What would Joan think?
Reading the newly released Notes to John, it’s hard not to wonder how the late author Joan Didion would feel about having her personal notes from a series of painful therapy sessions converted into a book after her death.
Discovered in a small filing cabinet in Didion’s office after she died in 2021 at age 87, the 150 loose pages formed a kind of journal she kept for her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, about her meetings starting in late 1999 with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. The writer of such cult favorites as The Book of Common Prayer (1977) and The White Album (1979) was an assiduous notetaker and recordkeeper who explained her lifelong compulsion to write things down in her well-known essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” to remember what certain moments had meant to her.
Still, the pages weren’t exactly a secret. They were included in papers that were placed by Didion’s heirs, her late brother’s children, without restrictions on access in the Didion/Dunne archive at the New York Public Library.
Much of the writings in the book released by Knopf center on the couple’s adult daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, who was adopted as a baby and named after a Mexican territory that later became a state.
