Reaching from beyond the grave, something she seemed capable of doing even while alive, Joan Didion retains a stony grip on readers’ imaginations. Posterity has been generous to her, much kinder than it has been to other literary luminaries such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and (to put it mildly) Alice Munro.
There was a considerable down payment of pain made to underwrite such posterity. The stunning one-two deaths of her husband, the novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, and, 20 months later, of their troubled adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, plunged her deep into the loss column.
But Didion, forever digging to determine what she thought, what she felt, and what she thought she felt about what she thought, was too dogged an existential reporter and exemplary pro to close up shop. She would publish two exacting yet impressionistic memoirs of elegy, grief, reverie, and retrospective introspection, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), both of which became best-sellers, the former adapted into a Broadway play starring Vanessa Redgrave, than whom there is no actor more august, more nobly perpendicular.
The avidity for all things Didion-esque has not diminished since Didion’s death, in December 2021. If anything, the death grip has deepened. With each year, Didion becomes more enshrined as a literary Sibyl, her chic, dead-ahead stare in photographs and every utterance meme-ified and merchandised, the inspiration for a cottage industry of anecdotes and artifacts attending to the legacy of St. Joan of Sacramento.
In the last few years, we’ve had nephew Griffin Dunne’s memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club; a memoir by Didion’s assistant Cory Leadbeater, The Uptown Local; the dual portrait of Didion and Eve Babitz, by Air Mail’s irrepressible Lili Anolik; critical-biographical studies by Evelyn McDonnell and Alissa Wilkinson; and the bequest of the Didion-Dunne archives to the New York Public Library, 336 boxes of rough drafts, party lists, correspondence, family photos, and daybooks.
The archives have yielded an unexpected parting gift to biographers and civilian readers: Notes to John, a running update of Didion’s psychiatric sessions from 1999 to 2002. It was fished out of a file in Didion’s office by her literary trustees. Whether or not Didion intended the material to be published is open to dispute, but here it is—ready or not.
Billed as a prologue to The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Notes to John is a diagnostic account of the turmoil and difficulty Dunne and Didion suffered trying to understand and guide Quintana, whose alcoholism and erratic direction in life vexed at every turn, provoking endless rounds of Where did we go wrong? and How to make things right?
In 1999, Didion began seeing a psychiatrist after Quintana told her own analyst that her mother was depressed and needed someone to talk to. The part of Didion’s psychiatrist couldn’t have been more perfectly cast. In a footnote, we’re told that Dr. Roger MacKinnon, an old-school Freudian, was once described in print as “John Wayne in a blue suit.” The Duke! Saddle up, little lady, and let’s get therapeutin’.
Didion, who despondently wept when Wayne bit the dust in The Alamo, “bleeding as no one has bled since Janet Leigh in Psycho,” and affectionately profiled the aging star for The Saturday Evening Post, needed a big hunk of understanding to lean her troubled mind against. A nebbishy analyst chewing on a pencil and quoting Woody Allen would never do.
The “notes to John” of the title are the reports of Didion’s sessions with MacKinnon that she addressed to her husband to keep him abreast. In the very first paragraph, the filigreed touch of Didion’s style is apparent: “Re not taking Zoloft, I said it made me feel for about an hour that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planters’ punch before lunch in the tropics.” So Hemingway-esque, this invocation of verandas past.
It would be misleading, however, to give the impression that Notes to John is a writerly performance akin to The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. It survives as a peculiar appendage to Didion’s oeuvre, and I’m not sure any writer wants a peculiar appendage attached to their oeuvre, especially a fine calibrator such as Didion.
Its value is less literary, more biographical-psychological. Direct and personal, shorn of vanity, Notes to John is a more sympathetic self-portrait than the finished memoirs, because the worry, confusion, doubt, regrets, and frustration are rendered plainly, without fancy fretwork and mood music. It documents what a grind it is dealing with an adult child in the drowning pool of alcoholism.
Filling out our understanding of the Didion-Dunne-Quintana perplex, the notes dispense disclosures along the way, such as Didion and her daughter watching The Night of the Living Dead together when Quintana was seven, Didion’s hidden bout with cancer (she received radiation treatment on 168th Street, where she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew), and her being hit by a former partner, identified elsewhere as Noel Parmental.
But it’s the slow machinery of therapeutic to-and-fro that takes precedence in these pages, the progress incremental, everyone doing their best. As Notes to John nears to a close, Didion is still having her dosage of Zoloft adjusted. Upward.
James Wolcott is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York