51 pages • 1-hour read
Notes to John
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Key Figures
Joan Didion
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, substance use, addiction, illness, and death.
Joan Didion was an American author and literary icon. She was born in California in 1934 and died in New York in 2021. In Notes to John, the executors of her estate have made her personal diary entries on her psychiatric sessions public for the first time. The notes were “found in a small portable file near her desk” and detail Didion’s conversations with Dr. Roger MacKinnon during the first year or so of their work together (v). Although Didion would go on to work with Dr. MacKinnon until 2012 (shortly before he stopped practicing psychiatry), her heirs only uncovered this brief era of journalistic accounting in her things after her death. The literary world has debated the ethics of this publication, as Notes to John presents a vulnerable look at Didion’s private life that she never intended for public consumption.
The intimacy of the diary entries is reflected both in their content and Didion’s stylistic choices. Didion has written all of the notes to her late husband John Gregory Dunne, referring to him as “you” throughout the text. Her use of the direct address affects an intimate tone and underscores her abiding love for and trust in her husband. Didion hasn’t edited the notes. She often uses fragmentation, referring to portions of her and Dr. MacKinnon’s shorthand as brief asides. She most often ends the sessions abruptly. In one or two instances, she will describe what she was thinking in the immediate wake of her sessions; but most often the entries end with one of Dr. MacKinnon’s insights.
Didion lived with depression and anxiety throughout her life and viewed Writing as a Means of Survival. Admirers of Didion’s work and followers of her career will see these aspects of her psychology reflected in her other published works of fiction and nonfiction. Notes to John presents a more raw window into how Didion’s depression and anxiety manifested. On the one hand, much of Didion’s anxiety revolved around her relationship with her daughter Quintana. She lived in near-constant fear of losing Quintana—a concern that sits at the heart of the text’s thematic engagement with Navigating Mother-Daughter Relationships. In the narrative present of her sessions, this innate fear was augmented by Quintana’s addiction to alcohol and recurring suicidal ideations. These issues also intensified Didion’s depression. In particular, she became despairing and immobilized when she felt powerless to help Quintana. When she felt powerless she couldn’t write, and when she couldn’t write, she felt unmoored.
The sessions also stress the important role that writing played in Didion’s mental health. As Dr. MacKinnon put it, writing was “crucial to [Didion’s] own survival” (146). Throughout her life, she used her creative practice as a way to either escape or process her emotions. Notes to John allows the reader to witness this entanglement between Didion’s writing life and mental well-being.
Quintana
Quintana was Didion’s daughter. Didion and Dunne adopted Quintana shortly after her birth in 1966. Throughout the majority of Quintana’s life, she had no contact with her biological family. In Notes to John, Didion addresses how difficult it was when Quintana’s biological sister reached out to her in 1982. Quintana ended up spending time with the family in Texas. Except for her sister, almost all of Quintana’s biological relatives struggled with addiction to alcohol. In therapy, Didion speculated that this revelation became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Quintana—as if she had no choice but to drink because of her biology. Throughout Notes to John, Didion and Dr. MacKinnon explore the role of nature versus nurture in Quintana’s sense of self. They also delve into how being adopted might still be impacting Quintana’s psychology. For example, Dr. MacKinnon suggests in one session that Quintana could be as afraid of losing Didion and Dunne as Didion feels of losing Quintana. (Dr. MacKinnon also speculated that Didion’s fear of losing Quintana related to her own deep-seated belief that she didn’t deserve good things from life.)
Throughout the 2000-2002 era detailed in Notes to John, Quintana was living with depression and a reliance on alcohol. These personal challenges immediately affected her relationship with Didion. Didion lived with the constant anxiety that something terrible would happen to Quintana as a result of her mental state. When Quintana was drinking, she had more prevalent suicidal ideations. She was also less able to care for herself, to work, to maintain friendships, and to communicate effectively. Dr. MacKinnon often encouraged Didion to let Quintana’s psychiatrist Dr. Kass work through these issues with Quintana or to let Quintana make her own decisions, but he also gave credence to Didion’s anxieties by allowing her to express her concerns in their sessions.
