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Sydney Morning Herald
21-05-2025
- General
- Sydney Morning Herald
It began as an ordinary Monday. Then I accidentally set myself on fire
'Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant,' wrote the late US writer Joan Didion in her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking following the sudden death of her husband and editor, John Gregory Dunne. One moment, Didion writes, he's sitting opposite her at the dining table nursing a single-malt scotch, very much alive, talking: 'Then he wasn't. Wasn't talking.' Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant. September 16, 2024: My husband has taken our youngest to school and our 17-year-old is in the shower. I'm working from home, and I get up from my desk to make a cup of tea. Then I wasn't. Wasn't making a cup of tea. In the days that followed, here's how I recalled what happened next: At 8.52am, I get up from my workstation and walk to the kitchen ... I … put the kettle on [the top of the stove] to make myself a cup of tea. I am wearing a flowing top and, as I turned towards the sink, my top catches a spark from the flame … In the millisecond it takes me to clock the flame it's already devoured my top (a favourite!), and the highly flammable one beneath it. It surges across my chest, up my neck and catches under my right arm. It claws at my eyelashes and sears the left side of my face. My hair is next. The more it takes, the more it wants. I exhale, and my world shrinks, warping behind a blinding, suffocating curtain of orange and red. 'What would you do if your clothes caught on fire?' pose the authors in the Country Fire Authority's primary-school manual Home Fire Safety: Lessons for Year 1 and 2. 'Would you run around to put out the flames? Would you blow on the flames? Would you stop, drop and roll?'
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.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What Hid Under the Surface of the Didion-Dunne Marriage?
The collection of descriptions of therapy sessions that Joan Didion wrote is being published under the title Notes to John, but it's soon apparent, reading them, that these notes aren't really for John Gregory Dunne, Didion's husband of more than 30 years. Although she addresses Dunne as 'you' throughout, the notes explain events and history that Dunne clearly already knew about, and in one instance record his own statements during a session in which he joined her and her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon. The notes—preserved in a folder, discovered by her literary trustees in her office after her 2021 death, and donated to the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library—seem less for John than for Joan herself. Notes to John offers a new perspective on one of the most important—and surely the most tormenting—people in Didion's life: Quintana Roo Dunne, the daughter she and John adopted in 1966. Surely when Didion was writing these notes in the early 2000s, she anticipated one day using them as material for a future work. But in the end, she seems to have lost her legendary nerve. Didion did publish a book about Quintana, 2011's Blue Nights, a follow-up to her bestselling memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, about John's sudden death in their New York apartment in 2003. Quintana, who was hospitalized with flu complications when her father died, succumbed to pancreatitis a mere 18 months later. While The Year of Magical Thinking recounts John's death and the disoriented Didion's feelings and experiences afterward in chronological order, Blue Nights, organized around a collection of mementos, seems an overt departure from that most famous of Didion's formulations: 'We tell ourselves stories in order to live.' Blue Nights swerves and circles. It was much harder for Didion to make sense of Quintana's life and death than it was to make sense of losing John and how she dealt with her grief for him. Like any parent, Didion felt responsible for her child, but as Notes to John reveals, she had also come to feel that her own sense of responsibility was part of the problem. The most salient factor in Quintana's distress and death was her alcoholism, a cause that Didion only glancingly acknowledged in Blue Nights. Notes to John, however, is a chronicle of Didion's and Dunne's preoccupation with Quintana's drinking and her efforts to get clean. Why Didion chose to avoid this subject in her published writings remains mysterious. Perhaps this sort of secrecy arose from some deep-seated WASP reticence about illness; Notes to John also reveals that at some previous time, Didion had received radiation treatment for breast cancer and that she had told no one else about it ('I even did the radiation at 168th Street so I wouldn't run into people I knew') until 'the five-year point,' when the couple confided in their close friends, Calvin and Alice Trillin. Or perhaps Didion still felt compelled to protect Quintana, even after her death. Protection proved an abiding theme in Didion's understanding of love. In her essay 'John Wayne: A Love Story' she wrote of her lifelong adoration of the actor, who onscreen embodied the stalwart pioneer spirit central to the mythos of her Sacramento family—descendants of settlers who prudently avoided the fate of the Donner Party by refusing to take a shortcut. As a child, she'd been smitten by a scene in War of the Wildcats, a 1943 Western in which Wayne's character promised his love interest that he'd build her a house 'at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.' While Didion admitted that the men in her life had never lived up to Wayne's image (even the real-life Wayne didn't, really), 'deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.' 'You married a protector,' Griffin Dunne says to Didion, his aunt, in 2017's The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary he made about her life and work. In turn, with Quintana, Didion suffered the fear that she couldn't protect her daughter; as the therapist MacKinnon told Didion in one of Notes to John's sessions, 'That is the very heart of your relationship with her.' A recurring image in Didion's work is of a snake, hidden in the innocuous grass, preparing to strike at any moment—a very real threat in the California landscape where Didion played as a child. When Quintana was little and the family lived in a beachside house in Malibu, Didion recalls that 'I had made her so afraid of the water that she had a slow time learning how to swim.' She feared that the daughter they tried for so long to bring into their lives could all too easily be lost. 