The Latest Breaking News from Joan Didion

Make room on the nightstand.

“My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” writes Yiyun Li early in her latest book, Things in Nature Merely Grow. And then, with harrowing directness, “Both chose suicide”.

As her memoir of losing her sons is published, the author talks about radical acceptance, and how writing fiction helped her to prepare for tragedy

Joan Didion died, aged 87, in 2021. When a new volume of her diaries was announced, anticipation was high: her personal nonfiction is the foundation of her formidable literary legacy. But as details emerged, readers began to question the ethics of its publication.

IN FOCUS: Nick Duerden speaks to the writers who’ve spilled their vulnerabilities onto the page, and asks why readers are flocking to books about the spirit of survival

The Girls creator has moved from New York to London – and I did the reverse. Until one day I realised I didn’t want to die there, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

Joan Didion, who died in 2021, never intended Notes to John to be published. They are, as the title intimates, notes to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and they are about meetings with her psychiatrist, Dr Roger MacKinnon, over the course of a little more than a year, beginning in…

Letter: Responding to an editorial about the publication of Notes to John, Clare Reihill writes that the late American writer never left anything to chance

There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but no one comes out of it well