Quintana worked as a photographer for various magazines. Throughout Notes to John, Didion details Quintana’s fraught relationship with her work. Although she at times acknowledged her skills as a photographer, she also expressed her fear of failure and rejection to her mother. She would repeatedly get stuck with a particular job or assignment. She would abandon her work altogether when she was feeling emotionally low. In her sessions, Didion told Dr. MacKinnon that she would at times get frustrated with Quintana’s inability to use her work to improve her outlook on life. Didion essentially wished that Quintana could relate to her photography in the same way that she related to her writing.
Quintana died in 2005 after a series of medical complications. She first contracted the flu, which led to pneumonia, septic shock, a subdural hematoma, and pancreatitis. Didion details this trying era in her book Blue Nights (which is a reflection on Didion and Quintana’s relationship and Quintana’s death). As the afterword suggests, Didion couldn’t reconcile with what happened to Quintana—unable to understand if her fate was the result of Quintana’s substance use or unfortunate medical mishaps.
John Gregory Dunne
John Gregory Dunne was Didion’s husband and Quintana’s father. In Notes to John, Didion addresses all of her diary entries to John. She uses the first person direct address, referring to John as “you” throughout. Didion only notes that John attended one of her therapy sessions with Dr. MacKinnon, but his presence pervades the text in the form of the second-person pronouns. By writing her therapy notes to John, Didion unconsciously enacts her and her husband’s marked intimacy. The sessions were meant as Didion’s private therapeutic journey, but her style and point of view suggest that she wanted John to be a part of this journey, too.
John was also a writer. He was working at Time when he and Didion met in the 1950s. They went on to marry in 1964 and remained together until John’s death in 2003. Throughout Notes to John, Didion repeatedly remarks on the similarities between her and John’s relationships to writing. Both she and John used writing to cope with life’s challenges. Because of their marked closeness, the two would often arrange their schedules similarly so they were working at the same time. In one session, she tells Dr. MacKinnon how she and John started working through the weekends to avoid feeling anxious and overwhelmed on Sundays. Didion also repeatedly refers to her and John’s work on various films. Most notably, the couple collaborated on the films The Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976), and True Confessions (1981). Despite these cinematic successes, Didion admits that neither she nor John enjoyed making movies and only did so to pay the bills.
Didion’s diaries also capture the way Quintana perceived Didion and John as a couple. According to Dr. MacKinnon and Dr. Kass, Quintana struggled with the fact that her parents always seemed to agree. At times, this made it difficult for her to communicate with her parents as individuals. In therapy, Didion acknowledges this dynamic and asserts that this is how she always understood healthy parental and marital dynamics to look. Didion’s relationship with John was therefore a defining aspect of how she understood herself as an individual, a writer, and a mother.
Dr. Roger MacKinnon
Dr. Roger MacKinnon was Didion’s therapist and their sessions together highlight the benefits and limitations of Confronting Mental Health in a Therapeutic Setting. She started seeing him in 1999 after Quintana told her therapist Dr. Kass that she thought Didion needed psychiatric help due to her depression. Didion would go on to work with Dr. MacKinnon until 2012. However, Notes to John only details her and Dr. MacKinnon’s sessions from late 1999 through early 2002.
Dr. MacKinnon was a notable psychiatrist in New York throughout his career. A footnote at the end of Chapter 45 references his New York Times obituary, which identified him as “‘one of the most skilled clinicians of his era’” (201). He was also known “as an old-fashioned Freudian” and “a staunch defender of talk therapy” (201). These aspects of his background are reflected in his conversations with Didion. Didion devotes large swathes of her diaries to recounting Dr. MacKinnon’s assessments of her situation or proposals for her growth and change. The space she gives Dr. MacKinnon’s words implies that Didion trusted Dr. MacKinnon’s point of view and found his direction valuable.
Throughout Notes to John, Dr. MacKinnon particularly advises Didion on her relationship with her daughter Quintana, acting as her proverbial guide throughout the text. He primarily does so by encouraging her to delve into her childhood and maternal relationship. He challenges Didion to examine her past as a means of understanding her life, outlook, and relationships in the present. While Dr. MacKinnon urges Didion towards self-confrontation, he also treats her gently. He repeatedly lauds her successes, offers perspective on her character, and creates parallels between her experience and his own.
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