'My attachment to her was so strong,' Didion writes in Notes to John, 'that blood lost its meaning to me.' Much of Notes to John will feel familiar to anyone who's coped with a loved one cycling between recovery and relapses. Her notes capture the maddening, circular nature of this dilemma: the desperate hope followed by ashen disappointment, the covert scrutiny for signs of tipsiness, scrutiny that the alcoholic always detects and becomes annoyed by. Here are the fiercely clutched signs of progress—a cheery phone call, a well-formulated plan for a career move—followed by exasperating and often scary backslides. 'My attempts to 'solve' or manage Q's life were futile,' Didion admits, but relinquishing the fantasy of being able to fix life for her beloved child was easier said than done. After reading in Notes to John of Didion's and Dunne's ceaseless fussing over Quintana—encouraging her to send her photographs to gallerists, fretting over whether it's a good idea to invite her on a Paris trip for Christmas, trying to figure out how to give her a sum of money without putting her back up, minutely planning out conversations in advance with the aid of the therapist, etc.—it comes as a shock to learn that Quintana was 34 at the time Didion was seeing MacKinnon, not an insecure twentysomething still trying to get her foothold in the world. MacKinnon repeatedly coaches Didion on how to back off, even when Quintana herself seemed to wish otherwise. 'Of course she wants you to step in,' he tells his patient with a merciless concision, 'because then it's your responsibility, not hers. You're giving her exactly what she wants: She can be free of responsibility and she can resent you for controlling her.' Yet it's also easy to see why Quintana continued to regard herself as a child supervised by a panel of venerable authorities. Even her own therapy took on this aspect. Didion began to see MacKinnon at Quintana's request because the daughter felt her own depression and anxiety were profoundly intertwined with her mother's. Fair enough, but these notes soon make clear that Quintana's therapist was sharing insights and information from their sessions with MacKinnon, who in turn shared them with Didion, who in turn shared them with Dunne. In Notes, MacKinnon is forever informing Didion of what Quintana (who was not his patient) really feels and conveying things she has told her therapist, presumably in confidence. As reported by Didion, MacKinnon's pronouncements and recommendations are confident to the point of imperiousness, so that when she recounts him saying 'You can't teach by telling' and that 'this is one of the hardest things to learn when you're being trained as a psychiatrist,' I found myself writing 'lol' in the margin. The estate's trustees—her longtime agent Lynn Nesbit and the editors Shelley Wanger and Sharon DeLano—append a sly footnote to the last of Didion's notes on her sessions with MacKinnon, citing a 1992 New York Times Magazine article that described the therapist as 'John Wayne in a blue suit.' Given that the book Didion published in her lifetime mostly elided her daughter's struggles with addiction, who can help wondering what else has gone unsaid here? By the time Didion sat down in MacKinnon's office, she and Dunne were deeply enmeshed. 'They were one of those couples who were always together,' Calvin Trillin says in The Center Will Not Hold, to the degree that their daughter felt she was 'dealing with a single person.' It was not always so, and both Dunne and Didion have admitted to rocky years at the beginning of their marriage. For her part, Didion tells MacKinnon about the one time she got angry with her husband in front of her young daughter, something she refers to as 'the famous scrambled-egg incident, after which, when I was in the shower with her trying to wash her hair and stop her screaming 'I hate him,' I said we won't live with him anymore,' a plan that Quintana immediately vetoed. The exact nature of this 'famous' incident isn't clear, but it certainly does sound like Dunne was responsible for the scrambled eggs in Quintana's hair. In that interview with Griffin Dunne, when he suggests to Didion that she married 'a protector,' she agrees, but then immediately adds 'and a hothead,' the same term Griffin himself uses to describe John Gregory Dunne in his 2024 memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. That John had a temper is no secret, but exactly how it manifested in his home life will now forever be unknown. There is much talk of anxiety and depression in Notes to John, but anger gets mentioned less often, despite the barely perceptible but steady thrum of anger—particularly men's anger, and the threat it poses—detectible beneath the surface. At one point, Didion admits that she did not encourage Quintana to express anger because Dunne would then respond in kind and 'the whole thing would escalate out of control.' She also relates that her own mother considered divorcing her father after he returned home from service in World War II because he had been 'so constantly in a rage with my brother and me.' Most ominously, Dominique Dunne, the glamorous older cousin whom Quintana had 'adored,' was strangled by her abusive ex-boyfriend in 1982. When Didion and Dunne took Quintana to Paris to protect her from having to testify at the killer's trial, Dominique's father and John's brother, Dominick Dunne, was so furious he didn't speak to John for decades. None of this is to suggest that Dunne abused his daughter. It does not seem that Didion, who loved Quintana beyond all measure, would have stood for that. Nevertheless, who knows what sacrifices were made to keep the peace, or what toll they eventually took? As MacKinnon and Didion run through the various ways her overprotectiveness toward (and dependency on) Quintana might have driven her to alcoholism, or how guilty Didion must have felt about working so much during her daughter's childhood—a guilt that Didion denies—MacKinnon doesn't always come across as capable of getting to the bottom of it. At one point, Didion writes that she and her therapist discussed Quintana's 'extreme fear of 'people getting mad at her,' which she believes went back to her childhood fear of you or I getting mad at her.' Yet neither MacKinnon nor Didion seems inclined to pursue the possibility that Dunne's temper might have contributed to Quintana's emotional problems. It's an issue that apparently no one, least of all Didion, wants to talk about. But just because the snake stays in the grass doesn't mean you can't hear it hiss.
