What Hid Under the Surface of the Didion-Dunne Marriage?

Yahoo

22-04-2025

The collection of descriptions of therapy sessions that Joan Didion wrote is being published under the title Notes to John, but it's soon apparent, reading them, that these notes aren't really for John Gregory Dunne, Didion's husband of more than 30 years. Although she addresses Dunne as 'you' throughout, the notes explain events and history that Dunne clearly already knew about, and in one instance record his own statements during a session in which he joined her and her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon. The notes—preserved in a folder, discovered by her literary trustees in her office after her 2021 death, and donated to the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library—seem less for John than for Joan herself. Notes to John offers a new perspective on one of the most important—and surely the most tormenting—people in Didion's life: Quintana Roo Dunne, the daughter she and John adopted in 1966. Surely when Didion was writing these notes in the early 2000s, she anticipated one day using them as material for a future work. But in the end, she seems to have lost her legendary nerve.
Didion did publish a book about Quintana, 2011's Blue Nights, a follow-up to her bestselling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about John's sudden death in their New York apartment in 2003. Quintana, who was hospitalized with flu complications when her father died, succumbed to pancreatitis a mere 18 months later. While The Year of Magical Thinking recounts John's death and the disoriented Didion's feelings and experiences afterward in chronological order, Blue Nights, organized around a collection of mementos, seems an overt departure from that most famous of Didion's formulations: 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' Blue Nights swerves and circles. It was much harder for Didion to make sense of Quintana's life and death than it was to make sense of losing John and how she dealt with her grief for him. Like any parent, Didion felt responsible for her child, but as Notes to John reveals, she had also come to feel that her own sense of responsibility was part of the problem.
The most salient factor in Quintana's distress and death was her alcoholism, a cause that Didion only glancingly acknowledged in Blue Nights. Notes to John, however, is a chronicle of Didion's and Dunne's preoccupation with Quintana's drinking and her efforts to get clean. Why Didion chose to avoid this subject in her published writings remains mysterious. Perhaps this sort of secrecy arose from some deep-seated WASP reticence about illness; Notes to John also reveals that at some previous time, Didion had received radiation treatment for breast cancer and that she had told no one else about it ('I even did the radiation at 168th Street so I wouldn't run into people I knew') until 'the five-year point,' when the couple confided in their close friends, Calvin and Alice Trillin. Or perhaps Didion still felt compelled to protect Quintana, even after her death.
Protection proved an abiding theme in Didion's understanding of love. In her essay 'John Wayne: A Love Story' she wrote of her lifelong adoration of the actor, who onscreen embodied the stalwart pioneer spirit central to the mythos of her Sacramento family—descendants of settlers who prudently avoided the fate of the Donner Party by refusing to take a shortcut. As a child, she'd been smitten by a scene in War of the Wildcats, a 1943 Western in which Wayne's character promised his love interest that he'd build her a house 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.' While Didion admitted that the men in her life had never lived up to Wayne's image (even the real-life Wayne didn't, really), 'deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.'
'You married a protector,' Griffin Dunne says to Didion, his aunt, in 2017's The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary he made about her life and work. In turn, with Quintana, Didion suffered the fear that she couldn't protect her daughter; as the therapist MacKinnon told Didion in one of Notes to John's sessions, 'That is the very heart of your relationship with her.' A recurring image in Didion's work is of a snake, hidden in the innocuous grass, preparing to strike at any moment—a very real threat in the California landscape where Didion played as a child. When Quintana was little and the family lived in a beachside house in Malibu, Didion recalls that 'I had made her so afraid of the water that she had a slow time learning how to swim.' She feared that the daughter they tried for so long to bring into their lives could all too easily be lost. 'My attachment to her was so strong,' Didion writes in Notes to John, 'that blood lost its meaning to me.'
Much of Notes to John will feel familiar to anyone who's coped with a loved one cycling between recovery and relapses. Her notes capture the maddening, circular nature of this dilemma: the desperate hope followed by ashen disappointment, the covert scrutiny for signs of tipsiness, scrutiny that the alcoholic always detects and becomes annoyed by. Here are the fiercely clutched signs of progress—a cheery phone call, a well-formulated plan for a career move—followed by exasperating and often scary backslides. 'My attempts to 'solve' or manage Q's life were futile,' Didion admits, but relinquishing the fantasy of being able to fix life for her beloved child was easier said than done.
