First Thought, (Not) Best Thought

Noah Rawlings considers Joan Didion’s “Notes to John.”

“WE FORGET all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,” Didion writes in her 1968 essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” A notebook, per Didion, is an antidote to personal oblivion. It helps you keep in touch with your former selves. It is existentially useful, but only to its keeper, since the details noted therein are clustered with associations detectible by and significant to its author alone. Because of this, Didion says, “your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.”

Knopf announced the posthumous release of Didion’s diary, published as Notes to John, on February 5 (the book appeared on April 22). Coincident with this announcement was the construction of a narrative about the diary’s significance, its charge, its relationship to the body of work Didion published in her lifetime. The story was an old one. It told us the diary would be a transparent window onto the true nature of a writer whose essence was somehow obscured by her work itself. Unlike that work, the diary would be, the publicists and journalists told us, “raw,” “vulnerable,” and “unfiltered.” It would be “open” and “astonishingly intimate.” It would reveal “the person behind the revered literary persona” and grant us “a peek into Didion’s psyche.” Nothing withheld, nothing omitted, nothing suppressed. Here at last: the true Didion, the intemperate face behind the impeccable mask!

All those labels—intimate, unfiltered, raw, vulnerable—are meant to entice. Their valence is positive. It’s not self-evident, however, that this should be so. Critics have called John Steinbeck’s diary “intense,” Christopher Isherwood’s “self-aware,” and David Sedaris’s “considered.” You encounter such verbal stamps, and you realize that vulnerability and rawness are not the qualities readers inherently find, or look for, in all diaries.

Intimacy, openness, rawness. The story told by these tender terms depends on another—that of the supposed remoteness and “cool detachment” present in Didion’s journalism and memoirs, the fact, in the words of Knopf’s editor in chief, that her writing “derived part of its electricity from […] what she withholds.” Yet this seems to me a bizarre frame through which to see the author of two books about grieving her loved ones’ deaths (2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking and 2011’s Blue Nights), one book in large part about her family history (2003’s Where I Was From), and an essay in which she excerpts her own medical report from “the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s hospital in Santa Monica” (1979’s “The White Album”). Each of these personal revelations, of course, is made with an eye to its reception by an audience; each serves a functional role in the piece where it’s placed. This does not negate their genuinely “vulnerable,” “open” character. If this character is now obscure or imperceptible, it has something to do with our narrow ideas about the form in which vulnerability and openness may be expressed. It has to do with how we interpret Didion’s style.

That style is composed of “orderly, crisp sentences patterned, not on women writers, but on Ernest Hemingway,” the historian Claire Potter has professed. Hers was “strong” and “masculine” writing, this magazine has previously averred. This is our received idea of Didion. It is misguided. To describe the prose of a woman as “masculine” because it is “crisp” and “orderly” and “strong,” or even because it is indebted to Hemingway, is to artificially circumscribe the field of what may be considered “feminine.” You can hear in these mischaracterizations echoes of old patriarchal dictates. Or you can hear in them reminders of outmoded feminist dictates, of the kind found in Hélène Cixous’s ideal of “écriture féminine.” Women write in “waves,” “torrents,” “floods,” and “rivers.” Women write without “discern[ible] contours” and “never hold back [their] thoughts.” Didion failed, in her published work, to produce contourless floods; she failed to “never hold back.” So we failed, in turn, to see (or remember?) that her oeuvre was often astonishingly self-exposing and confessional, until a book came along that promised a break from the supposedly “masculine” Didion we knew, promised code words—intimate, vulnerable, raw—for some essentialized “feminine” quality we felt to be lacking in her earlier novels and nonfiction.

Notes to John is a diary of a peculiar kind. Written by Didion between December 29, 1999, and January 9, 2003, it consists of 46 entries addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, about her sessions with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist was Roger MacKinnon, a Freudian who saw his task as “the healing of the soul.” In this case, there were three intertwined souls to be healed: Didion’s, Dunne’s, and their adopted daughter Quintana Roo’s. For one to be healed, all would have to be healed, for their problems were in part those of codependence. Quintana was addicted to drinking, to the point that she came, in her thirties, to rely on her parents for money and the execution of quotidian errands, which reliance her parents frequently obliged out of misapplied love and concern, which obliging perpetuated her reliance. A cycle, a knot, a feedback loop. “You’re allowing [Quintana] to hold you prisoner, which in turn imprisoners her,” MacKinnon tells Didion in one meeting. Didion wanted to help Quintana break out of this prison by breaking out of it herself. She turned to therapy to understand her own psychic baggage, in order to prevent it from exacerbating her daughter’s.

Throughout Notes, we see Didion’s baggage discovered where Freudians are wont to seek it: in childhood, and in the defense mechanisms, fantasies, and anxieties developed therein. We tend to get there in three steps. First, MacKinnon identifies a behavior or position of Didion’s that obstructs Quintana’s recovery (Didion’s skepticism of Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance). This position is then found to be a single instantiation of a larger belief system or set of assumptions (Didion’s general mistrust of all groups). Finally, this belief system is followed to its presumed roots in Didion’s past (“some distrust or misunderstanding between my mother and me,” or feeling “extremely isolated” due to an itinerant, military-brat childhood). The diary thus oscillates between daughter and mother, mother and the child she once was, slowly rendering, if not unraveling, an intergenerational psychic tangle. “These patterns go back for generations,” MacKinnon says in Didion’s 27th session. By diary’s end, we have seen MacKinnon analyze Didion’s dreams about mothering, we have seen Didion relinquish some of her hang-ups to accompany her daughter to AA meetings, and we have seen Quintana quit an unfulfilling job and leave a bad boyfriend—but not shed her addiction.

