Notes to John

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of depression and anxiety.

Throughout Didion’s private diary entries on her sessions with Dr. MacKinnon, she attempts to heal her relationship with her daughter Quintana by confronting her personal history. The introductory section establishes Didion and Quintana’s relationship as the heart of Didion’s therapy, highlighting the fact that Quintana herself encouraged Didion to seek therapy at the request of her own psychiatrist:

Some of the subjects in the journal appear in Blue Nights, the last book Didion wrote, which was a meditation on her daughter’s life. Didion had started seeing MacKinnon because Quintana had told her own psychiatrist that her mother was depressed and should talk to someone. He felt that the mother/daughter relationship was at the core of Quintana’s problems, which he was not having much success resolving (v-vi).

In the subsequent entries, Didion openly discusses her concern for Quintana’s well-being, while Dr. MacKinnon interrogates her inherited modes of relating to her daughter. The object of the therapy is to understand why Didion and Quintana communicate the way they do, and how their relational patterns relate to both Didion’s and Quintana’s understandings of themselves.

Didion’s open and honest way of talking about Quintana during therapy reveals her deep and abiding love for her daughter.