After reading in Notes to John of Didion's and Dunne's ceaseless fussing over Quintana—encouraging her to send her photographs to gallerists, fretting over whether it's a good idea to invite her on a Paris trip for Christmas, trying to figure out how to give her a sum of money without putting her back up, minutely planning out conversations in advance with the aid of the therapist, etc.—it comes as a shock to learn that Quintana was 34 at the time Didion was seeing MacKinnon, not an insecure twentysomething still trying to get her foothold in the world. MacKinnon repeatedly coaches Didion on how to back off, even when Quintana herself seemed to wish otherwise. 'Of course she wants you to step in,' he tells his patient with a merciless concision, 'because then it's your responsibility, not hers. You're giving her exactly what she wants: She can be free of responsibility and she can resent you for controlling her.'
Yet it's also easy to see why Quintana continued to regard herself as a child supervised by a panel of venerable authorities. Even her own therapy took on this aspect. Didion began to see MacKinnon at Quintana's request because the daughter felt her own depression and anxiety were profoundly intertwined with her mother's. Fair enough, but these notes soon make clear that Quintana's therapist was sharing insights and information from their sessions with MacKinnon, who in turn shared them with Didion, who in turn shared them with Dunne. In Notes, MacKinnon is forever informing Didion of what Quintana (who was not his patient) really feels and conveying things she has told her therapist, presumably in confidence. As reported by Didion, MacKinnon's pronouncements and recommendations are confident to the point of imperiousness, so that when she recounts him saying 'You can't teach by telling' and that 'this is one of the hardest things to learn when you're being trained as a psychiatrist,' I found myself writing 'lol' in the margin. The estate's trustees—her longtime agent Lynn Nesbit and the editors Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano—append a sly footnote to the last of Didion's notes on her sessions with MacKinnon, citing a 1992 New York Times Magazine article that described the therapist as 'John Wayne in a blue suit.'
Given that the book Didion published in her lifetime mostly elided her daughter's struggles with addiction, who can help wondering what else has gone unsaid here? By the time Didion sat down in MacKinnon's office, she and Dunne were deeply enmeshed. 'They were one of those couples who were always together,' Calvin Trillin says in The Center Will Not Hold, to the degree that their daughter felt she was 'dealing with a single person.' It was not always so, and both Dunne and Didion have admitted to rocky years at the beginning of their marriage. For her part, Didion tells MacKinnon about the one time she got angry with her husband in front of her young daughter, something she refers to as 'the famous scrambled-egg incident, after which, when I was in the shower with her trying to wash her hair and stop her screaming 'I hate him,' I said we won't live with him anymore,' a plan that Quintana immediately vetoed. The exact nature of this 'famous' incident isn't clear, but it certainly does sound like Dunne was responsible for the scrambled eggs in Quintana's hair.
In that interview with Griffin Dunne, when he suggests to Didion that she married 'a protector,' she agrees, but then immediately adds 'and a hothead,' the same term Griffin himself uses to describe John Gregory Dunne in his 2024 memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. That John had a temper is no secret, but exactly how it manifested in his home life will now forever be unknown. There is much talk of anxiety and depression in Notes to John, but anger gets mentioned less often, despite the barely perceptible but steady thrum of anger—particularly men's anger, and the threat it poses—detectible beneath the surface.
At one point, Didion admits that she did not encourage Quintana to express anger because Dunne would then respond in kind and 'the whole thing would escalate out of control.' She also relates that her own mother considered divorcing her father after he returned home from service in World War II because he had been 'so constantly in a rage with my brother and me.' Most ominously, Dominique Dunne, the glamorous older cousin whom Quintana had 'adored,' was strangled by her abusive ex-boyfriend in 1982. When Didion and Dunne took Quintana to Paris to protect her from having to testify at the killer's trial, Dominique's father and John's brother, Dominick Dunne, was so furious he didn't speak to John for decades.
None of this is to suggest that Dunne abused his daughter. It does not seem that Didion, who loved Quintana beyond all measure, would have stood for that. Nevertheless, who knows what sacrifices were made to keep the peace, or what toll they eventually took? As MacKinnon and Didion run through the various ways her overprotectiveness toward (and dependency on) Quintana might have driven her to alcoholism, or how guilty Didion must have felt about working so much during her daughter's childhood—a guilt that Didion denies—MacKinnon doesn't always come across as capable of getting to the bottom of it. At one point, Didion writes that she and her therapist discussed Quintana's 'extreme fear of 'people getting mad at her,' which she believes went back to her childhood fear of you or I getting mad at her.' Yet neither MacKinnon nor Didion seems inclined to pursue the possibility that Dunne's temper might have contributed to Quintana's emotional problems. It's an issue that apparently no one, least of all Didion, wants to talk about. But just because the snake stays in the grass doesn't mean you can't hear it hiss.