"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 intimate chronicle of [Didion's] struggle to help her daughter. . . . Written with her signature precision though without her usual stylistic, incantatory repetitions, it is the least guarded of Didion's writing." --NPR

"A tour de force from one of the best." --People

"Full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. . . . Readers of her memoirs will recognize how these notes inform those final books--the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it." --The New Yorker

"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"[Didion's] previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression, and creativity."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