So, in Notes to John, a private family affair is now broadcast to the world. This has led some critics to call the book “disturbing” and “sordid,” and to assert that the diary “should never have been published.” These strike me as rather alarmist reactions to the posthumous release of a work by a writer who believed that “the risk of publication is the grave fact of the [writer’s] life.” It was a risk Didion accepted as part of her stature. Such reactions likewise strike me as unnecessary, because the issues Didion avows in Notes are familiar to readers of her essays (“a problem with groups,” “feeling myself an outsider,” “anticipating the worst”—such self-descriptions could be précis of Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album), and much of the information held in her diary is willfully recounted in the works she carefully brought into print in her lifetime.

“[MacKinnon] said that just as all adoptive children have a deep fear that they will be given away again, all adoptive parents have a deep fear that the child will be taken from them,” we read in the diary’s first entry. This exact content reappears in Didion’s memoir about her daughter’s tragically early death at 39, Blue Nights: “All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents […] All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them.”

In some cases, what is documented in the diary has been documented in earlier work. “You have trouble talking to people one on one. You weren’t brought up to do that,” MacKinnon tells Didion in March 2000. “I am […] so neurotically inarticulate,” Didion told us in 1968. In the diary’s seventh entry, we encounter the following childhood memory, of the home Didion’s family lived in when her father was stationed with the US Army Air Corps in North Carolina during World War II: “In Durham […] Mother and my brother and I lived in one room in a Baptist preacher’s house, with kitchen privileges.” When Didion retells this memory in Blue Nights, the preacher’s domestic possessiveness—and by turn the tenants’ status as outsiders—is made more emphatic; the vague phrase “kitchen privileges” is also elaborated, into a regionally specific image that simultaneously underlines the term’s amusingly inapt formality and the meager hospitality of the hosts: “In Durham we […] lived in one room, this one not large and not with its own entrance, in a house that belonged to a Baptist preacher and his family. This room in Durham came with ‘kitchen privileges,’ which amounted in practice to occasional use of the family’s apple butter.”

The difference between the two accounts, we might say, is that Didion worked at the latter. She looked harder, dug deeper, drew out more meaning. The former is indeed “rawer” in the sense of raw materials—something yet to be clarified—but it is erroneous to think of it as realer, closer, more immediate. Might not the second account be the truer one to come from a woman who said, “I write to find out what I’m thinking”? Might she not have really found out what she was thinking in the first draft, the eponymous “notes” of her diary?

Style, for Didion, was not adornment but accuracy. She was after an isomorphic relation, a correspondence, between experience and words. “The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive,” she once wrote. “It tells you. You don’t tell it.” To get the picture right required effort, revision. First thought ≠ best thought.

I am not trying to argue that nothing in Notes to John is new, or interesting, or affecting. The Didion-Dunne family’s intractable troubles will move and disconcert readers. The book will be useful to scholars, biographers, and acolytes. And although the diary mostly reads as rough and sketchy, its unsculpted pages sometimes glint with Didion’s dark wit, her analytic force, and her famously compelling style. At one point, reflecting on her father’s mental health and how it shaped her childhood, Didion writes, “I had known of course that he was depressed. He was in and out of Letterman [Army Hospital]. He could only eat raw oysters.” The strange, self-imposed diet of bivalves was not, one assumes, the most obvious sign of her father’s depression, but it is a highly literary one—which is to say, memorable, evocative, doing the work of many words in a few.

The book also contains poignant, if not novel, remarks on parenting, marriage, and addiction. Often these remarks are made not by Didion but by MacKinnon, and there is something almost shocking about seeing the writer grope and fumble beside the psychiatrist, who is clear, direct, and authoritative. “Just give her room. Respect her. Let her see herself as she is,” he urges his client in a typical string of imperatives.

Still, the diary’s light is faint beside the work Didion worked over, the pieces of writing defined by the drive to arrange the words just so. What is at last most revelatory about Notes to John is, perhaps, not the various details about Didion’s family or her psychic state but the fact that she was capable of writing sentences such as “I said I had said that I supposed that was what I meant, yes,” or “I had remembered a note I had made when I was making notes for my last novel.” The ungainly repetitions, the profusion of dialogue tags, the qualifications of qualifications—this is Didion as we have never seen her before.

But we all write, or say, stuff like this—when we are harried, or desperate, or distracted, or blue. When we are under constraints of time and attention, when we are sketching, when we are working through something. If we take such instances to be uniquely revealing, uniquely reflective of our true selves, then we have embraced a truly undignified view of human endeavor. We have denied the significance of effort and intent in the constitution of the self. We have taken the fraction for the whole, the outline for the essay. As interesting as Notes to John is, I would prefer to believe that the “true” Didion is most visible not in a slim diary found in a drawer but in the life she led, and the literature at which she labored.