tradition. Essayists Caitlin Flanagan and Meghan Daum have each embodied some of Didion’s obsessions and syntax in their own work—with Meghan Daum even receiving the rare imprimatur of a Didion blurb on her first collection, My Mispent Youth. There’s also New York Times film reviewer Alissa Wilkinson’s recent book We Tell Ourselves Stories, which traces the formation of Didion’s personal mythology through the eras of movies in her life, and how that mythology was transfigured into her writing. And Wilkinson’s own wrestling seems as deeply personal as it is intellectual.

It’s hard to observe this genealogy without recalling the old Harold Bloom theory about the problem of belatedness among poets: that the son-poets, distanced from the golden era of their poetic fathers, have to overthrow them to forge their own artistic identities. And there is something of an adolescent female individuation—not rebellion, exactly—in the way that the daughters of Joan have responded to their mentor.

The daughterly identification, and the attempt to navigate meaning from it, is almost aching in Caitlin Flanagan’s 2022 Atlantic essay, “Joan Didion’s Magic Trick: What was it that gave her such power?” Here’s Flanagan’s origin story, not unlike my own:

“I was in Ireland, as I always was in the summer, and I was bored out of my mind, as I always was in the summer, and I happened to see a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in a Dublin living room. I read that book and something changed inside me, and it has stayed that way for the rest of my life.”

But the balance of that essay is a pilgrimage into the California origins of Didion’s mythology—and Flanagan’s re-evaluation and reckoning with its promises, and errors. (And you can even hear the ghost of Didion in the style of Flanagan’s sentences—her encomium of Didion sounds, beat for beat, not unlike Didion’s own encomium of Georgia O’Keefe.)

It should be clear now that we are in the realm of the parasocial as much as the literary, and that is what, after this long windup, brings us to the latest entry in the Didion canon: the recent publication of Notes to John, which is nothing more than a collection of personal transcripts about Didion’s psychiatry sessions, drafted between 1999-2002 in a period when Didion and John Gregory Dunne were coming to grips with their daughter Quintana’s mental illness and alcoholism. One could read hints of that crisis in between the lines of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, in language that was both rationalized and cloaked.

Here in Letters to John, however, the whole realm of family sadness is fully on display. Recounted here are the ups and downs of rehab and the professional guidance that the psychiatrist guides Didion toward in each weekly session about the better and more-effective ways to parent a challenging adult child. Some of Didion’s confessions to the doctor will seem astonishing to a parent in 2025, like the decision to watch the horror film Night of the Living Dead with Quintana when she was seven.

It’s that openness that has raised questions about the reasons for, and propriety of, releasing such an account. Technically published by “The Didion Dunne Trust,” Letters to John has spurred one school of reaction focusing on the sordid nature of posthumously revealing an ostensibly private correspondence, and whether it’s just a stunt of publishing, or an exhibitionist money grab. (That it IS a money grab is not really in doubt, though.)

The other camp would hold that the release of this compilation of therapy notes could have been nothing less than Didion’s actual intention. She had kept them collected and marked in the very filing cabinet where she kept her literary materials—the one, in fact, that is pictured in the photo on the cover of the book.

So these are, in a way, missives from the beyond. And they raise the question of what exactly are the uses of literature. Far beyond purely intellectual or literary engagement, I read these notes as one might the account of the life of a saint, seeking to divine lessons from Joan’s example—misguided, privileged, but still haunting, nonetheless.

I immediately made plans to send copies to my friends.

Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. 

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