‘I dealt with everyone at a distance': what do Joan Didion's therapy diaries reveal about guilt, motherhood and writing?

The Guardian

19-04-2025

Last month, the New York Public Library opened the doors on one of its most thrilling acquisitions of recent times: the archive of Joan Didion and her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. After two years of preparation, both scholars and anyone with a library card can arrange a visit to pore over the material contained in a total of 336 boxes of correspondence, photographs and screenplays from the couple's joint projects, which included the 1976 version of A Star Is Born and the film that in 1971 provided Al Pacino with his first leading role, The Panic in Needle Park.
Alongside material evidence of two long writing careers, there is much that is deeply personal: paperwork recording the naming of orchids in honour of Didion, Dunne and their adopted daughter Quintana, the couple's only child; kitchen notebooks and lists of party guests; the handmade cards and pressed flowers that the young Quintana made for 'the best mom ever'. But it is infinitely more troubled times that are the subject of a new book drawn from the archive, Notes to John – accounts of Didion's sessions with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon at the turn of the century, in which she discussed her daughter's struggles with alcohol addiction and depression and the writer's attempts to excavate the roots of their relationship in her own formative years.
Over the course of a year, Didion wrote her husband a report of each of her meetings with MacKinnon, in which their conversation is rendered as if verbatim, although that would defy possibility. Given that these sessions included much discussion of how Didion and Dunne had, in many crucial respects, fused their lives, sensibilities and even personalities, these 150 or so pages can also be read as notes to herself, written during a terrifying and disorienting crisis in the family's life. What do they tell us about her?
When she was very young, Didion's earliest conception of herself in a marriage was of exiting it; she imagined herself getting a divorce, 'leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark glasses and getting my picture taken'. MacKinnon, to whom she is relating this memory, is startled, replying that he's never before encountered a childhood divorce fantasy, and Didion smoothly fills in the detail by adding that she thought that it had its roots not in the real life around her – nobody in her orbit was divorced, and it was not a prospect – but in the 'trash fiction' she read precociously because children's literature bored her.
Didion never did get divorced; her marriage to John Gregory Dunne lasted almost 40 years, until his sudden death in 2003 propelled her into the appalled grief she memorialised in The Year of Magical Thinking. If it occasionally floated into the realm of possibility during times of marital strain, it appeared to be first neutralised, often in the form of exuberant travel, then translated into copy.
Hired to write a column for Life magazine in 1969, she was asked to kick off with a piece introducing herself to her readers; something friendly, gentle, generic. She responded by sending a dispatch from Honolulu that included the phrase 'We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce': at once a declaration of writerly intent, and also a rebuke to her new editor, who had refused to send her to Saigon in the wake of the My Lai massacre with the words 'some of the guys are going out'. In The Year of Magical Thinking, she recalls John telling her that working for Life would be like 'being nibbled to death by ducks'.
So the South American court never materialised, but the fantasy is revealing, and powerfully suggestive: Didion alone, far away from home, taking care of official business, shielded from scrutiny by dark glasses but nevertheless captured on camera. And it chimes with our sense of her, a vision bolstered and refined by not only decades of her own work but by the multiple prisms through which she has been seen: as an observer herself, casting her phlegmatic yet piercing gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury and the crimes and misdemeanours of American politicians in books such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album; as the taciturn centre of a literary-social web that spanned the Manhattan publishing world and the Hollywood film industry; as the style icon catapulted on to a Céline billboard at the age of 80.
And, in the years before her death in December 2021 at 87, there was another incarnation, as the battered but enduring survivor of a cruel double bereavement – Dunne's death followed less than two years later by Quintana's, at the age of 39. Her husband's last breath came as the couple sat down to dinner in the period between Christmas and New Year, having just returned from visiting Quintana in an intensive care unit, where her life was endangered by pneumonia and sepsis; Didion insisted that his funeral be delayed until their daughter was recovered enough to attend, in the following March. In August 2005, having come through numerous medical emergencies, Quintana herself died following a collapse at Los Angeles airport. The Year of Magical Thinking, which Didion was then publicising, had detailed many of her illnesses but had ended with her still alive; in 2011, she added to her chronicle of loss with Blue Nights, an account not only of Quintana's death, but of her life, and of their intense relationship. It opens with a memory of her wedding, six months before her critical illness and John's death: 'Seven years ago today we took the leis from the florist's boxes and shook the water in which they were packed on to the grass outside the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue. The white peacock spread his fan. The organ sounded. She wove white stephanotis into the thick braid that hung down her back. She dropped a tulle veil over her head and the stephanotis loosened and fell. The plumeria blossom tattooed just below her shoulder showed through the tulle. 'Let's do it,' she whispered.'
