As the name suggests, Notes to John contains Joan Didion’s notes for her husband John Gregory Dunne. The writing focuses on her detailed conversations with a Freudian psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, discussing their daughter Quintana, and Didion’s struggles with work, anxiety, depression, motherhood, and ageing. These sessions began after Quintana’s psychiatrist was unable to resolve her problems with addiction, personality disorder, and depression. He suspected that a complicated mother-daughter relationship was one of the root causes of Quintana’s problems. He suggested that Didion start seeing a psychiatrist to work through this.
Quintana was suicidal and she suffered from low self-esteem, personality disorders, anxiety, and depression. She isolated herself from friends and family, believing she did not deserve them. She also struggled with the creative work of photography. Didion was constantly worried that Quintana would end her life.
Didion’s sessions with MacKinnon reveal her tendency to always anticipate catastrophe, and that this was rooted in her childhood. As we read about the suicidal risk her daughter posed, we discover that it had cast a long shadow over Didion’s childhood as her father struggled with suicidal thoughts. The fact that Quintana was adopted added to Didion’s anxiety.
In one of the sessions with MacKinnon, Didion mentions, ‘This seems to be one of the key promises you make when you adopt a child: you will take the child away from his or her history.’ Didion believes this to be one of her failures. Even after MacKinnon’s repeated assurance that substance abuse in Quintana could be a result of her genetic disposition, Didion cannot overcome her guilt, and she questions the environment she and her husband created for their daughter. She also believes that her anticipating the worst was transmitting anxiety to Quintana, which contributed to her substance abuse. However, Didion’s constant worrying burdens her daughter and complicates matters further.
MacKinnon suggests Didion create a certain distance from her daughter, giving Quintana autonomy to make difficult decisions and deal with the consequences, without feeling guilty for abandoning her.
The 150 pages of notes from Didion’s meeting with her psychiatrist make up this book. They are part of the Didion/ Dunne archive at the New York Public Library, and were placed there by Didion’s heirs, her late brother’s children. ‘No restrictions were put on access’, reads the introduction to the book. A deeply invested reader might have discovered these notes in the public library. However, publishing the notes in the paperback format can be read as a capitalist move by the publisher, and an attempt to disrespect Didion’s wishes. Her contempt for posthumous publication (without the writer’s consent) is well-documented. Furthermore, these notes document Didion at her most vulnerable.
The book helps us come face-to-face with an unknown side of Didion, an anxious and depressed mother, with extreme interdependence on her daughter, struggling with the loss of control over her life as Quintana’s problems become more severe. But what happens to the image of Didion as we know her?
Notes to John reveal the loss of control that Didion had exercised in her previous works of reportage and essays. It also removes another degree of separation between the reader and Didion’s personal life.
The last entry in Didion’s Notes to John is from January 9, 2003. John Dunne died of a heart attack on December 30 of the same year. In August of 2005, Quintana passed away after septic shock and repeated hospitalisation over 18 months.
The book will interest readers who are curious about Didion’s life beyond her image as a writer.