In the 37 years that I knew my grandmother, I could count on one hand the number of times I saw her without her makeup on. Celebrated for her beauty in her teenage years and beyond, my grandma took great pride in her appearance. She never left the house without her lipstick on and her hair high, curled and stiff.
Once, when my grandpa was very sick, my husband and I drove from New York to Florida overnight with our new baby and arrived at my grandparents’ house on very short notice. My grandmother wore her robe and none of her makeup. “Oh, Lynn,” she kept saying, touching her hair and her face, closing up her robe. “You look beautiful,” I told her. Neither my husband nor I cared about the state of her face or clothing. But her discomfort wasn’t so much about our needs. Already worn down by her husband’s illness, vulnerable in new ways, she didn’t want to be so exposed.
Reading Notes to John, a new and much-discussed posthumous selection of Joan Didion’s writing, I thought over and over of this image: my grandma’s bare face, the nervous way she clasped her robe. The 150 pages of notes making up most of this collection were found, after Didion’s death, in a small file folder, next to other keepsakes: a copy of the speech she’d given at her daughter’s wedding, hotel-reservation records, a Christmas-party guest list, computer passwords. “No restrictions were put on access,” reads the book’s unsigned introduction.
The notes are virtually real-time accounts of sessions Didion spent with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, from December 1999 to January 2002. (Didion would continue to see MacKinnon until 2012.) Addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, whom Didion lived with, the notes evidently represent an effort to order her thoughts on the page during a torturous time for the family. They focus mostly on the couple’s only child, Quintana, who died in 2005 at the age of 39 (less than two years after Dunne’s passing).
In her 87 years, Didion published five novels and 11 works of nonfiction, along with plays, screenplays, and many, many essays. Her early works established her reputation as a writer of great introspection held back by chilly reserve. But late in her life, Didion went straight into the emotional turmoil of loss with two books: The Year of Magical Thinking, about Dunne’s sudden passing, and Blue Nights, which she wrote after Quintana’s lingering illness and death.
Despite the confessional turn, Didion’s essential approach remained consistent. Those late memoirs are works of both exposure and careful control; they withhold from the reader the undignified details of the husband’s death, the daughter’s decline, and the mother’s disorienting pain. The letters in Notes to John comprise the raw material. At the time they were written, Quintana, then in her mid-30s, struggled with alcoholism, was fired and seemed unwilling to find work, lied to her parents about her drinking, and ran through $110,000 in a single year. These notes were written by a terrified mother grasping to make sense of her grown-up, slowly disintegrating child.
“We then talked about what my anxieties were re Quintana,” Didion writes in one note, summing up a therapy session. “Basically that she would become depressed to a point of danger. The shoe dropping, the call in the middle of the night, the attempt to take her emotional temperature on every phone call.” Didion goes on to talk about her concern that her own anxiety is fueling Quintana’s. She recounts MacKinnon saying, “People with certain neurotic patterns lock into each other in a way that people with healthy patterns don’t. There’s clearly a very powerful dependency that goes both ways with you and her.”
Oof, Joan, I thought, feeling a sort of visceral recognition. Having to be human is hard and painful, full of yearning, chaos, miscues, and failure. If you are a writer, you might prefer to live primarily in sentences, where, at the very least, life can be contained; the power is in your hands. “You and I really liked to control things,” she writes to John. “And this past month had been a period when we were totally unable to control anything.”
Notes to John reveals how agonizing Didion finds the act of loving to be, how awkward and sloppy. She tells MacKinnon, “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.” It’s a straightforwardly desperate plea, mostly to herself. So unlike the Didion we’re used to, she looks directly at the trouble and then tries, clumsily, to stay with it. In Why I Write, Didion asserts: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” But the writing she does to understand the world is not necessarily the writing the world is meant to see.
Although the phrasing in these letters is sometimes as precise as that in Didion’s published work, so many of her other stylistic flourishes are gone. Missing here is her tendency to pivot to other people, deeper history, and broader reading. Nor is there any sign of her compulsion to hold up a sentence for interrogation and redefinition—“Life changes in an instant,” in Magical Thinking, or, in Blue Nights: “Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.”
