Notes to John

Pubished earlier this year, Joan Didion’s Notes to John offers readers an unvarnished glimpse into the late writer’s private reckoning with motherhood, legacy, and loss. Drawn from a file of pages discovered near her desk after her death in 2021, the journal records a period of psychiatric counselling that began in late 1999, during what Didion called ‘a rough few years’. Written for her husband, John Gregory Dunne, the entries reveal sessions of remarkable candour. Lightly edited by her longtime publisher Shelley Wanger, this posthumous publication stands apart from her earlier work - less essay, more raw notation - yet it deepens our understanding of a voice already known for its lucidity, detachment, and insight.

Didion was born in 1934, in Sacramento, California, to a family with deep roots in the state’s history. Her father was a finance officer in the Army Air Corps, which led the family to relocate frequently during World War II. She began writing at an early age and won a Vogue magazine essay contest after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956 with a degree in English. This launched her career at Vogue, where she eventually became associate features editor and began publishing essays and journalism.

In 1964, Didion married fellow writer Dunne. The couple moved to California, collaborated on screenplays, and adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne. Their marriage, both personal and professional, was marked by intense collaboration, including work on The Panic in Needle Park (1971) and A Star Is Born (1976). Didion’s literary voice matured during this period, reflecting a sharp eye for cultural decay and political fragmentation.

Didion’s breakthrough book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), collected her incisive reports and personal essays from the 1960s. She followed this with The White Album (1979), cementing her reputation as a chronicler of disintegration in American life. Her fiction, including Play It As It Lays (1970) and Democracy (1984), received critical attention, though her nonfiction remained her most influential work. In later years, her writing became more personal, especially with The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a meditation on grief following Dunne’s death, and Blue Nights (2011), written after the death of their daughter.

Didion received the National Medal of Arts in 2013 and was the subject of the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. She died in December 2021, in Manhattan, due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Didion’s official website, and Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Starting in November 1999, Didion began a period of psychiatric counselling, prompted, as she wrote to a friend, by the fact that her family had had ‘a rough few years’. She kept a journal of these sessions for her Dunne, and over several months, she recorded the conversations with meticulous care. Early topics included alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the emotional complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. As time passed, the focus shifted to her professional difficulties - her struggle to sustain work - alongside reflections on her childhood, including a fraught emotional distance from her parents, a persistent anticipation of catastrophe, and the question of legacy, or, as she phrased it, ‘what it’s been worth’. The therapy would continue for over a decade.

Shortly after Didion died, a collection of about 150 unnumbered pages was found in a small portable file near her desk. The notes and pages included a sort of journal in which Didion reported on sessions with her psychiatrist, most of them in 2000. These pages are now in the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library. Didion’s longtime editor Wanger recently prepared these pages (apparently with little editing) into the posthumous publication Joan Didion: Notes to John - published in April earlier this year. A few pages can be previewed at Amazon or Googlebooks. The book also has its own Wikipedia entry. Here is one extract.

12 January 2000

‘I said that at the end of the hour last week he had said something about trust or lack of trust between mothers and daughters feeling trusted being the key to separation, to growing up - that I had discounted as not relevant, not meaningful to me.

I said that however it had stuck in my mind, and later that evening or the next day I had remembered a note I had made when I was making notes for my last novel. I would have made the note at some time after my father died - my father’s death was part of the impulse behind that particular novel - but that this note had been not about my father but about my mother. I had looked it up, and it was interesting, because it seemed to indicate some distrust or misunderstanding between my mother and me

I showed him the note. Well, yes, he said. There you are. Extraordinary insight.

Extraordinary or not, I said, it’s not much help in just getting on with life. It’s even counterproductive, considering that my mother is now 89. It’s not as if we’re going to resolve anything by confronting this.

It’s not so much a question of you and your mother, do you think? Isn’t it a question of resolving the way you and your daughter deal with each other? Since we all carry in our minds little pieces of our mothers and fathers, isn’t it possible that you may have been replicating some of this pattern with your own daughter?

I said that in fact I had mentioned it to her at dinner the other night. She had been interested in it, but the conversation moved away from the personal into discussion of political attitudes in the 1950s.

Yet it was a good beginning, he said. You could reopen it another time. The more you and she talk to each other, the closer you’re going to get to this.

I said that right now we really didn’t know where we were with her. She had seemed very open for a period of time after she stopped drinking, but now she seemed closed again, resistant. She had at one time asked me to go to an AA meeting with her for example, and I had gone. We had gone to church and then to the meeting and then met you for lunch and it had been a very good, open day. Then we got into the holidays, and she was busy, and when I asked her recently if I could go to another meeting with her she was resistant. She said it wasn’t really a good idea to bring in outsiders. Frankly I didn’t even know if she was going herself.

Do you want to know how to make her go? he asked. Go yourself to an Al-Anon meeting. Go more than once. You have to find one with people who match your own intellectual and socio-economic level, but that’s not so much of a problem in Manhattan. If she knows you’re doing that, she’s ninety per cent more likely to go herself. And I think she needs a program. Psychiatry alone isn’t going to do it for her.

I said I had a problem with Al-Anon. “Sure, and she has a problem with AA,” he said. “And you’re going to say she’s the alcoholic, you’re not. And I’m going to say you're the mother of an alcoholic, and she’s not going to stay on the program if she thinks you distrust it. I could even say of course you have a problem with Al-Anon, you have a problem with groups, you don’t trust them, you don’t know what their agenda is. Does that remind you of your mother at all?”

I said that seemed a stretch, but I would think about it. “I’m going to assign you some homework,” he said. “I started out doing traditional Freudian analysis, just listening, then I got dissatisfied with the results, so I incorporated some techniques from the behaviorists. The behaviorists use homework to shortcut the process. Here’s your homework. Actually show your daughter that note you showed me. Don’t tell her about it, show her, because it’s quite a document. Tell her you showed it to me. And if she asked what I said, tell her I asked if your mother’s distrust of other people was reflected in your distrust of Al-Anon. See what she says. I think you might be surprised what this opens up.”

I said that I would see. “I think what I hear in your voice is exactly what you hear in your daughter’s voice when you ask her about AA.” ’