Blue Nights barely mentions Quintana's experiences of alcohol dependency and psychological distress, although at the time of Didion's meetings with MacKinnon, she was frequently in rehab and attending, if sporadically, AA meetings. She is referred to as an alcoholic both by herself and those treating her, but Didion wonders during a therapeutic session whether being labelled as such has contributed to her problems; similarly, her mother is willing to trust in the potential of AA and Al-Anon but also entertains doubts about their efficacy and their methods (what troubled her was not AA 'as an idea', but that 'in its more unforgiving mode', it seemed to her to presuppose the kind of 'theatrical failure' of relapse).
Her sessions with MacKinnon revolve around the often dramatic ups and downs of Quintana's life at the time, but they range over many subjects and facets of Didion and Dunne's life together. They encompass difficult topics, such as a previous relationship of Didion's with a man who drank heavily, was violent and subsequently tried to sue her for basing a fictional character on him. MacKinnon professes himself astonished that the man and Didion had remained on friendly terms up until that point, and that her husband hadn't exhibited jealousy, saying, 'It's as if you operate on a different level. Maybe it's the entertainment industry.' Whether or not she intends to be comical, Didion responds with recognisably deadpan wit: 'I said, in a conciliatory way, that in fact your parents had been married only once, my parents had been married only once, my brother has been married for 40 years, and you and I were married 36 last Sunday. So we were not entirely operating on entertainment-industry rules.'
There are also nice moments of self-knowledge, one of which comes when she relates the couple's desire to step back from commercial projects to those more meaningful to them, and the consequent drop in income. They had talked over the possibility of tightening their belts, she says, but 'maybe the most telling fault in our approach was that we had decided to address it in Paris, and taken the Concorde'.
Didion had initially come to the consulting room because Quintana told her own psychiatrist that she thought her mother was depressed and would benefit from speaking to someone; in other words, Didion did not initiate her own treatment, although there is a strong sense that both husband and wife are utterly confounded and harrowed by the events in their daughter's life and willing to do virtually anything they can to help. There is no suggestion that Dunne undergo the same or similar process, and when a friend mentions the possibility over dinner with the couple, he responds that, as a Catholic, he has confession. We join the sessions in medias res – Didion has had half a dozen meetings before she begins to write them up – and she can be seen not precisely as an unwilling participant, because she appears to engage as thoroughly as she is able, but certainly one whose default intellectual, and often emotional, mode is ambivalence.
You have trouble engaging, MacKinnon suggests to her at one point, and maybe she had dealt with Quintana at a distance during her childhood. 'I dealt with everyone at a distance,' Didion responds.
Here already are various preconditions for reading Notes to John. Add to that the thought that each of the lucid and self-possessed notes comes with inherent layers of mediation: what is set down is Didion's account of what Didion remembers of what Didion chose to tell her psychiatrist, presented ostensibly for her husband's information (although there is also a record of the one session that he too attended). The selective interpretation of one's own experience, later recalled, shaped for another's eyes; this describes all personal writing, but in the context of the extreme pressures on all members of the family, it would be hard to argue for blithely granting these accounts the status of unquestionable truth.
And yet, they are so direct, so apparently filled with vulnerability and doubt and distress, that it is also difficult to see them as polished or perfected; they read clearly, but reel with uncertainty and the fear of things falling apart. Discussing her relationship with Quintana, she describes her constant anxiety that she would lose her, which MacKinnon sees as part of the adoptive parents' emotional load; the fear, in Didion's case, of 'the hypothetical rattlesnake in the ivy', the resulting push-me-pull-you of overprotectiveness into the solitude of writing.