More than direct, Notes to John is naked, unadorned. It’s Didion but “unprecedentedly intimate,” just as the copy on the book jacket promises. Implicit in this promise is access to a different layer of the writer’s humanity, and by extension to our own. Yet the book evades a set of larger questions: Why do we need to see writers (or anyone) at their most open and despairing to be convinced that they are also human? How does our understanding of the line between art and exploitation shift once the writer dies and can’t make choices for herself? Why do we feel the need to lay them bare when they can no longer speak for themselves?
Long celebrated as a master stylist, a sharp and sometimes scathing critic whose targets ranged from Nancy Reagan to hippies, with Magical Thinking, Didion turned her distrust on language itself—on her own ability to make sense with it. In Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, she reveals her pain but also circles the actual events in order to better understand them. She recounts in Blue Nights reading books about intensive-care units as she sits in the ICU with Quintana, talks about other deaths she’s experienced up close. She is suffering in both books, but she is also well-read, sharp, bolstered and protected by both the daily life that she describes and the wider world that she brings in. In Blue Nights, a book dedicated to Quintana, about whom almost all of the pages of Notes to John are engaged, Didion is careful to show Quintana as something more than her illness: Quintana as a baby, a chubby-kneed toddler, a wise adolescent, a cousin, a wife, a friend. Didion, there, is a writer at a loss, but in control.
This may be why, at her most vulnerable, she also cemented her status as an icon of unattainable cool: the persona behind the sunglasses in ads for Celine and on sought-after tote bags. At the exact moment when she broke through by making work that seemed to be more human, the name Didion became known less as being that of a woman, a wife, a mother, and a writer, and more as a signifier and a mood.
Is Notes to John an attempt to reestablish our sense of her real relationships, or merely to feed the myth? The introduction suggests that Notes is powerful in two ways: These letters are important because they have informed two classic memoirs, and because they fill in the details that Didion left out. But this book is not art, because art-making lives in the act of crystallizing the mess of life into a tighter, sharper form. It makes experiences that are separate from ours seem intimately real; it feels bigger than the material out of which it is carefully hewn. Literature emerges from exceedingly difficult acts of choice-making—cutting off and away aspects of an experience that the writer feels is extraneous to the work. In interviews, Didion compared writing to performance (she’d initially wanted to be an actor). Although there are certainly writers who think that the way to find meaning is to press into the pain, that was not ever her style.
My grandmother, who was born in the same year as Didion and died almost exactly a year before her, was not actually beautiful. I’m not sure I would have typed that sentence were she still alive. Like most women, she was ordinary looking. Like most women, she had been taught that her appearance was one of her (very few) avenues to power. What she was particularly skilled at was making herself up, perfecting control, presentation, style. I often wished that my grandmother were more willing to cede some of that control, to crack her own impenetrable shell. I wanted this from Didion too. But then, I was born in 1983.
Not unlike Didion, the painter Willem de Kooning was famously obsessed with precision. He used not just paint and a brush but also palette knives, metal scrapers; he drew with charcoal, painted, and then redrew and repainted on the same surface several times. He mixed his colors painstakingly, sometimes with safflower or linseed oil, glass shards, quartz, or sand; he made graphs and charts to get the textures right. Long after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he still got up every morning and worked. His mind mostly gone, his body still remembered. Instead of mixing the paint, though, he had assistants squirt colors of their choosing on the palette in the morning, before he went to work. His paintings still bore the swirls and some of the gestures by then associated with the icon de Kooning had become. As a result, many of them were sold. But beyond the fact of the same body having made the gestures, they were vestiges, muscle memory enacted on a canvas, and the materials—which were once specific and particular—were carelessly chosen and compiled.
Notes to John shows Didion working with language, but this language is not the same as art. Their author is a human, trapped and afraid, feeling helpless, entering sentences less to make new meaning than to get hold briefly of feelings—and people—that were in danger of slipping away. What we see of Didion in these pages is that, at least for three years, the sharp seer and brilliant stylist felt more desperate, less in control, in life than she ever did inside the books she published. I’m not sure why we need a new book to know that.
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