Los Angeles Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Joan Didion's ‘Notes to John' may be a gift. And yet, I wish her the privacy she relished
Joan Didion's persona has loomed as large as her literary canon. That photograph of her holding a cigarette just so, daring the camera to reveal what she's thinking, says it all: You will be unable to find the key to the puzzle that is me. The memoirs Didion published after the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana — 'The Year of Magical Thinking' (2005) and 'Blue Nights' (2011) — are her most personal, excavating her grief to produce works that are by turns deadpan, wrenching, restrained, operatic. She is excruciatingly introspective but in perfect control of every sentence and emotion — withholding, sparing or repeating words to produce observations that gleam with intelligence and insight but keep their author shadowed. Didion died in 2021 at 87, and her literary trustees authorized the publication of observations she documented during an especially fraught personal period when she was seeing a psychiatrist to navigate her daughter's alcoholism and possibly suicidal tendencies. Those sessions are capsulized in 'Notes to John,' journal-like entries that were addressed to Didion's husband, who was mostly absent from the appointments. Didion's therapist — a strict Freudian named Roger MacKinnon — was in regular communication with Quintana's shrink. MacKinnon shared information gleaned about Quintana with Didion, unbeknownst to Quintana. It appears as though MacKinnon never met Quintana, and yet he doesn't hesitate to characterize her codependency, or to interpret certain behaviors as manipulative, or to dismiss Didion's fear that she might take her own life. When Didion expresses guilt that her adopted daughter is in such a 'labile' state, he offers: 'Don't take all the blame on yourself, she's a very difficult person, a very hard case.' 'You feel imprisoned by responsibility for her,' he intones. 'You're allowing her to hold you prisoner.' This serves to reassure Didion. Meeting after meeting, they repeat the theme: Quintana's problems may have been exacerbated by the impenetrability of her parents' bond, or by her mother's tendency to distance. In MacKinnon's words to Didion: 'You rather spectacularly lack the skills for dealing with other people.' The question haunting this book is whether an author so private that she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis to just two friends — Alice and Calvin Trillin — would have wanted her intimate, unedited reflections to be shared with readers. Close friends and family who have survived her appear split on this issue, with the majority coming down on the side of probably not. The document would have been made public in the archive she bequeathed to the New York Public Library, but if deposited there without the attention a book launch garners, they might have been relegated to obscurity. Fame is no doubt a rare gift, but also cruel, with every bread crumb counting as an essential clue. I came away from 'Notes to John' feeling discomfited and saddened — though literary scholars may read it as providing context with which to deconstruct a great writer's oeuvre. To Didion's Freudian analyst, the mother-daughter dynamic was everything, and the book suggests that the mother fell short. She professed love for Quintana, about whom she obsessed. But here she is ambivalent both about the maternal role and even, at times, about her daughter. She confesses to MacKinnon, 'It had occurred to me at several points that I didn't like her.' 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.' From the outside, Didion seemed to be to be inscrutable, glamorous, insanely gifted and invulnerable. But Quintana, these pages reveal, saw her mother as 'fragile,' if intimidating. How did Didion view herself? 'A friend once remarked,' she writes, 'that while most people had very strong, competent exteriors and were a bowl of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.' Her ethereal look masked her interior stoniness and likely facilitated her extraordinary powers of observation and reporting. This volume penetrates that shell to expose a woman entering her elder years as dealing with emergency rooms, hip fractures, vertigo and the necessity to shed the red suede high-heeled shoes and hoop earrings that distinguished her outward style. She continued to share details of her 'late life crisis' until 2012 with MacKinnon if no one else, well after Quintana and John were gone, and 10 years after she stopped documenting their sessions. Ultimately, 'Notes to John' may be a gift. Didion broke barriers, refusing to feel remorse over valuing her career above all else and forging a language that can only be described as Didionesque. Should her insecurities and parental doubts be in the public domain? Most everything is now. She must have known that, as an icon, her life would be studied from every angle for decades to come. And yet, I wish her the privacy she relished. But these latest revelations only thicken the mystery: Who was Joan Didion? Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah's Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
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.
