In November 1999, the writer Joan Didion began to see Roger Mackinnon, a New York psychiatrist, on the recommendation of the psychiatrist who treated his daughter Quintana for the limited personality disorder, depression and alcoholism. The two doctors estimated that the mother-daughter dynamic and powerful co-dependence were at the heart of Quintana’s problems.
After six nominations with Dr. Mackinnon, Didion began to write detailed reports from her sessions, which she sent to her husband, John Gregory Dunne. These notes, which extend over a little over two years, were found in a portable binder in his home office after his death in December 2021.
Published under Notes in John – And adorned by the photograph of Annie Leibovitz’s striking jacket of Didion, fragile but tenacious, at her office with the binder rolling behind her – the book is an intimate chronicle of the author’s struggle to help his daughter, even if it meant to dig into his own neurose unxaminate for a long time. Written with its signature precision, but without its usual stylistic and incantatory rehearsals, it is the least kept in the writing of Didion.
While the decision to publish Notes in John – Made by the heirs of Didion, the children of his brother – raises questions about privacy and deals with the apparently endless appetite for everything related to Didion, there are many arguments in favor of doing so.
To start: surely if Didion, a healthy writer to control, had been strongly felt to destroy or restrict access to these pages, she would have done so. We assume that it would have been more kept if Quintana is still alive. But her daughter, her husband, her parents, her brother and even her psychiatrist are all preceded for many years. If she knew that these notes were heading towards the publication, she could have wanted to modify or polish them – although their power lies in part in their brutality.
As it stands, Notes in John offers readers a key to the personality of Didion and his work. It is not an exaggeration to trace the genesis of The year of magic thought And Blue nights Her soul creations on the serious losses of her husband and daughter, respectively, and the paralyzing meaning of her own vulnerability – to his sessions with Dr. Mackinnon. In addition, not to be minimized, this therapy journal, which captures Didion’s despair in the face of Quintana’s alcoholism, can offer information to other parents struggling with the drug addiction of their own children.
Mackinnon, who collaborates with Quintana’s psychiatrist, appears to be a superb therapist because he skillfully leads Didion to recognize how his life of life to put his concerns aside by turning to work was “an extremely effective anti-animiety agent”, but closed it to the others, including his daughter.
Their sessions tackle Didion’s childhood with a depressed father, his tendency to catastrophize, his overprotective but distant parenting and his denial concerning aging and mortality. But when Dr. Mackinnon suggests that Didion felt guilt to focus on her work, she strongly rejects: “I never felt guilty to work.”
He also pushes her. He repeatedly suggests how his extreme proximity with Dunne could make a sensitive child and adopted as Quintana feels like a third wheel, and how Didion’s fragility led Quintana to feel from a young age that she needed to protect and take care of her mother.
Didion quotes Dr. Mackinnon’s clever comment: “Everything about your emotional tone seems fragile. But you are not. You are really extremely strong.” He advises her to let him know to Quintana – and give him a 34 -year -old girl to make his own mistakes: “You can only like it. You can’t save her.”
In March 2000, more about Quintana’s concerns about his mother’s ability to face alone, Dr. Mackinnon asks with a strange forensic: “You are obviously very close to your husband, but what would happen to you if something happened to him?”
Of course, Didion answers this question in The year of magic thought, Written not quite four years later, after Dunne’s death of heart failure in December 2003. It was shortly after their return from Quintana’s visit to a nearby USI, where she was in a coma fighting against the septics. Magic thinking is partly a chronicle of the first year of heartbreaking widowhood of Didion while Quintana succumbed to a cascade of disastrous diseases which finally led to his death in August 2005.
Notes in John raises many questions. Have the husband and the wife discussed each weekly session on the basis of his notes? Have his answers fed his answers to Dr. Mackinnon? Didion was an accomplished journalist, but to what extent his summaries and quotes from Dr. Mackinnon? What is it left out?
Didion’s last “note” concerned a session in January 2002, although she continued to see Dr. Mackinnon for another 10 years. One cannot help but wonder about their conversation on the marriage of his daughter in August 2003. It was only six months after the discouraging meeting of Didion with an insolent quintana in a state of drunkenness and his exasperated psychiatrist, whose report, included in this book, was found in the Didion computer.
Rereading Magic thinking And Blue nights in tandem with Notes in John, One is struck by the quantity of channeled teeth of his therapy in these books. As a trilogy, the three volumes underline what Didion has shown several times throughout her remarkable career: although she loved what she called the rituals of marriage, maternity and domestic life, she has always been a writer above all. Writing was how she treated everything.
Heller Mcalpin has been examining books for NPR since 2009.
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