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Irish Independent
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Joan Didion's therapy diaries reveal her doubts as a mother following her daughter's unravelling
Notes to John provides a valuable look behind the scenes of the late author's meetings with her psychiatrist and her own turmoil at the turn of the century It seems unlikely that Notes to John, a new and posthumous work by Joan Didion, was originally intended as a 'book'. Next to her other titles, it lacks the cohesion and ambition, the form and poetry that established her as a legendary essayist (The White Album), an influential novelist (Play It as It Lays) and a memoirist of grief (The Year of Magical Thinking). Instead, Notes to John is a record of Didion's meetings with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, beginning in December 1999 and ending in January 2002, with entries composed from memory after every session. These 150 pages, typewritten and chronologically ordered, were discovered by Didion's estate after her death in 2021, and are part of the Didion-Dunne Archive, made public at the New York Library last month.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How the Movies Made Joan Didion a Great American Writer
We go on needing Joan Didion. The aloof gaze; the Scotch and cigarette chic; the crestfallen scrutiny of America, of life. Whatever combined in her, we seek it over and over, in a way that seems only to be intensifying since her death in 2021. She has become one of the things she was most suspicious of: a myth. One of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. This is the famous line that provides the title for 'We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,' Alissa Wilkinson's thoughtful, perceptive new study of Didion and her relationship to movies. It's one of those books that apprehend their thesis on the very last page. 'The movies,' Wilkinson, a film critic for The New York Times, writes, 'shaped us — shaped her — to believe life would follow a genre and an arc, with rising action, climax and resolution. It would make narrative sense. The reality is quite different.' This passage identifies exactly the fracture from which Didion wrote; for all her legendary cool, the controlling emotion of her work is almost always dismay. How could the world be like this? The dream from which she fell into that disillusionment, Wilkinson convincingly suggests, was the silver screen. Didion knew this herself, to some degree. Born in Sacramento in 1934, she was a daughter of both the West and the western. 'When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams,' she wrote in 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' her landmark 1968 book of essays. In her senior year at Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and moved to New York. Her success thereafter was never really in doubt. She was, as they say on sports radio, a generational talent — so brilliant that in the genre at which she was second best by some distance, fiction, she produced, in 'Play It as It Lays,' from 1970, a classic whose influence is still reverberating through contemporary fiction. After returning to California with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 1964, she tried to break into Hollywood. Her story there was that of so many great writers before and after her: failure, more or less. Her mind was perhaps too intricate for a medium that rewards ingenious simplicity. ('It's not writing, but it can be fun,' Dunne wrote of screenplays.) To be sure, the pair got some credits, perhaps most famously for 'The Panic in Needle Park' (1971), which, Wilkinson writes, portrays 'what's believed to be the first real drug injection shown in a feature film.' Maybe just as important to Didion and Dunne, the couple went to a lot of great parties. Their daughter, Quintana Roo, played in a cage with Barbra Streisand's pet lion cub. Many years later, when Quintana Roo was sick, Didion flew back to L.A. on the private jet of her former carpenter, Harrison Ford. 'We Tell Ourselves Stories' has lots of excellent details like this for the dedicated Didion fan. But its strongest sections are the ones that question rather than venerate her. Wilkinson is superb at dissecting the overlap of film and politics in Didion's worldview. She grew up as a conservative, and was a proud Goldwater supporter: 'At dinner parties, she'd announce that she was voting for him, sometimes shocking her fellow diners.' When she wrote, 'The center was not holding,' at the start of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' her most famous essay, she was not talking about Vietnam or Jim Crow. She was talking about hippies. Conservatism is the shadow side of romanticism; the ideal is in the past, rather than the future, but they share an aspirational unreality. Didion was too shrewd to keep believing in movies or the G.O.P. very far into adulthood: John Wayne was a phony tough guy and a John Bircher. But she never got over her heartbreak about the loss of those entwined beliefs. When they merged, in the Reagans, she was horrified, in Wilkinson's words, at their 'vapidity, a fixation on image to the exclusion of anything else.' Even then, she started calling herself a libertarian. Wilkinson seems to start out adulating Didion before moving uneasily into a more realistic diagnosis of her, as a rattled declinist. 'Didion had been trafficking in some kind of nostalgia all her life,' she writes late in the book, in the tone of a realization. It's a disquieting trait to find in a great writer, especially when camouflaged, like Hemingway's sentimentality, behind acerbic rigor. Yet it's also probably why Didion keeps growing larger in our minds: Her fatalism seems prescient, not melodramatic. Have you checked in on the center lately? Is it holding? We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This searching, conscientious book leaves us with the question of what happens when everyone stops believing them at once.
South China Morning Post
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
The legacies of authors Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, explored in a new book
Young Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. Photos: The Huntington Library*, Handout Fame and celebrity Even without all the prepublication buzz, Lili Anolik's new book, Didion & Babitz , was always going to have immediate resonance. How could it not, when Joan Didion has long been the ultimate for both aspiring serious writers and the set you might call the literary 'It' girls? Not that you can't be both serious and an 'It' girl. Or an 'It' girl who's finally taken seriously. Both things are true of Didion and Eve Babitz. As the book details, the two women were linked in ways not especially known before. For example, who knew that Didion once edited one of Babitz's books and that Babitz reportedly 'fired' her? Arguably very few. The cover of Lily Anolik's book, Didion and Babitz. Photo: Handout Though, as Anolik sets out, the two women were less twin flames – both writing about Los Angeles and its people and happenings from different vantage points – than 'shadow selves'. You could think of it too as a rumination on style. Of how to use it, or why it matters. There's the Joan Didion-ness of it all. With her spare prose and that photo in front of the Corvette, her much-Instagrammed packing list (mohair throw, typewriter, two skirts) and the Juergen Teller-lensed campaign for Phoebe Philo's Céline . Of course Philo, high priestess of fashion for thinking women, is a Didion fan. As Anolik says, style is something Didion paid great attention to. It's part of her work, and the mythology of Joan Didion . Joan Didion with her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana. Photo: Handout 'I always felt that Joan Didion took care to present as a 'Joan Didion character',' says Anolik. 'If you read the description of Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays , you're reading a description of Joan Didion. (Maria doesn't just have Joan's Corvette, Maria has Joan's migraines!) It was all, I think, deliberate, because she understood that to become a big writer in the manner of her hero, Ernest Hemingway, everything had to be of a piece: the style of her books and her personal style had to match.
