Notes to John
About This Book
In late 1999, Joan Didion started seeing a psychiatrist. The reason she gave a friend was that her family had come through "a rough few years." After each appointment she wrote up what had been said and kept the pages in a journal made for her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. This book collects those notes. Didion set down the conversations over several months in painstaking detail. The early sessions circle around alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety and guilt, and above all the tangled, painful bond with her daughter, Quintana. Over time the talk widens to take in her writing, which she found hard to sustain for long stretches, and her own childhood. She describes failures to understand or reach her mother and father, and a habit, from early on, of expecting the worst. Underneath it all runs a question about legacy, which she phrased as "what it's been worth." The therapy itself went on for more than ten years. The result is a side of Didion that readers have not met before, far more private than anything she published in her lifetime. Yet the voice is unmistakably hers: exact, searching and unflinching, even when the subject is hard to look at. For readers of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, it offers a closer and rawer view of the woman behind those books.
ISBN: 9780593803677
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