Book Review: How would Joan Didion feel about her therapy session notes being published as a book?

By ANITA SNOW Associated Press What would Joan think Reading the newly published 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 at age the loose pages formed a kind of journal she kept for her husband writer John Gregory Dunne about her meetings starting in late with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon The writer of such cult favorites as The Book of Common Prayer and The White Album 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 Citizens Library This cover image published by Knopf show Notes to John by Joan Didion Knopf via AP Much of the writings in the book distributed 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 In the notes to Dunne the famously guarded Didion details her worries and guilt about Quintana s chronic alcoholism more openly than she did in the books she later wrote on that painful period The Year of Magical Thinking focused on Dunne s fatal heart attack in and Blue Nights mourned her death just two years later at age from acute pancreatitis He wished to know how old Quintana was when we got her the details of the adoption Didion writes to Dunne about one session with MacKinnon We talked at selected length about that and I commented I had constantly been afraid we would lose her Whale watching The hypothetical rattlesnake in the ivy on Franklin Avenue Related Articles fiction and nonfiction books inspired by the Vietnam War Coe skewers fellow Brits in The Proof of My Innocence Joan Didion s therapy sessions in book form A set of first editions of Shakespeare s plays could fetch million at auction Book Review Hope Dies Last visits visionaries fighting global warming Specific of the bulk poignant passages are about the numerous dreams she described to the psychiatrist about her daughter s addiction The hopelessness and vulnerability she acknowledges belie Didion s cool and controlled society image I stated him about the dream I had this week in which Quintana and I were sharing a room and every time I woke during the night she wasn t in her bed she was sitting by the window and she was getting drunker and drunker Didion writes And there was nothing I could do about it She couldn t see me watching her