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Scroll.in
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Should Joan Didion's therapy notes to her husband about their daughter have been published?
Joan Didion died, aged 87, in 2021. When a new volume of her diaries was announced, anticipation was high: her personal nonfiction is the foundation of her formidable literary legacy. But as details emerged, readers began to question the ethics of its publication. Billed as offering ' astonishingly intimate ' insights, Notes to John recounts conversations with Didion's psychiatrist between December 1999 and January 2003. It draws on a series of letters addressed to Didion's husband, fellow writer and frequent collaborator, John Gregory Dunne. And it is not only Didion and Dunne's lives that are revealed in the book's pages, but also their only child's. Indeed, Didion had begun her therapy sessions at the urging of her then-30-something daughter, Quintana, who was experiencing an acute mental health crisis and struggling with alcohol addiction. As the short, unattributed introduction notes, the book draws from 'a collection of about 150 unnumbered pages […] found in a small portable file' near the author's desk after her death. (Other contents included 'a list of guests at Christmas parties' and 'computer passwords'.) This material went on to form part of the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library, with 'no restrictions' on access. But it has been reported that Didion did not leave specific instructions for how it should be handled. The trustees of Didion's literary estate, literary editor Lynn Nesbit, and two of her longtime editors, Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano, made the decision to publish. At least some those close to her have subsequently expressed disquiet about its publication. Numerous reviewers have confessed to feeling ' discomfited ' and voyeur-like while reading. Would Didion have wanted us to read this book? And should it have been published if not? Ethics of posthumous publication Posthumous publication has long been a source of literary controversy. There is no shortage of examples of work published against an author's wishes after their death. Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson and – perhaps most notoriously – novelist Franz Kafka are among the prominent writers who left explicit instructions for their unpublished work to be destroyed following their passing, only for it to later appear in print. Sometimes such issues arise even when the author is still living. The 2015 publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman – marketed as a sequel to her only other published novel, the 1960 classic To Kill a Mockingbird – sparked concern that the then-elderly Lee had been coerced into reversing her long-held stance that she would never publish again. The controversy was heightened by the fact that Go Set a Watchman received decidedly mixed reviews. In some readers' eyes, its publication tarnished both Lee's literary legacy and the reputation of To Kill a Mockingbird 's heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, who is depicted as less than righteous in Go Set a Watchman. This suggests the way such debates are often weighed in terms of public opinion. As Didion herself once observed: This question of what should be done with what a writer leaves unfinished goes back to, and is conventionally answered by, citing works we might have lost had the dying wishes of their authors been honoured. We are, then, perhaps more receptive to potentially unauthorised posthumous publications if the result is a literary masterpiece. We may feel less forgiving when the work is of less certain quality. The role of the writer Didion did publish her own thoughts on this subject. A near-lifelong devotee of Ernest Hemingway, she criticised the posthumous publication of work left unfinished when he died in 1961. In a 1998 New Yorker article, she noted Hemingway's disdain for such practices, quoting a letter he'd written in 1952 to an author working on a book about his early career: Writing that I do not wish to publish, you have no right to publish. I would no more do a thing like that to you than I would cheat a man at cards or rifle his desk or wastebasket or read his personal letters. Didion also saw in Hemingway's famously precise prose style further evidence of the wrongheadedness of such endeavours. Hemingway was a writer for whom seemingly minor points of grammar, syntax and punctuation were deeply consequential. As Didion wrote, This was a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them. In her telling, the power of his writing arose from his exacting control over his craft: over what was included, but also what was left out. To make decisions on such matters without the input of the author was, she argued, nothing less than 'a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it'. A matter of style Like Hemingway, Didion was a master stylist, known for the crystalline elegance of her prose and her investment in questions of writerly craft. There can be a mistaken tendency to think of autobiographical writing as straightforwardly confessional – simply opening a vein onto the page – but this was never Didion's way. Even when her writing felt emotionally raw and self-revelatory, it was always finely wrought, informed by those lessons from Hemingway about the power of deliberate omission. This was, after all, a woman sufficiently private that she kept her treatment for breast cancer secret for years from everyone but Dunne. Many of the hallmarks of Didion's writerly style are present in Notes to John: the fragmentary quality, the clarity of her prose, even snakes as a recurrent image. But in recounting this emotionally fraught subject matter at little temporal remove, she becomes direct to the point of bluntness. At one point, for example, Didion's psychiatrist praises her 'extraordinary insight' into her relationship with her own mother. She responds: Extraordinary or not […] it's not much help in just getting on with life. It's even counterproductive, considering that my mother is now 89. It's not as if we're going to resolve anything by confronting this. Of course, it soon becomes apparent that Didion's relationship to her mother is highly relevant to how she has parented her daughter. If, as one of Didion's most widely quoted lines puts it, she wrote to 'find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means', in Notes to John, that process is seemingly very much a work in progress. All of this contributes to the sense of reading something not intended to be published in anything like its current form – and thus not yet rising to the status of a masterpiece. Didion would go on to write about at least