The Latest Joan Didion Book — What to Respect and What to Question

When is an exploration of the personal exploitative? When is it clear?

Joan Didion wields outsized influence even now, several years after her death. Her most recent book, Notes to John, her husband, was just published. The book details the conversations with her psychiatrist from 1999–2001, the notes from the conversations typed and neatly filed, found after her death. This is also the time that The Sopranos was airing its first seasons, with the construct of Tony Soprano talking to his psychiatrist.

I am entranced by Joan Didion. She was a great writer. She wrote, thought clearly, and connected the dots of the culture into a reduction, a through-line. She was one of the first writers to question the correctness of the Central Park Five rampagers’ convictions.

Joan had great talent but also struggled with life setbacks: health, relationships, and the writing market. She was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in later life, and the documentary The Center Does Not Hold shows her face in the Parkinson’s mask, except when laughter breaks the set muscles. Weekly, debilitating migraines were part of her life, as was an early MS diagnosis, although the MS was in remission, and remains a question for me.

The famous writer, thinker, mother, and wife also demonstrated the contradictions many of us carry. I have listed my takeaways from reading her latest book, rewatching the documentary, and reading random stories she either wrote or were written about her and her family.

1. Her writing is clean and direct. I am reminded of my anthropology class on the participant observer: she has an outsider’s skew that allows the clear view of someone pressing her nose against the outside glass pane.
2. She is controlled. I imagine her as a puppeteer, setting up her many parties by inviting characters, influencers, and staging the setting. She moves her plot points around a whiteboard as scenarios are set up by the party shifting around her living room.
3. She and her husband, John Dunne, are successful but also like spending money. They are both freelance writers. They are driven to create by forces of literary merit and the need to deposit checks.
4. She creates the persona of how she presents herself, perhaps mitigated by health needs. She wears large, oversized sunglasses throughout her life. She poses in front of their yellow Corvette. She is casually elegant.
5. At the same time that Didion is controlled, her emotions are on the surface. She is enmeshed in her immediate family. John Dunne is her first reader, editor, and collaborator, as she is for him. Their offices at their home are next to each other.

She was also enmeshed with her daughter, Quintana, who struggles with separation as an adult. Joan struggled with separation from Quintana, not recognizing the mirror.

Quintana must have struggled with differentiation and identity as an adopted child of two well-regarded and well-known parents. Joan Didion was a foremost intellectual and writer, and John Dunne and Dominick, his brother, were both well-known crime writers. They come from a blue-blood Catholic family on the East Coast. Joan and John are also Hollywood scriptwriters for well-known movies, and Dominick had been a movie producer. Joan is a product of settlers from the Oregon Trail in California.

Didion undertook the psychiatric sessions in the interest of helping resolve the issues with Quintana, who was struggling with alcohol addiction and mental health issues in her 30s. It appears Quintana attended Hazelden and had some other addiction-related hospitalizations and treatments.

Disclosure: I managed addiction treatment programs for eight years and was an Alanon volunteer presenter to Hazelden parent programs. I was appalled at Joan Didion’s reaction as a parent to Quintana’s addiction struggles.

She criticizes Alanon’s commitment to its story arc, which is a fair criticism. She and John do not participate in the parents’ program, citing philosophical differences and not recognizing their perceived commitment (or not) to Quintana and her recovery. I felt they were careful of class differences, were elitist, but as a volunteer presenter, I recognized famous families in the program. Hazelden attracts participants from all over the country and from many backgrounds.

Quintana jokes about Joan’s two scotches before dinner. Joan Didion is a famously small person, under 100 pounds and maybe five feet tall.

Joan Didion and John Dunne created the lives they wanted, which many would envy. They had a California/New York life, a successful marriage, two successful careers. Talent came with discipline. Casual opportunities came to them through people they knew, publishing connections, and movie connections. They worked their network, but their network was also available to them. As a no-name writer, I was gobsmacked by their opportunities.

They had affluence, influence, effluence. This is not to say they were without worries. Health challenges and anxiety, and life predicaments came their way.

John and Joan agreed that their lives were all material. There is a line between exploitation and privacy that makes me uncomfortable in some of Joan’s writing, but tell-all is the expectation of the current culture. I was appalled by the question in the documentary to Joan about how she reacted when a small child was on psychedelics. (Joan Didion researched and wrote a seminal article on hippies in California.) Her response? “It was gold.” It was the kind of experience and material that writers wait for.

My first reaction would be to call Child Protective Services.

I had a peculiarly satisfied reaction to reading Notes to John, the smug reaction that compares the highs and lows of life lived. Joan Didion is a person I admire, but I don’t view her life as so extraordinarily different from my own. We each had advantages and disadvantages. I made different mistakes and different choices, perhaps less calculated choices. Joan had greater discipline and boundaries that are difficult to compare. Perhaps that is the biggest question I have remaining — what were her boundaries?

She is a better writer. She had talent from a young age, opportunity, and the willingness to seize that opportunity.

I am left admiring and puzzling.