Write Notes Like Joan Didion

Source: Write Notes Like Joan Didion, Josephine, 7:59, uploaded 2025-06-13, playlist index 225.

Josephine’s video begins with Joan Didion’s image of a notebook as a passage back to the world. A person who has gone numb, or who has begun to move through life by habit, can open the book and find an older self waiting there. The point is remembering what it was like to be that person.

Didion and the reason for taking notes

The video introduces Didion as a great writer and a serious note-taker. Josephine treats the two facts as related. Didion’s journals reportedly sold for $11,000 after her death, even though the journals were empty. The price gives the notebook a strange status. Its value sits in the act of keeping it, and in the person whose attention once gave the blank pages a history.

Josephine already keeps notes in notebooks and in apps such as Obsidian. She writes after reading a book, watching a film, or hearing an interesting conversation. Some journals have vanished into the cloud. Some notes return to her more often. The practice had become routine until she read Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” which gave her a reason for the habit.

That reason begins with a distinction between information and self-awareness. A note can preserve something learned, although Josephine’s interest lies in the relation between present and former selves. Knowing why a person takes notes changes the attention brought to the act and to ordinary life. The video offers this as a personal discovery. It asks about the purpose of note-taking and leaves the choice of method to each writer.

An account of a life in fragments

Josephine describes her own method in language that follows Didion. She writes down what she sees, then rearranges life into paragraphs and chapters in an attempt to make sense of it. The attempt is impossible because words cannot contain the whole of reality. She returns to it anyway.

Notes become a forgotten account of things. They have no strict structure. Thoughts arrive as a fast flow at the edge of the mind, briefly forming a shape before they settle into ink or pixels. The notebook holds the fragments long enough for a later self to recognise them.

Didion’s phrase about “keeping in touch” gives this account its social form. A notebook lets a person remain on speaking terms with the people they used to be, whether those earlier selves feel like attractive company or not. Josephine finds herself writing towards a former self and returning to her. The notes join past and future through words.

A new note can make an old note active again. Josephine describes being caught by an earlier thought, then writing on top of it and attaching a new question to an older one. The answer may have changed. It may have arrived through the intervening life rather than through another sentence in the notebook. The practice becomes an ongoing conversation between successive versions of one person, with a future self waiting to discover what she will know, remember, or forget.

Memory as a record of feeling

The video treats memory as unstable. Its surface can look clear while an unknown world moves beneath it, leaving broken reflections behind. Josephine says that she delights in life and fears it, which makes direct acceptance difficult. She sits with experience until words come out of it.

The notebook therefore records feeling as much as events. Josephine asks how the first signs of spring felt and whether spring feels the same after a year has changed her. The note preserves a memory of a memory, a fragment that survives because its author can meet it again. Conversations belong to this record as well: words that changed a person, words left unsaid, words used in their place, and kind words that matter even when they are harder to find among everything else.

Didion’s notebook remains private in Josephine’s account. It is a tangible form for the contents of the mind, made for the writer’s own eyes. Its purpose lies in remembering. The page keeps a part of a former self available without pretending that the page has captured reality whole.

Limits of the reading

The claims in this note belong to Josephine’s interpretation of Didion, with Didion’s essay presented as the main source. The video gives no edition, page reference, or publication link for “On Keeping a Notebook,” so the quotations remain tied to the wording and context supplied by the video. The $11,000 auction figure also appears without a supporting source.

The video offers a personal account of why note-taking can matter. It gives a way to understand the practice through memory, attention, and contact with former selves. It supplies no evidence that notebooks reliably improve memory or writing, and it does not propose a universal note-taking system.

Further reading / references

• Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook.” Josephine identifies the essay as the source for the video’s account of private note-taking and quotes it throughout.