51 pages • 1-hour read
Notes to John
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Introduction-Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of substance use, suicidal ideation, addiction, depression, and anxiety.
Didion’s diary entries use both the past and present tenses. These summaries preserve these same tense shifts.
Introduction Summary
After Didion died in 2021, the heirs of her estate (her brother’s children) discovered unpublished pages in her office. They brought the pages to the New York Public Library, where they’re now accessible to the public. In Notes to John, select pages have been collected into a pseudo diary. The pages detail some of Didion’s sessions with her psychiatrist, Dr. Roger MacKinnon. She began working with him in 1999 and documented their conversations in personal journal entries which she addressed to her husband John Gregory Dunne. These entries detail Didion and Dr. MacKinnon’s conversations about Didion and her daughter Quintana’s relationship and Didion’s childhood. In a separate computer file, Didion remarked on the transformative nature of her and Dr. MacKinnon’s work.
Chapter 1 Summary: “29 December 1999”
Didion and Dr. MacKinnon discuss her dosage of Zoloft, an SSRI antidepressant medication. She’s worried about changing her medication, lest it make her lose control or worsen her anxiety. The conversation shifts to Didion’s anxieties over Quintana, now 33 years old, who struggles with alcoholism. Dr. MacKinnon suggests that Didion is too attached to Quintana. Didion admits that she’s “always been afraid” of losing her and has done everything to protect her (4). Dr. MacKinnon suggests this fear originates from Didion’s core belief that she’s undeserving of good things.
Chapter 2 Summary: “5 January 2000”
Didion and Dr. MacKinnon talk about Didion’s reliance on her work. She often turns to writing to ward off anxiety, particularly over Quintana. However, this year she’s found it hard to work at all. Didion goes on to describe a recent incident with Quintana where she and John thought something had happened to her because she wasn’t in her apartment when they arrived. They assumed Quintana had been drinking and found blood on the floor. Although she’s been attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, Didion and John are skeptical of the program.
Dr. MacKinnon encourages Didion to talk openly about AA with Quintana. He also recommends they talk about love, worry, and trust.
Chapter 3 Summary: “15 January 2000”
Didion returns to the topic of trust in mother-daughter relationships. She found a note in her things about her mother, which relates to the subject. She shows it to Dr. MacKinnon. He remarks on its insights and suggests that Didion’s relationship with her mother provides insight into her relationship with Quintana.
Didion goes on to describe her continued frustration with Quintana. Now that she’s drinking again, she’s become more distant and resistant to going to AA. Dr. MacKinnon suggests that Didion’s mistrust of the program might be impacting Quintana. He encourages her to talk to Quintana about AA. Quintana also might not see herself as a child and might be worried about showing vulnerability when she feels responsible for Didion’s care.
Chapter 4 Summary: “19 January 2000”
Didion tells Dr. MacKinnon about her recent conversation with Quintana. She showed her the notes she wrote about her mother and admitted she had a fear of groups, which might be impacting her regard for AA. Quintana admitted she didn’t want to go because she thought Didion disapproved. They then agreed to attend a meeting together.
Dr. MacKinnon commends Didion’s work in communicating with Quintana. He also tells her about his recent conversation with Dr. Kass, Quintana’s psychologist—the doctors and clients had agreed to talk openly while Quintana and Didion worked through their relationship. Dr. Kass informed Dr. MacKinnon that Quintana often saw Didion and John as a single person and found it difficult to communicate with them as individuals. Didion admits that she and John have always been a unified front. She recalls the one time she and John got upset, which made Quintana cry. Didion promised to leave him, but Quintana begged her not to. Dr. MacKinnon asserts that Quintana was afraid of their divorce because she was adopted and didn’t want to lose her family. She also may have needed to express her anger in a safe space.
Dr. MacKinnon suggests that Didion and Quintana spend more one-on-one time together. Didion agrees they could go to her niece’s wedding without John. The conversation then shifts to anger, guilt, and worry.
