Joan Didion, Thomas Powers observed after she died aged 87 in 2021, is “almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear what she means to say” – including to her, one might add. Bluntness and a certain opacity, exactitude and elusiveness, even avoidance: this paradoxical blend, as Didion’s iconic status attests, proved to be culturally intoxicating. She set the forthright, cagey tone as early as her first, reputation-making essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In her reluctant preface, she complains that after the title essay was published, “I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through.”
Didion learned to write by typing out Hemingway’s stories as a teenager, and later by writing copy, especially captions, for Vogue, where she worked in her twenties. Hemingway’s “perfect sentences”, she said, “taught me how sentences worked”: “Very direct sentences, smooth rivers, clear water over granite, no sinkholes.” It’s a seductive, telling image: a cool, transparent medium through which you glide; no snags or hidden depths; nothing to drag you beneath the surface; nothing, as she put it of Henry James’s long, complicated sentences (“sentences with sinkholes”), in which you could “drown”. Her exacting editor at Vogue (“Run it through again, sweetie”) would “get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working”: “everything had to work, every word, every comma”.
“Work”: not make every word “tell” (let alone “mean”), as Strunk and White’s classic style guide has it, but work together, as in a well-oiled machine, or work on its own terms – as though the ideal were a kind of internal harmony, a functional coherence. It’s an emphasis in keeping with Didion’s keen sense of writing as a technical craft. A writer was to her “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper”, as she put it in her beguiling, somewhat baffling 1976 essay “Why I Write” – not an inaccurate definition but a partial one, leaving open the possibility that writers could be collagists of nonsense. Didion explains that she has little idea what she’s going to say until she says it. She claims to be unable to “think” and to be without “even limited access to my own mind”. An enigma to herself, writing is a route to eloquent self-discovery: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.”
She worked backwards from the sounds of the sentences. Writing for Didion was akin to writing music (“grammar is a piano I play by ear”). “The arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on,” she explained, dogmatic about her intuitive methods: “Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.” The beauty and potency of Didion’s prose is indeed partly down to its strong, dramatic cadences. But the drift of her sentences was not always as clear as they sounded, and the relationship between the music and the meaning would later seem more complicated. If in 1976 Didion could enthuse that “all I know about grammar is its infinite power”, by the time of her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, she was sounding a more equivocal note: “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” It’s an appropriately ambiguous, indeed “increasingly impenetrable” sentence. Note the unsatisfying seam – a little “sinkhole”? – between the clauses: to what exactly does “technique” refer? Writing is no longer a way of finding out what you think. Now, Didion already knows “whatever it was I thought”, and regards rhythm as a way of “withholding” it: a means not of discovering your meanings but hiding them.
By the time of her last book, Blue Nights (2011), Didion found that writing by ear – letting the “rhythm tell me what it was I was saying” – “no longer comes easily to me”. She at first puts it down to a “certain weariness with my own style”, “a wish to be more direct”, even for an “absence of style”, but she fears it is simply “frailty”: “What if I can never again locate the words that work?” Blue Nights is indeed a frailer, less musical, altogether less accomplished book. “I need to talk to you directly”; “Let me again try to talk to you directly,” she says repeatedly – sentences that don’t sound as perfect, as self-possessed, as direct as her earlier “smooth rivers”. Didion eventually acknowledges that the book’s subject – the death of her adopted daughter, at 39 – is exacerbating her problem: “Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.”
Blue Nights was in a sense Didion’s second effort to be direct about this “area” (itself a strikingly nebulous, evasive word). The Year of Magical Thinking was written in the aftermath of the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, but it had also been in part about their daughter, who had become seriously ill and was admitted to hospital a few days before Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack. It was the beginning of many months in and out of ICUs in what Didion, in Blue Nights, calls Quintana’s “cascade of medical crises”. She would die of acute pancreatitis in 2005, while Didion was promoting The Year of Magical Thinking.
That famous memoir is a riveting study of a reeling mind, an exercise in clinical self-scrutiny, a rational record of Didion’s irrational ruminations: obsessively rehearsing the details of Dunne’s death, in search of evidence that would relieve her of her feelings of responsibility and allow her to relinquish the secret hope that he might come back. It is full of penetrating reflections and wrenching details: plugging Dunne’s phone into charge when she gets back from the hospital, keeping his shoes because “he would need shoes if he was to return”. Despite its searing intensity – this is writing to find out what you are thinking at its most captivating – Magical Thinking is not especially confessional, as though an inquiry into a grieving mind that only happens to be hers. Quintana is a particularly elusive presence, and the reader is left in the dark about the extent of her recovery. There is “a sense of things missing”, as Martin Amis observed of The White Album in 1980.
