In their long and illustrious writing careers, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were known as much for their close collaboration as for their impressive individual productivity. That’s one of the things that makes NOTES TO JOHN such an intriguing, and at times puzzling, document.

This journal of therapy sessions spanning two years and centering on the year 2000, discovered after Didion’s death in 2021, takes readers deep inside the Didion/Dunne family as Didion wrestles, seemingly alone, with the anguish of their 34-year-old adopted daughter Quintana’s alcoholism and other psychological issues.

In November 1999, Didion began seeing noted New York City psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, a classical Freudian analyst. In this detailed record of their encounters, she intersperses extensive quotations from MacKinnon with her own commentary, including asides addressed to Dunne. It’s almost certain that the material in this book was never intended for publication, at least not in this form, and that raises the unanswerable question of what the book would have looked like if Didion had taken the opportunity to shape it into a true memoir.

"NOTES TO JOHN is a sad document, and reading it there’s at least a slight sense of voyeurism as we eavesdrop on these therapy sessions."

Didion’s conversations with MacKinnon take on a certain circular quality, as they dwell repeatedly on Quintana’s multiple hospitalizations at different institutions, her intermittent engagement with Alcoholics Anonymous, and her difficulties making headway in establishing herself as a magazine photographer and editor. Didion’s musings on her own writing career and the subject of money occasionally enter the dialogue.

In their attempt to penetrate to the core of Quintana’s problems, the pair chew over an assortment of recurring themes, including Didion’s protectiveness, Quintana’s dependency, and Didion’s fears that her daughter --- in therapy herself at this time with a different psychiatrist --- might take her own life. MacKinnon gently, but insistently, reminds Didion that she and Dunne are neither the source of Quintana’s difficulties, nor do they possess some magical cure that will make those problems disappear. That’s summed up best in this entry from May 24, 2000:

“What Quintana is going through is something you didn’t cause. And you can’t fix it. All you can hope for --- all we’re working toward here --- is for the two of you to develop a closer relationship in the hope that this will ease the internal pressure she feels to drink, or escape.”

Inevitably, these excavations take Didion back to aspects of a peripatetic upbringing that eventually landed her back in California, her birthplace and the locale with which she’s most strongly identified. We learn about her father’s depression and her mother’s “controlling” personality, and how those aspects of her past echo in the present.

As Didion’s encounters with MacKinnon proceed, it’s impossible not to wonder how Dunne fit into this family dynamic, especially if one assumes that he read his wife’s painstaking summaries and reacted to them. Save for a single session on June 7, 2000, he is physically absent. And yet, that absence doesn’t seem to bespeak any disengagement from Quintana’s issues or acrimony between husband and wife.

At one point, Didion concedes, “I thought that in some ways this whole period had been harder on you than on me.” As reflected in her notes, there seems to be little doubt of Dunne’s love for their daughter, even if his relationship with her is different from Didion’s, or that it created an independent source of tension or conflict.

Readers of Didion’s memoirs --- THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, written in the aftermath of Dunne’s sudden death in December 2003, and BLUE NIGHTS, which chronicles Quintana’s struggles with multiple catastrophic medical problems that culminated in her death at 39 in August 2005 --- will find some of this material familiar.

In a period of less than two years, Didion suffered the almost unimaginable loss of both her husband of nearly 40 years and her daughter, whose disastrous medical decline began just days before Dunne’s passing. Didion lived on until her death in 2021, and readers who want to learn more about the latter stages of her life can turn to the memoir THE UPTOWN LOCAL, written by her assistant, Cory Leadbeater.

NOTES TO JOHN is a sad document, and reading it there’s at least a slight sense of voyeurism as we eavesdrop on these therapy sessions. Didion had many years to destroy it and chose not to, perhaps assuming --- even desiring --- that someday it would be read by a wider audience. The result of that decision is this unique opportunity to see Tolstoy’s observation about unhappy families play out on the page.