Didion Done
Legendary author's posthumous book sheds light
My admiration of Joan Didion and her writing put me on the fence about whether or not Notes to John, a personal diary of her sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Roger MacKinnon, should have been published. The decision by the Didion Dunne Literary Trust to publish this highly personal account from 1999 to 2001 met with a fair amount of disdain in the press—characterized as a money grab from the sensationalism of peeking behind the curtain of very cool customer. But she was a writer who mined her own life in pursuit of her art, and I was curious, so I picked up the book.
When I read Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, I unsuccessfully tried to get to the bottom of her daughter Quintana’s illness and subsequent hospitalizations. (I have not read Blue Nights, and it had not yet been published when I read Magical Thinking. ) It turns out that Quintana suffered from alcoholism and that her subsequent health issues if not directly related, were certainly exacerbated by that disease. While the timeframe of this book pre-dates her daughter’s final series of hospitalizations, Quintana and her attempts to get and stay sober are the primary focus of Didion’s therapy sessions: that and Didion’s own unexcavated childhood.
While not expressly written for publication, upon her death, Didion nonetheless left no instructions (pro or con) regarding the publication of these “notes to John.” The conceit is that she is writing to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, about her sessions with MacKinnon that explore her relationship with her daughter, her relationship with her family of origin and her marital relationship with Dunne.
I found it a pretty fascinating and kind of a compulsive read. The book presents readers with a ringside seat to the very real ups and downs Quintana was experiencing, as well as her parents’ reactions to what seem to them, mercurial changes of heart regarding Alcoholics Anonymous, sobriety, her job, and her dating life.
As parents of an only child, if felt like Didion and Dunne were unbelievably enmeshed in the life of their 34 year-old daughter. Ostensibly this involvement is about Q’s alcoholism, but as MacKinnon leads Didion to understand, she has always been controlling, from a young age. “You don’t understand living without control. Which is another way of saying you don’t understand not having to be right.”
While Didion’s control may not come as a surprise, I found the therapeutic insights she gleaned regarding her own life and her motherhood worthwhile, and I felt MacKinnon helped guide her pretty well, if not in a way that would be deemed appropriate by today’s therapists.
As someone adjacent to recovery, (my husband is in recovery) I found particular comments of MacKinnon’s totally outrageous and even wrote in the margins, “This shrink is a douche.”
Ultimately, I found Notes to John to be a very humanizing look into the personal life of a treasured American writer. While the naysayers focus on the fact that Didion, who famously edited and re-edited, never had a chance to edit this published work, I’d argue instead that her desire to better understand herself and how who she was impacted her maternal behavior required no editing. It came from the heart.