Blue Nights is only somewhat more forthcoming. We learn of Quintana’s “startling depths and shallows” as a child, “the quicksilver changes of mood”. Didion refers, grudgingly, to her daughter’s various “diagnoses” (eventually “borderline personality disorder” – Didion won’t waive the quote marks). She refers only once to her daughter’s alcohol addiction, with a characteristic mix of clarity and circumlocution: “She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.” As in Magical Thinking, the introspection is abstracted. One of the refrains of the book runs: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” Talking about Quintana is in part a way of talking about other things, and those things, perhaps, a way of not talking about Quintana.
Notes to John, the first book to emerge from Didion’s archive, plugs the gaps, to say the least. It is the most direct book Didion wrote – or rather, pointedly didn’t write – on the “area” about which she found it so difficult to be direct. It is a journal, apparently kept for her husband, recording regular sessions with a psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, beginning in late 1999. She started seeing MacKinnon at the suggestion of Quintana’s psychiatrist (“Dr Kass”), who thought it might help Quintana, then in her mid-thirties, severely depressed and drinking heavily (“really a hardcore alcoholic”, as Kass tells MacKinnon at one point – the two are in communication). Didion is herself “very depressed”, racked by the suffering of her daughter, before which she feels helpless.
The release of material that Didion carefully preserved (apparently typed up and chronologically organised in a filing cabinet next to her desk) but did not choose to make public is controversial. That her memoirs are selective with detail appears to have been, in Magical Thinking especially, a conscious formal decision, and there a highly effective one: isolating grief as a psychological phenomenon with thrilling precision, rather than dilating on her family circumstances. Regarding Quintana, reticence was presumably also a matter of compassionate discretion.
Whether or not it was right to publish it, Notes to John is an undeniably interesting book, if not an obviously stylish one. It reads as a functional chronicle of Didion’s exchanges with MacKinnon, delivered as “directly and flatly” as she perhaps ever mustered, though its seeming completeness, its level of detail, does imply virtuosity: namely, astonishing powers of recall, as Didion charts seemingly every turn in their conversation, including reproducing whole paragraphs of MacKinnon’s speech. Their sessions range widely, from Didion’s early childhood – her sadness and fear when her father enlisted in the war (she stopped growing), his depression when he returned – to her feelings about adopting Quintana (always afraid she would lose her and so invested in her dependency) and her attitude to work (the best salve for anxiety yet invented, according to MacKinnon). But it is also a gruelling account of the cyclical patterns of Quintana’s affliction (“Every four to six weeks a crisis, an opening, then the withdrawal, the distancing”). The best way Didion can help Quintana, MacKinnon suggests, is by accepting that she can’t. To “break” the pattern of overprotection and overdependency Didion must accept their separateness. “You can’t protect her anymore… What she needs is your trust.” Children grow up, MacKinnon says, by coming “to trust that their parents trust them”.
Since the journal is almost entirely reported speech, with no commentary, Didion herself is an oddly absent presence, the subject and the narrator but somehow not quite either. One close friend, objecting to the publication of the book, said they could not “think of anything more private than notes kept about one’s psychiatry sessions”. There are sensitive revelations: Didion reveals she was secretly treated for cancer. At one point she admits to having the “extremely upsetting” thought that she “didn’t like” her daughter. There are also intimate details of a more banal variety (Didion and Dunne give Quintana $100,000 for Christmas; by the end of the journal the money is running out). But do even unspeakable thoughts really count as revelations? We may not make a habit of publicising our hurtful ambivalences, but that they exist is not exactly shocking. What’s more, the therapeutic context is generalising, a setting in which innermost patterns are interpreted according to an impersonal framework, an idea of how minds and families work.
The quantity of arresting and widely applicable insights makes Notes to John a profound, rich document. Any sense of prying is counter-balanced by the definite feeling that you are learning about more than the particular unhappiness of Didion’s family. Didion herself has rarely seemed so sympathetic in her own writing. Perhaps we are all sympathetic on the couch – there, we are the ones telling the story (in Didion’s case, twice over: telling and then telling the telling). As her famous line has it, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”, to make our lives liveable.
The literary merits of Notes to John are harder to appraise – it’s so neutral and unvarnished that there is little sense of writing as “a performance” (as Didion once described it). Yet that it is such a readable narrative suggests there may be more craft involved than meets the eye. Perhaps Didion here perfected the “absence of style” she would seek at the end of her career. One can only speculate about her wishes, conscious or unconscious: what to make of her leaving the entries neatly by her desk, or neglecting to destroy them when she can’t have been unaware of the coming onslaught of posthumous interest in every scrap she left behind. Maybe there were things part of her wanted the world to know but that she was unable to say to us – directly. Or perhaps she simply didn’t know what she thought.
Notes to John
Joan Didion
4th Estate, 208pp, £18.99
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[See also: Brian Friel’s vanishing world]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer