Some years ago, during an onstage interview in Los Angeles, I asked Joan Didion whether, in making a late-career shift to memoir, she was working counter to her best interests. In part, this was a riff, intended to amuse or provoke, a callback to the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “My only advantage as a reporter,” Didion had written there, “is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.”
For Didion, however, in the context of our conversation, it appeared to be an opening. “Sure it is,” she said. “Where I’ve pushed myself now is I’ve torn apart the only narrative I knew.… Yes, it is counter to my own best interest.”
I kept thinking about this as I read Notes to John, a journal of sorts, written mostly in 2000 and 2001, charting Didion’s experience in therapy as she sought to come to terms with her daughter, Quintana, who would die in 2005 at age 39 of pancreatitis likely tied to alcohol-related disorders. That death—or, more accurately, its aftermath—plays a central role in Blue Nights (2011), which is unique in the author’s body of work for revealing her almost entirely at a loss. “Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct,” Didion acknowledges in the middle of the book, and the admission reverberates throughout the narrative back and forth.
Yet when I asked Didion if she had ever considered not publishing, writing privately as opposed to publicly, she rejected the idea outright. “I’ve never written anything that wasn’t for a reader,” she insisted. “I cannot imagine writing not for a reader.”
What, then, do we make of Notes to John?
When it was announced in February that the manuscript—discovered in the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Archive, now held at the New York Public Library—would be published, there was immediate controversy. Talking to the Guardian, one friend called it “a tremendous betrayal of her privacy.” More than one reporter cited Didion’s 1998 New Yorker essay “Last Words: Those Hemingway Wrote, and Those He Didn’t,” which, in critiquing the Ernest Hemingway estate’s decision to publish so much posthumous material, argues there is “a substantive difference between writing a book and making notes for it.”
And yet, as much as I believe Didion is right about Hemingway, when it comes to Notes to John, I have an opposing point of view.
Partly, of course, that assessment has selfish motivations, beginning with my desire to read the book. Didion, after all, has long been for me a touchstone writer, and I appreciate any opportunity to encounter her anew. More to the point, there is the way these entries—46 in total—were printed out and left in a filing cabinet in chronological order, as if meant to be found. Not only that, but the documents themselves are not fully private, as Didion’s title for them suggests. Addressed to Dunne and composed in a mix of shifting first- and second-person perspectives, this is not the work of an author writing only to herself.
Even here, in other words, she was addressing an audience. Even here, she was writing to be read.
That this audience was intimate is the whole idea, for it allows Didion to share what she could not otherwise reveal. If nothing else, then, Notes to John represents a corrective to Blue Nights, which remains, to my mind, her least successful work. The reason is the absence of Quintana, who functions, at best, as a cipher, an emptiness around which the various bits and pieces of the narrative can never quite cohere.
Coherence is not an issue in Notes to John. The subject is Didion’s relationship with her daughter, and if the prose bears, in places, her signature indirection, it is also revealing and unadorned. “I said,” she writes, referring to herself and Dunne in an entry dated June 21, 2000, “I thought we were both feeling the pressure of time. Of not having time to do what was important to us. Of writing movies when we should be doing things we wanted to do. And that every time we thought maybe we had a shot at getting out from under our obligations—Quintana would kick in. And that sometimes I couldn’t help feeling a certain resentment.”
Compare that with this more oblique passage from Blue Nights: “Once she was born I was never not afraid.”
What Didion is doing in that sentence is deflecting. This may be a useful survival strategy, but it rarely makes for effective personal narrative. How much more moving, how much more vivid, to read about her and Quintana in three dimensions, with all the love and loss and grieving, all the guilt and all the rage? Late in the book, as 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.”
Such a remark, the graveyard humor of it, will resonate with any parent who has had a difficult child or a child with difficulties, which is to say every parent, in a sense. What Didion is facing—her daughter’s “familiar drunk ramble” amid multiple hospitalizations, rehabs and relapses—becomes all the more heartbreaking because it is so recognizable. In that, perhaps, Notes to John is most effectively read not as a corollary to Blue Nights (or, to a lesser extent, its precursor, The Year of Magical Thinking) but as a cracking of the family façade. Therapeutic? Surely, although with all the principals now dead, that no longer seems so urgent. Rather, what emerges is the portrait of a life, or lives, in progress, the fear and sorrow less of a writer than of a human, a mother, wrestling with a fallout she cannot contain.
As to whether this is literature, I couldn’t tell you. To be honest, I don’t really care. The very question seems beside the point—“from a different narrative altogether,” to borrow a phrase from Didion’s essay “Fire Season in Los Angeles.” For all its rawness, its sense of open-endedness, Notes to John has the feeling of an integrated work.
“I’ve torn apart the only narrative I knew,” Didion told me that long-ago night in Los Angeles. She was speaking about the process, if not necessarily the results. Perhaps, looking back, she was not prepared to tell it to others. Certainly, she understood that she had backed away. In Notes to John, we get the fuller story, so alive and febrile that it is not a story but instead a reckoning with what one can and can’t accept or change.•
