Let’s assume that writers maintain diaries and correspondences with a spirit of exhibitionism, attuned to the possibility that these texts might eventually inform their biographies or even get published. Notes to John, published by Knopf under the direction of Joan Didion’s literary executors, is an informal accounting of the author’s sessions with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, addressed to her husband, John Dunne. These appointments occurred within a two-year interval at the end of the Nineties and largely revolved around the couple’s 34-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana — her depression, her alcoholism, and, most disturbing to Didion, her lack of professional ambition.
In advance coverage of Notes, Didion’s executors (a cohort that includes her agent, her longtime editor, and Knopf’s current publisher) take special care to emphasise that when the memos were discovered, they had been printed out and arranged chronologically in a file folder near the author’s desk, as if the gesture of organising documents in a 50-cent folder constitutes an instruction to publish its contents in a glossy $32 hardcover decades later.
Didion’s life and work were governed by her infamous capacity for restraint. She exercised an almost anachronistic degree of discretion, a level of dignity that would not be possible for public figures who came after. But even casting aside Didion’s persona, this was a writer famed for her meticulous perfectionism, a woman who rewrote her drafts dozens of times until every sentence sang. It’s difficult to imagine her agreeing to publish a book whose first line is, “Re not taking Prozac”. Perhaps if Didion had the opportunity to fashion these memos into a project with more direction and economy, this book would have earned its place within her body of work. But as it stands, one wonders whether Didion would even grant that Notes to John qualifies as a proper book, a unit of composition that could be stacked alongside Didion’s masterful nonfiction collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.
In her private transmissions to her husband of nearly 40 years, Didion comes across as guarded and self-censoring. In a work of this nature, we hope to unearth at least a few stray details that might complicate our understanding of the author’s inner life. The only interesting aspect of this project is the gesture itself — the impulse to catalogue her therapy sessions and report them to her husband. But the tone is perfunctory and clinical, written as if under a court order to document her therapeutic insights.
Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s tabloid-adjacent double biography of Doan and the artist Eve Babitz, published last year, delivers many times more compelling insights into Didion’s mindset. Anolik writes, “Engraved at the top of her stationary was Joan Didion Dunne, but she always … ran a line through the Didion. If ‘Joan Dunne’ was how she wished to be known, why didn’t she order stationary with a Joan Dunne engraving? Was it because she wanted to call attention to the fact that she, a major writer, was allowing her identity to be subsumed by that of her husband, a minor writer”?
In this case, Didion’s scattered personal effects are more revealing than her private writings to her closest confidante. Anolik isn’t the first observer to clock the author’s cosmetic deference to her husband, although she provides the most complete accounting of it. Also from Didion & Babitz, a letter that Babitz wrote but did not send to the diminutive Joan Didion in the Sixties: “Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it were not for the fact that he regards you a lot of the time as a child, so it’s alright that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more alright because you are always referring to your size.”
The balance of power in the Didion-Dunne marriage was delicate. The couple’s lifelong friend Dan Wakefield remarked on their shared magazine column: “The Saturday Evening Post wanted Joan to do a column called Points West. She said she would, but only if she could alternate writing the column with John, and only if she and John could each have their own separate byline.”
Like Andy Warhol, Didion saw something in American culture before the culture saw it in itself. She was ahead of her time, a sort of proto-trad-wife — a breadwinner masquerading as a beauty queen. Didion would have married into an affluent single-income household had that been her ambition, devoting herself to motherhood and family life, writing in her spare time. But, as Anolik keenly observes, Didion wanted both “the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.”
Like the tradwives that came after her, she could not suppress her careerism, nor could she suppress her appetite for fame and attention. Contemporary conservative influencers monetise the performance of motherhood and housekeeping, but Didion carved out the archetype when it still possessed an aura of newness, rejecting the burgeoning counterculture, conforming to an Old World model of femininity and making it look cool. She’s rarely credited for her supreme contribution to the phenomenon that is the socially conservative It Girl. Every time she denounced the spirit of the age — the Sexual Revolution, the women’s movement, almost every aspect of the Sixties — her star rose higher.
But Didion continually failed to live up to her traditional aspirations, even in her fantasies. She told Dr. MacKinnon: “I keep hearing that small girls imagine themselves as brides, princesses in wedding dresses. I never had: my earliest picture of myself being ‘married’ was getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South-American city wearing dark sunglasses and getting my picture taken.” Indeed, at no point did she encourage her daughter, Quintana, to date or consider marriage. She spent the bulk of these therapeutic sessions bemoaning Quintana’s unwillingness to seize the opportunities Didion finds for her in photography. She continually expressed frustration that Quintana’s focus seems to be on “leaving her job rather than going somewhere specific”.
It apparently didn’t occur to Didion that work might not provide the same salvation for Quintana as it did for her and Dunne. Status was Didion’s prescription for alcoholism and depression. Superficiality was her prized maternal wisdom. She told her doctor, “I had said repeatedly over the past few years — when Quintana expressed unhappiness or hopelessness about her situation — I had tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. That there was an actual benefit to putting on a happy face”. Over the course of a few-dozen sessions, the author cobbled together an impression of Quintana’s well-being based on her enthusiasm for her professional life and her capacity to manage basic daily tasks. In one of her first sessions, Didion expressed confusion at Quintana’s backslide into addiction, saying, “She had seemed fine, a blizzard of efficiency — I had even today gotten a check for medical reimbursement, with the paperwork all efficiently highlighted, ready for filing”. And that’s what the Didion estate has delivered with Notes: efficient paperwork, ready for filing.
“Status was Didion’s prescription for alcoholism and depression. Superficiality was her prized maternal wisdom.”
The notes that were originally printed in Didion’s files end in 2001, although the collection includes an additional brief from 2003, recovered from Didion’s computer, written eight months before Quintana’s death. The picture these transmissions paint is of a woman whose capacity for understanding the people in her life extended only to her husband. Even then, there were instances in which the mask slipped, and Didion’s cultivated docility to her husband disintegrated. In 1969, Didion wrote that she and Dunne were on vacation at the Royal Hawaiian hotel, “in lieu of filing for divorce”. Another telling moment from Didion’s biography: after miscarrying in her early 20s, she expressed regret at “having missed an interesting moment in Cuba”.
This flippant cynicism — abortion reduced to tourism — is not entirely in line with Didion’s carefully cultivated persona: a good Protestant girl, the debutante from Sacramento who got her start in National Review. These disclosures reflect what Anolik calls Didion’s “contradictory extremes … concealment and exposure, mystery and blatancy”. The paradoxes are expertly woven into her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, written when Didion was at the height of her abilities, and could reflect on Quintana’s death with transparency and control. The problem with Notes is that it is devoid of paradox; it’s exposure without concealment, blatancy without mystery, a woman writing to and for her husband. Whether or not these memos were interesting to John Dunne at the time of their writing, they are unlikely to be of interest to the general reader.