Chapter 5 Summary: “2 February 2000”
Didion tells Dr. MacKinnon about an AA meeting she attended with Quintana. Although still skeptical of AA, Didion was glad they ran into Quintana’s friend Julie. The conversation shifts to depression and whether or not a depressed individual can summon the strength to feel better.
The conversation shifts to Didion’s father’s depression. Didion’s mother recently gave her letters he’d written years before. There were some letters between Didion and her mother, too. He served during World War II, and it was hard for him to readjust to life at home afterward. Didion remembers one time he asked her to drop him at Golden Gate Park. In retrospect, she wonders if he wanted to die by suicide, but she hadn’t thought of it at the time. Dr. MacKinnon wonders how these dynamics are impacting Didion’s regard for Quintana’s situation.
Chapter 6 Summary: “9 February 2000”
Didion admits that last week’s conversation about death by suicide upset her. She’s been thinking about it a lot and about her childhood past. She once tried writing a book about California called “Fairy Tales” but couldn’t do it because she didn’t want to revisit her family history. Dr. MacKinnon speculates as to why.
The conversation turns to Didion, John, and Quintana’s dinner this past Friday. While the dinner was okay, Quintana’s call on Saturday worried Didion. Quintana had gotten a letter from a friend saying she had attempted to die by suicide. Didion and John tried keeping Quintana on the phone to support her. Didion was afraid for her but didn’t want Quintana to think she was controlling. However, when Quintana stopped answering the phone, Didion was terrified she’d died by suicide. Dr. MacKinnon muses on Quintana’s behavior. He also reassures Didion, reminding her how much she is going through. The conversation shifts to adoption and the constant desire to help the child overcome their fraught history.
Chapter 7 Summary: “16 February 2000”
Didion admits that it’s been a hard week; she’s constantly worried about Quintana and expecting the worst to happen. Dr. MacKinnon urges her to dissect this thinking. Didion guesses that she’s thought this way since she was a child. Instead of wedding fantasies, she had divorce fantasies. She and her family moved constantly during the war, too. They started traveling from station to station whenever her father was reassigned. Her father felt guilty for not being sent overseas, but Didion was terrified of him being sent away. Finally, Didion, her mother, and her brother returned home to live with her grandmother. When her dad later returned, he struggled to readjust to family life. Dr. Mackinnon asserts that her anticipation of losing her father might be causing her to anticipate losing Quintana. However, he reminds Didion that worried parents make for worried children.
Chapter 8 Summary: “1 March 2000”
Didion relays her worries from the past week. Quintana hasn’t been as communicative and has refused to call back Susanna Moore (Didion and John’s writer friend who Quintana always got along with). She and John want to invite her over for her birthday but don’t want to pressure her. Dr. MacKinnon encourages Didion to let Quintana have her own life.
The conversation turns back to Didion’s childhood. She doesn’t remember feeling abandoned and insists her experiences were normal because of the war. However, she did often feel lonely because they moved so often. Dr. MacKinnon notices Didion’s mood change. She says she’s just tired.
Chapter 9 Summary: “8 March 2000”
Didion shares some notes she wrote after meeting with another psychologist in 1955. She remarks on how similar these conversations were to her and Dr. MacKinnon’s conversations. They discuss Didion’s reasons for not continuing with the psychologist. The conversation shifts to separation and attachment, and how it relates to Didion and Quintana’s relationship.
In the 1955 notes, Didion and the Doctor discussed the alienation Didion has felt since childhood as well as her obsession with time, order, and control.
Chapter 10 Summary: “15 March 2000”
Didion and Dr. MacKinnon continue their conversation about dependency. Didion admits she has an “investment in Quintana’s dependency” (48). As long as Quintana needs Didion, Didion feels young and powerful. She also admits that if Quintana needs her, she doesn’t have to feel guilty for not being more engaged. She has always worked constantly, which has taken her away from Quintana. They go on to discuss how Didion can form a healthier attachment with Quintana. Dr. MacKinnon says that overprotecting Quintana only stalls her growth.