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Over the course of the year during which Didion meets with MacKinnon, Quintana's condition manifests itself in unpredictability and instability; veering between sobriety and relapse, she castigates both herself and those closest to her, alternates between buoyancy and desolation, between charting a course forward and regressing to helplessness and terror. For her parents, there appears to be no correct way to relate to her: if they express worry, they are smothering her; if they step back, they are abandoning her. There is profound love on all sides, and anguish when exhaustion and resentment threaten to spill over. Practical offers of help with jobs, finances and treatment appear to be unequal to meeting the immense emotional needs of the situation. It is into this tangle that MacKinnon arrives.
In a feature assessing the shifting balance of power between talking therapies and psychopharmaceuticals in psychiatric theory and practice in the New York Times magazine in December 1992, readers were given a swift sketch of Didion's doctor, who was placed firmly in the former camp: 'If you can imagine John Wayne in a blue suit playing a psychiatrist, you begin to get the feel of MacKinnon.' Charismatic, tenacious and possessed of a formidable ability to forge connections with patients, he was reported as frequently telling his students that 'If you sound like a psychiatrist, you're not doing it right. Let your personality stick out.'
MacKinnon's commitment to providing relief to troubled minds through dialogue rather than medication is borne out by his work with Didion; although she was taking 'subclinical' doses of an antidepressant, he supported her instinctive decisions to reduce its intake further, and he certainly appears happy to let his personality 'stick out', offering direct advice on her interactions with her daughter. When Didion reported Quintana's belief, during a period of despair, that she would be better off not existing, MacKinnon urged her to make clear to her daughter the effect this had on those who loved her: 'I can't tell you strongly enough, you have to play every card you have with her – play the guilt card, play it shamelessly – tell her you would never have another good day if anything happened to her.'
Aside from Didion's immediate concerns, MacKinnon focused with increasing determination on getting her to interrogate her own family life and early childhood, which had been deeply unsettled, materially and emotionally, by the arrival of the second world war, during which her father worked in the US for the Army Air Corps, necessitating his absence and the frequent relocation of Didion, her mother and her younger brother.
After the war, her father suffered episodes of mental ill health, and spent periods in an army psychiatric hospital in San Francisco; Didion recalls visiting him with her mother, taking him out for oysters – the only food he would then eat – and dropping him, at his insistence, at the beach near the Golden Gate park. MacKinnon's view is that at some level, Didion was aware that her father was depressed and probably suicidal, especially since he asked to be left at a spot where people died, caught in heavy surf and riptides. It must, he insists, have gone through her mind. 'I said I didn't remember thinking this,' Didion writes. 'I just thought how sad he looked waving goodbye.' Decades later, after a weekend during which Quintana doesn't answer her phone, Dunne believes she has been murdered, as his niece Dominique was, while Didion fears that she has taken her own life.
The thrust of MacKinnon's work with Didion revolves around encouraging her to move beyond control and compartmentalisation, and to recognise the deep roots of her anxieties, which had been focused on protecting Quintana from harm ever since the couple adopted her as a newborn. All of the fiction that she wrote during Quintana's childhood, Didion tells him, 'could be read as an attempt to work through separation from her before it happened. I had worked all that through. So why couldn't I separate?'
Present, too, is a suffocating guilt, which finds expression in the fear that she has been an inadequate mother because she was so devoted to her work; could it not be, suggests MacKinnon, that work was an effective anti-anxiety agent? 'Working was what I did instead of engaging,' writes Didion to John. 'Work, as you once pointed out, was the way I had found to not be there emotionally.'
By the end of their year, it appears that Didion has made significant progress in relaxing her defences; there's a deeply affecting moment when she arrives at a session and begins to weep. What's on your mind, MacKinnon asks. 'I said I didn't know. I rarely cried. In fact I never cried in crises. I just found it very difficult to sit down facing somebody and talk.'
On another occasion, when she is wrestling with the contradictory feelings of anger towards her daughter and terror of their relationship foundering, she says, 'All my life I have turned away from people who were trouble to me. Cut them out of my life. I can't have that happen with Quintana.' It's an astonishing moment, revealing Didion's capacity to confront a painful truth – the possibility that a person might contemplate turning away from their child – and to name it aloud. She didn't, and she couldn't, turn away from Quintana, but she was aware of her mind's capacity to apprehend the darkness and disorder she worked ferociously to banish from her life and her work. She became aware, too, that the quest for control could also be a weakness.
Notes to John by Joan Didion will be published by 4th Estate on 22 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.