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The Age
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
These diaries of Joan Didion should never have been published
DIARIES Notes to John Joan Didion 4th Estate, $34.99 Joan Didion, one of America's sharpest critics on its many myths, had precision in her prose and acuity in her observations. Over a 50-year career, the writer would leverage deep reporting and a declarative style to unmask many of her country's false ideas about itself. Now joining this long output – bookended by essays of detached distance and memoirs of disarming honesty – is a series of journal entries she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Notes to John is a crude, even aberrant, addition to Didion's published writings, one made at a time of devastating personal crisis. These unnumbered pages (150 in total) were discovered in a personal filing cabinet and summarise therapy sessions she had for more than two years. Starting in 1999, Didion began seeing a psychiatrist at the insistence of her daughter, Quintana, who believed her mother was suffering from depression. Melancholia and anxiety had indeed engulfed Didion, owed largely to Quintana's own worsening alcohol problems and deteriorating mental health. (Quintana died in 2005 aged 39.) The notes show how Didion starts out, like many new to therapy, evasive with 'no concept … of direct conversation'. Over the many months, however, the sessions encourage her to tease out the corrosive issues afflicting her relationships, including the 'two-ness' of parents Didion and Dunne and their over-involvement in Quintana's life. Verbatim quotes from the therapist (sometimes edifying in their own right) are interspersed with frank testimony covering Didion's daily despair. In one session, she starts crying for no obvious reason, with the psychiatrist wondering whether these emotions stem from her being 'afraid [she] couldn't protect' Quintana. Gone is the enigmatic image of writer Joan Didion as she confronts truths of infantilising Quintana long into adulthood and wonders whether her daughter will simply spend a large inheritance from her parents. Nightmares haunt Didion frequently, too, such as one where she sits watching Quintana get inebriated in a windowsill and is simply unable to help. 'She couldn't see me watching her,' she says.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
These diaries of Joan Didion should never have been published
DIARIES Notes to John Joan Didion 4th Estate, $34.99 Joan Didion, one of America's sharpest critics on its many myths, had precision in her prose and acuity in her observations. Over a 50-year career, the writer would leverage deep reporting and a declarative style to unmask many of her country's false ideas about itself. Now joining this long output – bookended by essays of detached distance and memoirs of disarming honesty – is a series of journal entries she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Notes to John is a crude, even aberrant, addition to Didion's published writings, one made at a time of devastating personal crisis. These unnumbered pages (150 in total) were discovered in a personal filing cabinet and summarise therapy sessions she had for more than two years. Starting in 1999, Didion began seeing a psychiatrist at the insistence of her daughter, Quintana, who believed her mother was suffering from depression. Melancholia and anxiety had indeed engulfed Didion, owed largely to Quintana's own worsening alcohol problems and deteriorating mental health. (Quintana died in 2005 aged 39.) The notes show how Didion starts out, like many new to therapy, evasive with 'no concept … of direct conversation'. Over the many months, however, the sessions encourage her to tease out the corrosive issues afflicting her relationships, including the 'two-ness' of parents Didion and Dunne and their over-involvement in Quintana's life. Verbatim quotes from the therapist (sometimes edifying in their own right) are interspersed with frank testimony covering Didion's daily despair. In one session, she starts crying for no obvious reason, with the psychiatrist wondering whether these emotions stem from her being 'afraid [she] couldn't protect' Quintana. Gone is the enigmatic image of writer Joan Didion as she confronts truths of infantilising Quintana long into adulthood and wonders whether her daughter will simply spend a large inheritance from her parents. Nightmares haunt Didion frequently, too, such as one where she sits watching Quintana get inebriated in a windowsill and is simply unable to help. 'She couldn't see me watching her,' she says.
