NOTES TO JOHN, by Joan Didion
After Joan Didion died, a first-person record of her psychiatric sessions with Dr. Roger MacKinnon was found lurking temptingly in a box near her desk. Is their publication, in the form of a slim new book called “Notes to John,” unethical?
I don’t think so. Famous writers — especially those who were part-time journalists — know they need to dispose of their papers if they don’t want them ogled, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. (See Paul Moran, or as The Atlantic called him, “The Man Who Made Off With John Updike’s Trash.”) In 2025, we should be saying hallelujah that people still want to see these and not just some influencer’s nudes.
Further: The other principals exposed here — Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, to whom the notes are nominally addressed; their troubled daughter, Quintana Roo, a magazine photo editor and photographer; and MacKinnon — are also dead. Didion herself gave us a front-row seat to this grim parade of mortality in the best-selling “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which was made into a play, and “Blue Nights” (2011). You can imagine “Notes to John” completing the trilogy, even sliding neatly into a Boxed Set of Bereavement.
This material is also available in the couple’s archive that was recently opened at the New York Public Library, with no restrictions on access. Do we really think Didion would prefer some bumbling biographer quoting and interpreting it to the spare treatment (a few footnotes) of her trusted imprimatur, the Knopf borzoi? Like Janet Jackson, she loved control. The words “control” and “controlling” appear in “Notes to John” some 50 times.
The book begins in late December 1999 and ends in early January 2002, with a small, sad postscript taken from Didion’s computer, recounting a session she and Quintana had with the latter’s own psychiatrist, a Dr. Kass. He was the one who’d suggested that psychoanalysis for Didion might be helpful for Quintana, who was adopted as an infant and may have had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism.
This was not Didion’s first encounter with mental-health professionals. She presented MacKinnon, a Freudian who also drew from behaviorism and the work of Melanie Klein, with notes from a couple of sessions with a psychologist she saw in 1955 as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, when mulling whether to leave her sorority and fretting about her father. Unmentioned is the excerpt from the psychiatric report she included in “The White Album,” after an episode of “nausea and vertigo” in response to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 sent her to the hospital.
The dialogue with MacKinnon is related with enough precision that you wonder if Didion was running a tape recorder in therapy, as she did often in her reporting. Otherwise the level of detail suggests either a fatal refusal to be truly present (possible), a superhuman level of recall (doubtful, since she complained at least once to him of a breakdown in short-term memory), or simply a skilled New Journalistic reconstruction.
Nonetheless, though “Notes to John” shares with “Blue Nights” the subjects of mother and daughter, generational trauma and general anxiety, and both are written with Didion’s constitutional meticulousness, the new book is obviously not a finely cut sapphire. More like a cloud of diamond dust.
We learn that Didion had no qualms about watching the horror movie “Night of the Living Dead” at midnight with a 7-year-old Quintana, which appears to stun MacKinnon. “I asked what it was he thought I should have done differently, other than put her to bed, which didn’t seem like being a fun mom,” she wrote.
We learn that Didion monitored her daughter’s weight and that there was a notorious “scrambled-egg incident,” after which Quintana wound up in the shower, with her mother washing her hair, screaming “I hate him,” referring to Dunne.
We learn of the couple’s deep skepticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the many treatment programs Quintana tried. (She died at 39 of complications from pancreatitis.) “This kind of theatrical failure seemed built into it,” Didion mused. “You want a drink and give in, you don’t just end up with a hangover and a case of the guilts as you would in real life, you end up in the gutter, or in a bar picking somebody up who’s going to hit you.”
And we learn that the doctors disagreed on an approach to Quintana’s suicidal ideation: MacKinnon advised Didion to “play the guilt card, play it shamelessly — tell her you would never have another good day if anything happened to her,” while Kass believed “it’s not useful to lay it on her that she has to live to keep you alive.”
“Notes to John” is rough, incomplete, raises more questions than it answers, slightly sordid and absolutely fascinating. With casual allusions to dinner at the Four Seasons, vacation in St. Bart’s, rehab at Canyon Ranch, financial dispensations from Paine Webber and taking the Concorde to Paris to discuss the family budget, it also makes the idea that this book is some kind of money grab by her trustees or publisher seem oddly sanctimonious.
Didion and Dunne loved money. Swam in money. What, you think they wrote all those screenplays for the joy of it? This was a writer who modeled sunglasses for Celine, not LensCrafters. (Sunglasses that, at a 2022 auction of her possessions, sold for $27,000.)
This book is a comparative bargain with the same effect: darkening some of the dazzle of an important star, clarifying but also complicating our view.
NOTES TO JOHN | By Joan Didion | Knopf | 224 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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