By Nathan Smith
DIARIES
Notes to John
Joan Didion
4th Estate, $34.99
Joan Didion, one of America’s sharpest critics on its many myths, had precision in her prose and acuity in her observations.
Over a 50-year career, the writer would leverage deep reporting and a declarative style to unmask many of her country’s false ideas about itself. Now joining this long output – bookended by essays of detached distance and memoirs of disarming honesty – is a series of journal entries she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
Notes to John is a crude, even aberrant, addition to Didion’s published writings, one made at a time of devastating personal crisis. These unnumbered pages (150 in total) were discovered in a personal filing cabinet and summarise therapy sessions she had for more than two years.
Starting in 1999, Didion began seeing a psychiatrist at the insistence of her daughter, Quintana, who believed her mother was suffering from depression. Melancholia and anxiety had indeed engulfed Didion, owed largely to Quintana’s own worsening alcohol problems and deteriorating mental health. (Quintana died in 2005 aged 39.)
The notes show how Didion starts out, like many new to therapy, evasive with “no concept … of direct conversation”. Over the many months, however, the sessions encourage her to tease out the corrosive issues afflicting her relationships, including the “two-ness” of parents Didion and Dunne and their over-involvement in Quintana’s life.
Joan Didion and her husband, John Dunne, in 1977.Credit: AP
Verbatim quotes from the therapist (sometimes edifying in their own right) are interspersed with frank testimony covering Didion’s daily despair. In one session, she starts crying for no obvious reason, with the psychiatrist wondering whether these emotions stem from her being “afraid [she] couldn’t protect” Quintana.
Gone is the enigmatic image of writer Joan Didion as she confronts truths of infantilising Quintana long into adulthood and wonders whether her daughter will simply spend a large inheritance from her parents. Nightmares haunt Didion frequently, too, such as one where she sits watching Quintana get inebriated in a windowsill and is simply unable to help. “She couldn’t see me watching her,” she says.
The paralysis Didion faces, wanting to stay involved in Quintana’s recovery but told to keep some distance from her decision-making, is a familiar one to parents whose child has endured addiction. Didion’s profound anguish at the many cyclical patterns – of brief relief and sudden relapse – proves palpable in her accounts, which are often broken by charged admissions. “That’s why I’m here,” she tells her therapist, “I can’t just sit here in silence.”
Didion memorably – and publicly – chronicled her grief in self-scrutinising memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking (on the death of Dunne) and Blue Nights (on Quintana’s death). “I know that I can no longer reach her,” she wrote in the latter, attempting to process the enormity of a mother losing a daughter.
Didion in her New York apartment in 2005.Credit: Judy Griesedieck/Getty
The entries here, by contrast, cruelly incriminate Didion as often ambivalent about motherhood, a parent who harbours many unsaid misgivings about her daughter: “It had occurred to me at several points that I didn’t like her.”
For a journalist known for distance and deliberateness, it is a forlorn portrait of Didion numbed by a family crisis and unable to anchor herself anywhere fixed. She is at once totally exposed and incautious with her intimacy: struggling to process her daughter’s emotional defences while also increasingly unable to swallow antidepressant medication (an unintended metaphor if ever there was one).
Notes to John is an antithetical work to the one Didion would have approved. The fact that the publisher doesn’t list an editor, or even explain its misleading book title, suggests no one there wanted to be associated with publishing such private material.
To know whether Didion would have wanted these pained personal records to be published, this may help: in a 1998 New Yorker piece, she criticised plans to posthumously publish Ernest Hemingway’s last novel. “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t,” she wrote, “and Hemingway didn’t.”
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