NOTES TO JOHN, by Joan Didion
After Joan Didion died, a first-person record of her psychiatric sessions with Dr. Roger MacKinnon was found lurking temptingly in a box near her desk. Is their publication, in the form of a slim new book called “Notes to John,” unethical?
I don’t think so. Famous writers — especially those who were part-time journalists — know they need to dispose of their papers if they don’t want them ogled, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. (See Paul Moran, or as The Atlantic called him, “The Man Who Made Off With John Updike’s Trash.”) In 2025, we should be saying hallelujah that people still want to see these and not just some influencer’s nudes.
Further: The other principals exposed here — Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, to whom the notes are nominally addressed; their troubled daughter, Quintana Roo, a magazine photo editor and photographer; and MacKinnon — are also dead. Didion herself gave us a front-row seat to this grim parade of mortality in the best-selling “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which was made into a play, and “Blue Nights” (2011). You can imagine “Notes to John” completing the trilogy, even sliding neatly into a Boxed Set of Bereavement.
This material is also available in the couple’s archive that was recently opened at the New York Public Library, with no restrictions on access. Do we really think Didion would prefer some bumbling biographer quoting and interpreting it to the spare treatment (a few footnotes) of her trusted imprimatur, the Knopf borzoi? Like Janet Jackson, she loved control. The words “control” and “controlling” appear in “Notes to John” some 50 times.
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The book begins in late December 1999 and ends in early January 2002, with a small, sad postscript taken from Didion’s computer, recounting a session she and Quintana had with the latter’s own psychiatrist, a Dr. Kass. He was the one who’d suggested that psychoanalysis for Didion might be helpful for Quintana, who was adopted as an infant and may have had a genetic predisposition to alcoholism.
This was not Didion’s first encounter with mental-health professionals. She presented MacKinnon, a Freudian who also drew from behaviorism and the work of Melanie Klein, with notes from a couple of sessions with a psychologist she saw in 1955 as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, when mulling whether to leave her sorority and fretting about her father. Unmentioned is the excerpt from the psychiatric report she included in “The White Album,” after an episode of “nausea and vertigo” in response to Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 sent her to the hospital.
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