some of this subject matter in later books, particularly 2011's Blue Nights, which chronicles her grief after Quintana's death in 2005, less than two years after Dunne's passing. But the way this material is handled in Blue Nights is markedly different. Where Notes to John moves in a chronological fashion through time, Blue Nights mimics the workings of memory with its non-linearity. Notes to John feels, formally speaking, like exactly that: a series of notes or journal entries covering a specific span of time. Blue Nights, however, takes advantage of the expansive, hybrid possibilities of the essay to cast its net wider and tell a fuller story about love, parents and children, guilt and grief. Notably, in Blue Nights, Didion does discuss Quintana's diagnoses with conditions including borderline personality disorder, but largely elides the specific nature of her addiction. In Notes to John, it is faced head-on and discussed in detail. Didion was a writer known for her obliqueness – for her mastery of what the Irish writer Brian Dillon calls the essayist's 'sidelong glance'; that is, a way of illuminating difficult subject matter by approaching it indirectly. Notes to John 's forthrightness is thus a contrast to Didion's classic nonfiction. There, her narratives often proceed by a logic of association, asking readers to make connections via metaphor and to fill in the gaps to see how this relates to that. In the space of a single chapter in Blue Nights, for example, Didion goes from recounting Quintana's wedding day to recalling the family's home in suburban Los Angeles to reflecting on the process of getting a New York driver's licence when they later moved east. There's discussion of a psychiatric text about suicide from the 1930s, a quote from the ancient Greek playwright Euripides, and the image of Quintana in 2003, 'in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator' during 'the first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her death'. This mode of storytelling is quintessential Didion. It can give rise to accusations of ambiguity or evasiveness – charges levelled at her work more than once. But it also has the potential to protect an author and the people around them as they share intimacies, keeping them firmly in control of what is revealed, and not. Marital eavesdropping Notes to John is also troubled by a question of intended readership. One of the people responsible for its publication – Didion's agent Lynn Nesbit, also one of her literary trustees – has acknowledged this material 'wasn't written to be published'. Its title makes clear it was written for an audience of one: for Dunne. This is also evident stylistically, in its second-person narration directed at a 'you' so familiar with the people and events it mentions that Didion doesn't need to explain throwaway references to 'the Nick narrative' or someone called Marian. Footnotes have been inserted to clarify that the former refers to Dunne's strained relationship with his older brother, while the latter was Quintana's boss at a magazine. Their presence emphasises that we are eavesdropping on intimate marital conversations. The portrait of Didion that emerges is thus startlingly vulnerable: we see her frailties, anxieties and doubts – particularly regarding her and Dunne's parenting of Quintana, who they adopted as a newborn – far more directly than in her other published writing. Perhaps there is value in this: another of Didion's literary trustees, her longtime editor Shelley Wanger, has said she hoped the book's unguarded quality would offer a corrective to Didion's somewhat chilly public image. I can also see that Didion's candour may provide comfort to readers dealing with similar difficulties. Notes to John has much to say that is resonant and truthful about depression, anxiety, addiction and the grinding difficulties of supporting a loved one through such challenges. 'You and your husband are going through hell,' Didion's psychiatrist tells her during a discussion of 'a hard weekend' in which she and Dunne had worried for Quintana's safety. 'You can only love her,' the doctor says. 'You can't save her.' Ethical responsibilities I am less inclined to agree with those who suggest the ethical ramifications of publishing this material are less relevant because Didion, Dunne and their daughter are no longer alive to suffer the pain or embarrassment of exposure. Life writing scholar G Thomas Couser has argued that while death could 'seem to suggest utter invulnerability to harm' when it comes to being written about, it may actually 'be the state of ultimate vulnerability and dependency', given that the deceased can offer neither consent nor self-defence. From this perspective, Notes to John 's depiction of Quintana is particularly troubling. Readers gain an intimate view of what must have been some of her most vulnerable moments as she struggles with addiction and mental ill-health. We watch – through the eyes of her loving, fretful and perhaps overprotective mother – as she fumbles, relapses and at times, says things to her parents it seems likely she'd have lived to regret. We see mother and daughter's extreme closeness, perhaps even codependency ('You and Quintana had been for too long two people in the same skin,' the doctor observes). We also see Didion's guilt at what she regards as her culpability for her child's inability to cope with life, in part for the way she has projected her own at-times debilitating anxieties onto her. 'I had always been afraid we would lose her,' Didion admits. All of this frequently makes for devastating reading. But it also gives the clear sense that Didion recognised her daughter as what Couser terms 'a vulnerable subject' – and so strove to protect her, in her published writing as in her life. Frozen in time Notes to John peters out in January 2003, following Didion's account of a fractious joint psychiatry session with Quintana. As readers, we know how things will end: with a woman mourning both her husband and daughter, and turning to writing to try – as she always has – to make sense of it all. In the pages of these journals, however, she is frozen in time: 'I was trying to keep her alive,' she says of Quintana. 'Because she was killing herself day by day.' Should Notes to John have been published? Or should it have been left to the relative obscurity of the archive, where it would have been read by Didion scholars, biographers and super fans, rather than a potential audience of millions? From an ethical standpoint, I think the latter option would have been more defensible. But it's also true that this revealing, raw and often hauntingly moving little book will stay with me – in large part for the complex portrait of Didion's guilt and devotion to her daughter that it reveals.
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.
Express Tribune
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
To read after ‘Notes to John'
Joan Didion's posthumous Notes to John, published by Knopf, is a brief but shattering collection of journal entries from the early 1970s, written during one of the most psychologically turbulent periods of her life. Addressed to her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, the entries trace Didion's experience with psychiatric treatment, her wavering sense of self, and a constant, looping grief. It's Didion stripped to the nerve; less polished essayist, more private woman in crisis. If Notes to John leaves you breathless, or looking for more books that explore the brain's breaking points with raw honesty, here are four that resonate deeply with its intimate, searching voice (and which are not The Bell Jar). 'Blue Nights' If Notes to John is the emotional wound still bleeding, Blue Nights, also by Didion, is the scar you can't stop tracing. Written after the death of her daughter, Didion's prose is skeletal, looping, and disarmingly quiet; it murmurs. This is a slow, devastating read for anyone obsessed with the passage of time, the terror of memory loss, and the impossibility of preparing for grief. Best read alone, in low light, with a mug or lemon water you're not enjoying. 'The Diaries of Virginia Woolf' Imagine live-tweeting your inner chaos in the 1920s as an upper-class white woman, but doing it with genius-level prose. Woolf's diaries are a wild ride through literary ambition, mental illness, domestic life, and social gossip. Her entries shift from biting to blissful in a paragraph. The pace is sprawling, but the voice is familiar and addictive. For readers who love the messiness of a mind at work, and aren't afraid to wade into the weeds of art, ego, and despair. Basically, if you highlight half your books, bring a second pen. 'The Noonday Demon' Think of this as depression with footnotes, but make it incredibly honest and beautiful. Unlike the massively dated The Body Keeps the Score, Andrew Solomon blends memoir, science, history, and politics into a doorstop of a book that somehow never drags. It's personal but expansive, structured yet digressive, like taking a college course and a therapy session at once. For readers who want to understand mood disorders from every angle and aren't scared off by pages of nuance. 'Hurry Down Sunshine' This memoir reads like a slow-motion car crash; impossible to look away from, even as it devastates. Michael Greenberg captures the summer his teenage daughter suffers a psychotic break with startling clarity and restraint. The writing is quick and clean, with bursts of lyrical beauty, and it builds tension like fiction. Perfect for readers who want emotional depth without melodrama, and who are curious about how mental illness fractures family, time, and trust. It's heartbreakingly observational; no big speeches, just brutal presence. These books don't offer easy answers, but neither does life inside the mind. Like Notes to John, they prove that the act of writing through suffering is its own kind of survival. Haves something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
The Guardian
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Notes to John by Joan Didion review – a writer on the couch
Motherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing 'swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet'. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator's breakdown is precipitated by her daughter's long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist's criminal revolutionary daughter. 'Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing' – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general. The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully 'impenetrable polish', found herself seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book. For the three years recorded here, Didion rationally feared the death she'd always irrationally dreaded. Quintana is indeed, MacKinnon informs her, a patient with a high suicide risk. So should the mother remain beside her, smothering her with love, reminding her of the parents she needs to live for? Or should she leave her daughter to her own devices, and risk living with guilt for ever? The circles are tragic, unresolvable and tedious, and no doubt recognisable to many parents. Why did she write about the sessions, week after week? Mainly, because this is just what she did. 'The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion justifies itself.' Didion was self-medicating with pen and paper as Quintana self-medicated with alcohol. The notes were also useful in involving her husband John Dunne in the process. He's addressed as 'you' throughout and their rather moving closeness is manifest on every page, not least because Quintana rails against it, asking them to act more independently. What's the justification for publishing, though? Biographically, the notes are of reasonable interest, clarifying the stakes of the late great books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Within three years of the final therapy session, Quintana had recovered, married and then died of physical illnesses that also precipitated her father's fatal heart attack. This wasn't the suicide or the overdose that Didion prepared for – nevertheless, she was left alone, writing yet again for survival. There's a crude fascination in seeing some of the raw material behind this, but there's also something shameful about it. We're invading Didion's privacy – at times less as a mother than as a writer. She's caught in the act, writing workaday, clunky prose. It's there right from the first page: 'I then said that I had tried to think through the anxiety I had expressed at our last meeting.' Didion wore dark glasses even as she walked down the aisle at her wedding, yet here she is naked with her eyes bare and uncertain, puzzling away at how to support Quintana with AA when she disapproved of it intellectually: 'AA both isolated the alcoholic from everything that wasn't AA and made the alcoholic see him or herself as perpetually sick.' It's odd to be reviewing a book by a complex writer, whose work I have engaged so deeply with, that I don't think counts as part of her oeuvre. It isn't especially illuminating to see a woman without much capacity for self-reflection stumbling her way through a crisis aided by a therapy-speak she doesn't quite want to master. Her novels and essays derive their power from the fact that she and her characters refuse to know themselves, acting out their neuroses with passion and grandeur, and in doing so reveal the fault lines of the larger culture. That is what we need from her; it isn't on display in these notes. Notes to John by Joan Didion is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
