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The Hindu
01-08-2025
- General
- The Hindu
Review of Joan Didion's Notes to John
These notes — summaries of sessions with a psychiatrist — were found in Joan Didion's desk after her death in 2021, addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. There are two questions here: a) should such notes have been published? and b) what is the quality of the book itself? Questions of ethics and aesthetics. The couch-side view of a great author might provide some voyeuristic gratification; the thought that people who are not like us suffer like us might satisfy some, but this was not Didion writing polished prose, merely a grocery list of issues with her family. You won't find clunky sentences like 'She had said that absolutely she agreed that depression could be a motivating agent for people…' in any of her finely-chiselled novels. No easy answers She could have simply thrown the lot away or burnt them, so the fact that they are now in the public domain means she wanted it that way. This is usually the publishers' justification. But she was 87 when she died, and might have simply forgotten they were there. However, she had once told an interviewer, 'I've never written anything that wasn't for a reader. I cannot imagine writing not for a reader.' Clearly, there are no easy answers; you react to the book on feel and emotion. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez's last novel Until August was published (he could have thrown it away too), I argued in these columns that his sons might have served the cause of fiction. With the publication ofNotes I find my position has clarified somewhat. Yes, for fiction (Kafka, Nabokov, Marquez), no to psychiatrist notes. There is an ethical question here that cannot be avoided even if the main subjects — Didion, Dunne, their daughter Quintana, their parents, Joan's brother, the psychiatrists — are all dead. Didion's cancer, her abuse as a young woman, her daughter's alcoholism and hospitalisations and other personal details are unlikely to hurt anyone. The public's right to know is usually inviolable, but reading about 'romantic degradation' as Didion calls physical abuse at the hands of an early boyfriend, about alcoholism in the family, especially that of her daughter, can be painful. The entries are extremely personal and share confidential information, particularly about her daughter who died within a couple of years of the final entry. Maybe it is the commercial exploitation of a family's trauma that provokes that painful feeling. I am uncomfortable about watching someone die in a car crash. There are flashes of the writer Didion is, of course. When Didion and Dunne consider giving their daughter a substantial sum of money, her psychiatrist suggests holding off if they decide they do not trust her values. 'I said I did trust her values,' Didion reports. 'I just didn't trust her common sense.' Amazing fortitude You can't help admiring the amazing fortitude of a writer, a candidate for the Nobel, who crafted some of the finest essays and novels of our times, even ifNotesisn't one of them. Didion's own response to posthumous publication was laid out in a brilliantNew Yorkeressay in 1998. On the Ernest Hemingway estate's decision to publish from notes and treatments left behind after the author killed himself, she wrote: 'This was a man to whom words mattered. He worked at them, he understood them, he got inside them…', and that 'there is a substantive difference between writing a book and making notes for it.' DoesNotesstand on its own as an offering from a major writer? There is too much disorganised prose, too many similar thoughts being bounced around, too many pages that feel repetitive. And strangely, for what is an intimate memoir, it does not always draw the reader into the world of Didion the writer. Presumably, she has left that to critics and revisionists of the future with the message: This is what happened, you decide what it means. Perhaps this book is meant for them, and for the pop psychologists who see a grain in a world of sand. For me,The Year of Magical Thinking,about the year following her husband's death, a grief observed and translated into literature, tells us more about Didion and her unfortunate family. The reviewer's latest book is Why Don't You Write Something I Might Read?.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on posthumously publishing Joan Didion: goodbye to all that
Joan Didion entered the fray on the publication of Ernest Hemingway's unfinished final manuscript in an essay titled Last Words in 1998: 'You think something is in shape to be published or you don't, and Hemingway didn't,' she wrote. You believe a writer's unpublished work is fair game after their death or you don't, and Didion – it would seem – didn't. Debate about the ethics of posthumous publication has been ignited once more, this time with Didion at its centre. After the writer's death in 2021, about 150 pages were found in a file next to her desk. These were meticulous accounts of sessions with her psychiatrist, from 1999 to 2003, focused mainly on her adopted daughter Quintana, who was spiralling into alcoholism. Addressed to her husband, screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, this journal has been published under the title Notes to John. 'No restrictions were put on access,' we are told in a brief, anonymous introduction, presumably the ghostly hand of her literary estate. The history of posthumous works is a long and contentious one, from Virgil's Aeneid to the publication of Gabriel García Márquez's Until August last year. Márquez's sons excused their 'act of betrayal' in publishing this abandoned novel against the Nobel laureate's wishes as a service to his readers. In 2009, Vladimir Nabokov's son published his father's incomplete last work, The Original of Laura, 30 years after his death, despite his instructions that the novel be destroyed. Harper Lee's 'lost' manuscript Go Set a Watchman (discovered in a safe deposit box) caused a sensation when it was published in 2015. Lee was 89 and in very poor health. It became the fastest-selling novel in HarperCollins history. But the critical verdict on all these recent 'rediscoveries' was that the authors had good reasons not to want them published. However, it is not always a case of publish and be damned. Most famously, we would not have Kafka's The Trial had his executor, Max Brod, not ignored his demand that it be burned. 'Don't pull the Max Brod-Kafka trick on me,' Michel Foucault reportedly warned his friends. Henry James made a 'gigantic bonfire' of his archive. Thomas Hardy followed suit. Philip Larkin's diaries, more prosaically, were committed to a shredding machine and then the University of Hull's boiler house. 'What he wished to be remembered would be remembered,' Larkin wrote of Hardy. 'What he wished forgotten would be forgotten.' How much of Notes to John was meant to be forgotten? Didion wrote two memoirs: The Year of Magical Thinking, after Dunne's sudden death in 2003, and, later, Blue Nights, about her relationship with Quintana, who died in 2005 at the age of 39. In both, her daughter's addiction is gracefully elided. Didion was America's literary celebrity. Aged 80, famous for her sunglasses, the author became the face of luxury fashion house Celine. Today, her image is printed on tote bags for bookish hipsters. Notes to John is a further offering to the cult of Joan. What could be more irresistible than her therapy notes? It seems unlikely that Didion, that most reticent of people and most exacting of writers, would have welcomed these intimate, unedited journals seeing the light of day. But it is implausible that she would have been unaware of the inevitability of their publication. In Notes for John we see Didion bare-faced. We see her pain. But still she remains an enigma.
