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The Latest Breaking News from John Gregory Dunne

The 34 Best Memoirs by Female Authors Worth Reading

Make room on the nightstand.

Marie Claire

The final fact-check of Joan Didion

One of the year’s best books yet shows us an author at odds with her own storytelling

Salon

Should Joan Didion’s therapy notes to her husband about their daughter have been published?

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.

The Conversation

From analysis to the latest developments in health,
read the most diverse news in one place.

Notes to John by Joan Didion: Dispatches from the therapist’s chair are a guilty pleasure

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…

Evening Standard

The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that

Editorial: Would the legendary American writer have welcomed the publication of her therapy notes? It seems unlikely

The Guardian - UK

Graydon Carter hired Christopher Hitchens, pissed off Trump and revealed Deep Throat. He calls himself a ‘beta male’

The editor of Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones, is stepping down after seven years. Amid the media buzz about who might take her role – long considered a plum one – is a surprising question. “Is it still a good job?” asked the New York Times last week.

The Conversation

‘I dealt with everyone at a distance’: what do Joan Didion’s therapy diaries reveal about guilt, motherhood and writing?

The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativity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 - UK

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Literary gold … or betrayal of trust? Joan Didion journal opens ethical minefield

Soon we can all read the late author’s private notes about her therapy. But should we?

The Guardian - UK

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz: The uneasy bond between two very different literary ‘it girls’

THE READING LIST: A new book explores the friendship and rivalry between two very different chroniclers of Sixties and Seventies Los Angeles – and shines a light upon why a new generation of readers are still obsessed with Didion and Babitz decades later, writes Katie Rosseinsky

The Independent UK

Eve Babitz and Joan Didion may be dead. But their feud isn’t

A new book on the Los Angeles authors leaves no petty stone unturned as it explores their fraught friendship

The Guardian - US

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik review –the seductress and the sphinx

This account of the purported bond between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two fascinating chroniclers of late 20th-century America, is titillating but diminishes both writers

The Guardian - UK

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik review – friendship and rivalry in LA

The journalist and author of Hollywood’s Eve makes no pretence of impartiality as she charts the difficult relationship between two chroniclers of California

The Guardian - UK

What to Know About Dominick Dunne and His Connection to 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story'

The late actress' crime writer father Dominick Dunne greatly influenced public opinion of the Menendez case.

Marie Claire

The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne review – a Hollywood insider with an outsider’s eye

The actor’s star-studded memoir-cum-account of his sister’s murder could have been a clunky read, but his self-awareness, honesty and humour make the nephew of Joan Didion and son of Dominick Dunne an engaging narrator

The Guardian - UK

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The Independent UK

Griffin Dunne finds balance between madcap Hollywood adventures and family tragedy in new memoir

Griffin Dunne's new memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club, A Family Memoir,” out Tuesday from Penguin Press, is filled with raucous tales of growing up in Hollywood — from sneaking into his parents’ dinner parties featuring Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra, to Sean Connery saving him from drowning in a pool

The Guardian - UK

‘I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing

Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything

The Guardian - UK

The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell review – bits and pieces of a literary pioneer

A ‘fangirl’’s fragmented study of the great US author has a disparate and magpie approach that never coheres into a satisfying whole

The Independent UK

Didion-Dunne archives acquired by New York Public Library

The archives of the late Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne have been acquired by the New York Public Library

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news in one place.

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The Guardian - UK

Robert Duvall’s 20 best performances – ranked!

From the horse’s head in The Godfather to the smell of napalm in Apocalypse Now, no one does chilling menace like the 91-year-old Oscar-winner. With the release this month of his new film, we rate his greatest roles

The Conversation

Joan Didion for sale: the auction of the author's belongings reveals the grand fiction of her image

There are few writers as visually distinctive as Joan Didion. We have glimpses of her as a young reporter with her delicately poised silk scarf and anorak. A decade later we see her on the porch of her Malibu home, casting an ironic glance at her partner and daughter in…

WEKU

Writer Joan Didion's possessions sell for eye-popping prices at auction

The late author Joan Didion was an exemplar of the New Journalism of the 1960s. Many fans traveled to Hudson, N.Y., to see some of her possessions up for auction. A pair of sunglass fetched $27,000.

The Guardian - US

‘Pull back the shroud of mystery’: Joan Didion’s revealing estate sale

The often secretive author’s belongings will be available to bid for at an expansive and eye-opening auction

Chicago Sun-Times

Joan Didion estate sale features author’s notebooks, sunglasses, typewriter

The auction, titled ‘An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion’ will take place at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, and online Nov. 16.

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