Bookish Diversions: Not Done with Didion
Psychiatry Notes, Ethics of Posthumous Publishing, Among the Archive, More
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¶ Shrink-wrapped legacy. Joan Didion died in 2021, but we’re still not done with her. In the last few years publishers have given us biography, memoir, and critical studies about various aspects of her life. Most recently, we’ve been treated to her therapy notes.
“With each year, Didion becomes more enshrined as a literary Sibyl,” says James Wolcott, “her chic, dead-ahead stare in photographs and every utterance meme-ified and merchandised, the inspiration for a cottage industry of anecdotes and artifacts attending to the legacy of St. Joan of Sacramento.”
The latest artifact? Dispatches from the psychiatry couch, some 150 unnumbered pages discovered in a file by her desk after her death, ostensibly written to inform her husband John Gregory Dunne about sessions with her shrink. These notes have now been published under the title Notes to John.
Curiously, Dunne attended one of these sessions and thus presumably didn’t need Didion’s notes about it; the real question is, of course, whether the rest of us needed Didion’s notes either.
We could make the argument that the Didion’s therapy notes serve as a valuable historical or biographical document; I’m sure they’ll be read that way by a narrow set of readers. But as a literary product? I think that’s different.
“I read Notes to John with rapt attention and not a little queasiness,” says Taylor Antrim, writing in Vogue,
for there is barely any of Didion’s habit for misdirection in these pages, and only glimpses of her frequently oblique style. The entries are plainspoken, blunt, and even a bit quotidian, dwelling as they do on the difficulties she was experiencing with her adult daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne.
Antrim isn’t the only one to note the lack of literary quality in these entries. “Even when her writing felt emotionally raw and self-revelatory, it was always finely wrought,” says Gemma Nisbet about Didion’s prose. Such moments glint through these notes, which you might expect; Didion was Didion. But Nisbet walks away with “the sense of reading something not intended to be published in anything like its current form.” As evidence, she compares Notes to John to Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, written in the wake of Quintana’s tragic death.
The two books cover some of the same ground, though in a “markedly different” way. Says Nisbet,
Where Notes to John moves in a chronological fashion through time, Blue Nights mimics the workings of memory with its non-linearity. Notes to John feels, formally speaking, like exactly that: a series of notes or journal entries covering a specific span of time. Blue Nights, however, takes advantage of the expansive, hybrid possibilities of the essay to cast its net wider and tell a fuller story about love, parents and children, guilt and grief. . . . Notes to John’s forthrightness is thus a contrast to Didion’s classic nonfiction.
Should Notes to John have been published at all? Didion left no indication she wanted these reflections published. Then again, does that matter?
¶ When the dead still speak. Shakespeare had been dead for seven years when his friends John Heminge and Henry Condell published the First Folio. It was the first time many of the bard’s plays had been published, and there’s a good chance as many as eighteen of his works would have been lost to time if the pair hadn’t presumed to publish their old pal’s plays.
As Elizabeth Carr-Ellis points out, a similar story could be told of Samuel Pepys’s diaries, both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Jane Austen, most of Emily Dickinson’s poems, Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, and The Diary of Anne Frank.
Some of these were even published against the authors’ wishes. Dickinson wanted her papers torched at her death, but since she left no particular instruction on more than three dozen notebooks full of poetry, the family felt free to publish them. Kafka told his friend Max Brod to burn all his papers, including his stories; Brod refused.
Carr-Ellis notes that Philip Larkin approved of writers sending their own work up in smoke. “Really,” he said, “one should burn everything.” The publication of his own posthumous letters indicate that he failed to follow through on that conviction.
¶ A denial of the idea of memoir. Didion herself seemed unfriendly toward grave-robbing, criticizing the release of a posthumous novel by her teenage idol Ernest Hemingway. “You think something is in shape to be published or you don’t, and Hemingway didn’t,” Didion wrote in the New Yorker.
In a passage that seems to match the Notes to John situation almost exactly, she called the Hemingway publication
a denial of the idea of fiction, just as the publication of unfinished work is a denial of the idea that the role of the writer in his or her work is to make it. Those excerpts from “True at First Light” already published can be read only as something not yet made, notes, scenes in the process of being set down, words set down but not yet written. There are arresting glimpses here and there, fragments shored against what the writer must have seen as his ruin, and a sympathetic reader might well believe it possible that had the writer lived (which is to say had the writer found the will and energy and memory and concentration) he might have shaped the material, written it into being, made it work as the story the glimpses suggest, that of a man returning to a place he loved and finding himself at three in the morning confronting the knowledge that he is no longer the person who loved it and will never now be the person he had meant to be. But of course such a possibility would have been in the end closed to this particular writer, for he had already written that story, in 1936, and called it “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
It’s not hard to imagine Didion considering Notes to John as a denial of the idea of memoir, for she had already written its story and called it Blue Nights.
¶ From the depths. The source of these notes? The New York Public Library now houses the collected papers of Didion and husband Dunne—more than three hundred boxes, some 240 linear feet of manuscripts, outlines, notes, letters, telegrams, and family ephemera. One archivist compared the collection to the underside of an iceberg of which the published work is just the tip, a vast writerly id looming beneath the ego expressed in books, screenplays, and articles. It all goes back to the couch, I guess.
The best thing about the archive is the gobs of scholarship still to come. “There are 1,000 different ways of approaching [this collection] and as many researchers who will do that work,” said one assistant curator.
Elizabeth Barton dipped into its depths for insights into Didion’s first novel, to see how she came to write it particularly. “Much is said about Didion’s precision and carefulness,” she said. But the evidence of all that paper pulled from boxes tells a different story—a novel she feels dead certain about but then abandons to start another project, discussed with “a frenzy of energy,” only to be later abandoned after landing on what became her debut novel, Run River. “This glimpse at her early process,” said Barton, “reveals just how much we still get wrong.”
David L. Ulin notes one thing I find especially exciting: the now-visible collaboration styles of Didion and Dunne. How did this literary power couple work together? “The drafts and manuscripts of each bear notes in the other’s handwriting,” says Ulin, pointing to the example of Dunne’s novel Nothing Lost, for which Didion kept all her husband’s notes, drafts, research, and other working documents. With these papers now made public, their process, including its interpersonal side, can be studied.
Side note: Nothing Lost was published (clears throat) posthumously.
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Hi, I'm Erika Reily, I live in Corpus Christi, Texas with a lovely husband and a gaggle of wonderful children and I am an extremely amateur reader relative to most of you but yet it's my thing. My late uncle taught college writing for decades and something he said once about someone's scholastic performance always stuck with me: "She's doing fine but she doesn't think about it when she's not there." I've used that line many many times in discussing what makes people, including myself, tick, and what's between the covers of books is what I think about when I'm not there. So there is my introduction!
Regarding Joan: as for me, The Year of Magical Thinking was personal enough. The image of Dunne more or less falling over dead in their dining room when they sat down to eat on an ordinary Tuesday felt intrusive to me; of course it wasn't, as she choose to share it, but it was such a private moment. I happen to be finally reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem as this conversation unfolds. I like seeing things through her eyes; I'm not drawn to seeing herself or her marriage or her therapy experience or her mind through her eyes. Has anyone read Harp, by Dunne? It's been on my shelf since she mentioned it in Magical and I look forward to reading it. I'm not Irish but my husband is, and he's old enough to remember in his suburban New York childhood a faint sense of distaste toward Irish-Americans. I'm curious about this.
Brings to mind all those Beatles anthologies and similar.
Thank goodness most writers are obscure. It saves us from such temptation... 😅