“Notes to John” gives Joan Didion a worthy opponent: herself

It is somewhat embarrassing to give the “Best” Book Award when you are not completely sure of its existence. There were only a few months between the announcement of a folder from magazine entries in Joan Didion’s office shortly after her death They published them as “KNOPF notes”, April 2025), and the book was received in almost equal quantities of excitement and anxiety. On the one hand, this was a very personal and unpublished work from a famous special writer; If Didion wants to publish the magazine, will it not be already known? On the other hand, this was a very personal writing that Joan Didion may not have never been to publish – but if you did not want it in the hands of curious readers, you will not destroy the papers or ordered another person to do so?

Without confirmation in both cases, the auditors fought the book about an empty ethical space. Some believe it is Seizure of satirical money By the author’s heirs, some are simply a disturbing betrayal of privacy. Others are sure that Didion intentionally left their fate, well, fate. But everyone who cares enough to have an opinion on these deep personal records seems, regardless of his reading.

“John’s notes,” what it deserves, is undoubtedly a narration, a little more than a year occurs, from 1999 to 2002. All notes are directed at John Gregory Don, Didion’s husband and a lifelong writing partner. Each of them is an accurate narration of a session with a psychiatrist, and a penis “I said” and “he said” with a little exhibition or context except for an accidental footnote. Almost all notes focus on Didion and Dan’s daughter, Quintana, who in her sessions with a psychiatrist expressed concern that Didion was depressed and should “see someone.”

This coordination – “what you did in treatment today”, more or less – raw and sometimes repeated. It is sometimes impractical: Although the dialogue that was re -created in every note is between the author and her doctor, Didion speaks directly to John (“You”), and the doctor speaks to Joan (also “you”) in addition to reporting things that the doctor said about Quintana.

The narration is not progress, but it is a volatile recession as Didion tries and without helping Quintana, then in her thirties and wrestles with depression, isolation and alcohol addiction. But the sessions revolve around Didion, because they are consumed by fear of losing Quintana (doctors have identified by that time as the risk of suicide), and because she calculates what she can appear to be “help” in her mother’s relationship deeply reveals The background of the chaotic family.

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Didion and Dan, who adopted Quintana as newborns, were fathers who loved their new daughter in the life they lived side by side – editing the writing of each other and cooperating in the scenario scenario, rejecting parties and taking the phone calls and gossip from separate offices in the same house. Returning her mind to Quintana’s early life, Sometimes Deidon is a comic deception: she remembers “never” feel guilty about work; Instead, she says that the guilt was about “not engaging, and there is no emotional” – which you could not be, because the work “was the way I found it not emotionally.” She realizes that Quintana originated in a house where the alcohol was an ongoing attachment and sometimes a clear problem. She realizes that her involvement with Quintana is exacerbated with a relationship with Dunne, who left their daughter to feel like she was interlocking.

Quintana Roo Dunne, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, 1976 (John Bryson/Getty Images)

Notes, dinner, discussions, arguments, and détante. There is confrontation, denial, and the improvements followed by the backlines. The notes of John tells without anything that he did not already know; What has been accelerated is a process that pushes a group of fresh eyes Didion to accept that she cannot control every novel.

It will not succeed if the psychiatrist is similar to the two separate and the two legitimacy who took advantage of the most familiar with the movie Didion and without – Hollywood films, cartoons in New Yorker, their imagination and non -stories. “Notes to John” requires a convincing frustration of Didion and Mackinnon: Director of the Colombia Center for Training and Psychoanalysis, the former president of the New York Psychiatric Association, the author of the distinguished doctor. “If you can imagine John Wayne in a blue suit, he plays a psychiatrist, you will start to feel,” is how McCainon was presented In the 1992 article New York Times About the effect of new drugs on emergency training protocols. Even the unofficial Delaon reader may know How to wave on the horizon and where In her life and work.

What makes the “notes of John” worth reading – what for me, at least, justify its publication – it is something that also makes it an inevitable dead: the patient interact She tells herself to live He invites them:

“I said I may have been excessive in protection, but I never thought [Quintana] He saw me this way. In fact, it was once described as a mother, as “a little shortcoming.” Dr. McCainon: “Do not think she saw your dimension as a defense? When you use the item herself as a defense. Didn’t you just tell me? She never looked?”

McKinnon is to examine facts in the actual time, and he refused to allow her to apply her frightening talent to rotate the story to her life. Another exciting touch is that the mother’s psychiatrists and her daughter are in close contact, but often they deal with the main pain points differently. McKinnon Didion encourages the parents ’guilt on Quintana, so you will reconsider the customs of self -destruction, while Quintana doctor believes this is a bad idea. It cannot end well. As we already know, no.

John Gregory Don died in 2003; Quintana Roo Dunne died two years later. The last two Didion’s book, “The Year of Magic 2005” Thinking “and” Blue Nights “for the year 2011, is the most personal for her, and” notes to John “gives an additional context for both. Didion I wrote once that “The book always sells someone,” But her husband and daughter were, not among them. The word “ill -treatment” did not put resentment and anger that Dan was well known; She did not recognize the role of alcohol in a series of diseases that preceded the death of Quintana. “John’s notes” will never be known. But what He appears Contradictions, failures, rationalities, self-deception, despair-moving, especially if you are aware of the neon addiction that you cannot love. I concluded that Didion left these pages behind them until it was eventually formed because the expiation of the narrator is definitely very arranged. By providing the greatest amount that you could bear until none of the participants were present to feel the influence, it was right in the brand.