Introduction-Chapter 10 Analysis
The opening chapters of Notes to John lay out the structure and form, stakes, and themes of the text. The introductory section offers the reader context for Didion’s diary entries, which she describes as notes “on sessions with [her] psychiatrist” (v). Written as a part of Didion’s private journal, the included pages provide an intimate glimpse into Didion’s personal life—particularly as it pertained to her relationship with her daughter Quintana in the early 2000s. Didion’s discussion of her emotions, fears, and anxieties maps her attempts to develop healthy familial relationships even as she and her daughter navigate depression, anxiety, and addiction. The fact that Didion’s diary entries were published without her or her daughter’s consent introduces questions about the ethics of making private writings public after a writer’s death.
Didion’s ongoing conversations with Dr. MacKinnon about Quintana introduce the text’s thematic exploration of Navigating Mother-Daughter Relationships. Didion’s entries detail attempts by her daughter and herself to make sense of their profound attachment to one another. Dr. MacKinnon notes that Didion’s habit of conflating love and protection with control and worry and her subsequent reflections on trust in mother-daughter relationships provide insight into Didion and Quintana’s distinct dynamic:
I said that at the end of the hour last week he had said something about trust or lack of trust between mothers and daughters—feeling trusted being the key to separation, to growing up—that I had discovered as not relevant, not meaningful to me. I said that however it had stuck in my mind, and later that evening or the next day I had remembered a note I had made […] about my mother. I had looked it up, and it was interesting, because it seemed to indicate some distrust or misunderstanding between my mother and me (10).
As Didion begins to make a connection between her relationship with her mother and her understanding of herself as a mother, her perspective on her relationship with her daughter begins to shift. By returning to her writings about her mother, Didion finds insight into her own maternal psychology. Confronting the ways she related to her mother allows Didion to see the ways she’s continued that dynamic with Quintana, highlighting the ways that mother-daughter relationships can fall into generational cycles, particularly if unhealthy patterns aren’t addressed. Because Didion’s mother didn’t trust or respect her, Didion unconsciously distrusted Quintana. Failing to recognize this pattern has kept Didion from acknowledging and addressing it.
Didion’s use of direct address throughout her diary entries creates an intimate narrative tone. As shown in the above passage, Didion recounts her and Dr. MacKinnon’s conversation about maternal dynamics on the page as if she is speaking directly to her husband John. The introduction clarifies this stylistic choice, asserting that John “is the ‘you’ in the manuscript” (v). By writing from this point of view, Didion conveys her deep love and trust for John and her desire to process her and Quintana’s relationship with her husband. Privately divulging the content of her and Dr. MacKinnon’s therapy sessions to her husband lets her process her sessions with someone she trusts.
Didion’s deep connection with John, underscored by the intimacy of her address, informs her struggle to interact with Quintana not as one part of a united parental front, but as an individual. She admits that she and John “will [not] take an independent stand” and often “defend each other against [Quintana],” because this is how she believes “parents [are] supposed to present themselves to their children” (15). The authorial stance, voice, and tone of the entries reflect this manner of thinking. The first-person direct address affects an illusory intimacy between Didion and her reader. Although Didion’s pages were not meant to be published, the second-person pronouns give the text a mutable and multivalent quality, allowing the illusion that Didion is writing directly to the reader. As a result, the therapeutic lessons Didion learns in her private sessions function as tools that readers can apply to their own experiences.
Didion’s relationship with Dr. MacKinnon and their discussion of depression, anxiety, and addiction throughout these chapters illustrates the process of Confronting Mental Health in a Therapeutic Setting. Except for her brief psychoanalysis in the 1950s, Didion’s conversations with Dr. MacKinnon are her introduction to professional therapy. Notes to John traces Didion’s attempts to work through her psychology in a new way. Instead of simply “mov[ing] on,” “muddl[ing] through,” and “control[ling] the situation through [her] work and [her] competency,” Didion takes active steps to address her mental health (4). Although the focus of their sessions is her relationship with Quintana, Dr. MacKinnon’s questions about Didion’s family of origin push her to engage with and confront her childhood and past trauma.
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