Joan Didion and John Gregory without in the late 1950s met when she was working in Vogue and was in time. They got married in 1964, and in 1966 they adopted a child, giving her a name from Yucatán: Quintana Roo. Together, Didion and without one of the most cooperative literary marriages lived in American history. Last week, two years after the preparation, the New York Public Library opened the Dideon Don to the public. Of the three hundred and thirty -six boxes of materials, there is a thick file of notes written by Didion who describes its sessions with psychiatrist Roger McKinnon, starting in 1999. directed to Done, the entries are full of direct quotes and writing with immediate repetition. Didion was concerned about Quintana and her conflicts with depression and alcohol addiction, but she was also busy, with aging, with creative fulfillment, with the complex dynamics of their families. She recorded her ideas with the clarity of the cold forensic medicine that she became famous for. These entries will be published in the form of a book as “notes for John”. Readers of her memoirs “The Year of Magic Thinking”, in the wake of Dan’s sudden death, will learn in 2003, at the age of seventy, and “blue nights”, about the death of Quintana less than two years later, in the thirty-nine, how these notes teach those final books to seek to understand them and feel the confidence that comes with it. “Life changes quickly,” the famous Didion wrote. “Life changes at the moment. She sits for dinner and life as you know.” She died in 2021, in eighty -seven.
–David Remnik
December 29, 1999
Don’t take Zoloft, I said that it made me feel about an hour after I lost my organization’s principle, instead of having a punch for farmers before lunch in the tropics. I said that I tried to think about it, because I learned rationally that it could not be true, because PDR even twice that the dose did not reach any effect for several hours and the effect of the peak for 3-5 days of the fixed dose. I realized that I had an idea closely about my physical well -being, very afraid of losing control, and that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.
Then I said that I tried to think through the anxiety that I expressed in our last meeting. I said that although it was expressed in terms of work (the meeting in Los Angeles and so on), I realized when I discussed with you that he focused on Quintana.
“Of course it was,” he said. Then we talked about what my anxiety was. Basically, they would have been depressed to a point of danger. The shoe falls, calling in the middle of the night, and trying to take its emotional temperature in every phone call. I said that in some respects this seemed to him what he justifies and in other unfair ways, because she should feel anxious as we felt it.
He said, “I think she is especially anxious.” I seemed to have said she did. Not only did she tell us that she did so, but also mentioned this to Dr. Cass. I, not you, you want to see a psychiatrist. He said that she was supposed to read anxiety in both of us, but this is something in it and my relationship made her feel more severe, made her lock her. “People with certain nerve patterns stand in each other in a way that people who have healthy patterns do not do. It is clear that there is a very strong dependency that is heading between you and them.”
He wanted to know how old Quintana was when we got it, and the adoption details. We somehow talked about it, and I said I was always afraid to lose it. whale. The virtual snake in the ivy on Franklin Street. He said that just as all adopted children have a deep fear that they will be given again, all adopted parents have a deep fear that the child has taken them. If you do not deal with these concerns at the time you have, you are replacing them, with anxiety risks that you can control – the snake in the garden – unlike the danger that you cannot control. “It is clear that you did not deal with this fear at the time. You put it aside. This is your style. You are progressing, you flow, and control the situation through your work and efficiency. But fear is still there, and when you discovered this summer, your daughter was in danger that you cannot manage or control, and the fear has penetrated between you.”
I said I may have been overlooked, but I never thought she saw me this way. In fact, she once described me as a mother, as “a little bit”.
Dr. McCainon: “You don’t think she saw your dimension as a defense? When you use the item herself as a defense? Didn’t you only tell me? She never looked?”
February 2, 2000
. . .
I said it was repeated over the past few years – when Quintana has expressed misery or despair of her situation – I tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. There is an actual benefit “put a happy face.” I said that I encouraged to hear that some of what was said in Aden seemed to repeat this – “it seems good to feel satisfied”, and the theory “as if” – the point that behaves “as if” you believe the slogans, and suddenly I found that you believe. I said that I told her, for example, that I believed myself in a dead end in my twenties, and finally I reached a conscious decision to change it-in this case to violate a relationship with a devastating person and continue in my life.
Dr. McKinnon wanted to know what was devastating about the relationship. She made it clear that the person concerned was very smart, and he believed that I was very smart, who was in an insecure time in my life, but this person was also very destroyed for himself, drinking a lot, and he was very depressed to work or even take care of himself, etc., etc.
Dr. McKinnon asked if he was much larger than you were. I said he was older than me, but not much – I think eight or nine years. Dr. McKinnon asked if he was addicted to alcohol. I said it was not a word I used at the time, but I assumed that he had identified himself, because he later went to rehabilitation and as I understood that she had not been drunk since then. I said that I did not really know because we were no longer talking – we remained friendly after you and faced, but then he tried to sued me for a character in a novel.
“Was the character based on him,” Dr. McCainon asked. I said more or less, yes, but putting a personality on him was not really the problem – the problem was that the “character” did something in the novel that this person did in real life and does not want people to know about it. Dr. McKinnon asked what he was. I said that the character had been defeated by a woman in great circumstances such as a person who had overcome a woman she knew. Or so I believed.
“Did you hit you before?” Dr. McKinnon’s request.
I said yes.
“Did your parents hit you?”
I said no, they never beat me. Once my mother slapped me, but it was completely understandable.
“After that, it was not important to get this man?”
I said yes, it was the case, but at the time I was able to rationalize it, or keep it away from “literary”, “real life”, an example of a romantic deterioration.
“Did you blame yourself?”
Certainly no, I said. I blamed it. I blamed it, alcohol, or anything else, and not myself. I said that I asked myself this naturally, because everything I read about home abuse depends on the idea that the victim blames herself. I was not.
“However, she remained friendly even after she got married?”
I explained that we were all friends, and you and I actually met through this person.
“Your husband did not resent this friendship?”
I said, why should he have.
“Most people have the people who marry them. Do you not resent the presence of an old friend around him?”
No, I said. In fact, an old girlfriend over the years – although we rarely saw her, because she lived in England – one of our best friends. I even once contacted her (I worked in BA) to get Quintana on a trip from Nice to Heathrow.
“You really don’t know what I am talking about, right?”
No, I said. What are you talking about?
“It seems as if you were working at a different level. It may be the entertainment industry.”
“If you mean that many people I know often marry and remain in good degrees with their ex -wives and their husbands, this is true.”
“Only a very small percentage of people do it. In the rest of the world, people look at their wives or husbands fatally.”
“I think they are unhealthy.”
I said, in a conciliatory way, in fact that your parents were married only once, my parents were married only once, my brother married 40 years ago, and I got married and 36 on Sunday. So we were not working completely on the entertainment industry rules.
“I mentioned a few weeks ago that your father was depressed.”
I said yes, it was. I said a few weeks ago I looked at the messages he left in his safe deposit box for me and my mother. My mother gave her after his death, saying that she could not bear reading her salary, “so she takes her.” There was also one for my brother, but I never saw him. At a time when I received the messages, immediately after his death, I read it once and then put it in a box – I didn’t want to prepare for them. A few weeks ago, when I took them out of the box and read them again, I noticed something – I didn’t notice before – shocked me. The message to the mother was dated 1953, and the message to 1955. The message began with me by saying that some things were taking place indicating that it would not be much longer, and the message did not say to the mother but it is implicit the same.
