Notes to John by Joan Didion: The posthumous publication of the writer's psychiatry sessions feels exploitative

Irish Times

4 days ago

Notes to John
Author
:
Joan Didion
ISBN-13
:
9780008767259
Publisher
:
4th Estate
Guideline Price
:
£20
Joan Didion once famously declared that 'writers are always selling someone out' – but what about publishers?
Notes to John, a posthumous publication from Didion's archive, is a collection of typewritten journal entries discovered in her study shortly after her death in 2021. The entries, which begin in December 1999, are meticulous transcriptions of sessions with her psychiatrist, 'an old-fashioned Freudian' who Didion conveys here with such detail I wondered if she'd brought a dictaphone to therapy.
The book is loosely addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and feels more like Didion's own private notes to self, an attempt to clarify the bewildering circumstances they describe. The preface contains a pre-emptive caveat that because Dunne himself was present for one of the sessions, Didion must have intended a further audience. I'm not sure I'm convinced.
The entries cover Didion's troubled relationship with her adopted daughter, Quintana, focusing almost entirely on how Quintana's struggle with alcoholism caused paralysing rifts between them. It's undeniably affecting, and Didion's swerves between fear and frustration will be acutely familiar to anyone who's lived with a loved one's addiction.
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Several harrowing revelations ensue – an anecdote about a violent lover in her youth is casually recalled as 'an example of romantic degradation'. Later, with the startling disclosure that she secretly received treatment for breast cancer, she writes 'I was telling no one. I even did the radiation on 168th Street so I wouldn't run into people I knew.'
Details such as this make me uneasy to call this publication a book. Didion's diary remained in a filing cabinet for 20 years before she died – if she had wanted it published she probably would have done so herself. It's hard not to read it now as the result of the same kind of opportunism Didion lambasted the publishing industry for while she was alive. After the posthumous appearance of an unfinished Hemingway book, she once wrote, 'This is a man to whom words mattered ... His wish to be survived by only the words he determined fit for publication would have seemed clear enough.'
Notes to John is full of the kind of clear-eyed detail that made Joan Didion her name. Obviously this is a woman to whom words mattered – I'm just not sure we should be reading these ones.