Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne met in the late fifties, when she was working at Vogue and he at Time. They married in 1964, and in 1966 they adopted a baby girl, giving her a name from the Yucatán: Quintana Roo. Together, Didion and Dunne lived out one of the most collaborative literary marriages in American history. Last week, after two years of preparation, the New York Public Library opened the Didion-Dunne archive to the public. Among its three hundred and thirty-six boxes of material is a thick file of typewritten notes by Didion describing her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, beginning in 1999. Addressed to Dunne, the entries are full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. Didion was concerned about Quintana and her struggles with depression and alcoholism, but she was preoccupied, too, with aging, with creative fulfillment, with the complex dynamics of their family. She recorded her thoughts with the cool, forensic clarity she was known for. These entries will be published in book form as “Notes to John.” Readers of her memoirs “The Year of Magical Thinking,” written in the wake of Dunne’s sudden death, in 2003, at the age of seventy-one, and “Blue Nights,” about Quintana’s death less than two years later, at thirty-nine, will recognize how these notes inform those final books—the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it. “Life changes fast,” Didion famously wrote. “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” She died in 2021, at eighty-seven.

—David Remnick

29 December 1999

Re not taking Zoloft, I said it made me feel for about an hour after taking it that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planters’ punch before lunch in the tropics. I said I’d tried to think this through, because I knew rationally it couldn’t be true, since the PDR said even twice that dose doesn’t reach any effect for several hours and peak effect for 3-5 days of steady dosage. I realized that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well-being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.

I then said that I had tried to think through the anxiety I had expressed at our last meeting. I said that although it had been expressed in terms of work (the meeting in Los Angeles etc.), I realized when I discussed it with you that it was focused on Quintana.

“Of course it was,” he said. We then talked about what my anxieties were re Quintana. Basically, they were that she would become depressed to a point of danger. The shoe dropping, the call in the middle of the night, the attempt to take her emotional temperature on every phone call. I said that in some ways this seemed justified and in other ways unfair to her, because she must be feeling our anxiety as we were feeling hers.

“I suspect she feels your anxiety very particularly,” he said. I said apparently she did. She had not only told us she did but had also mentioned this to Dr. Kass. It was me and not you she wanted to see a psychiatrist. He said he would assume that she read anxiety in both of us, but that something in her and my relationship made her feel mine more acutely, made her lock into mine. “People with certain neurotic patterns lock into each other in a way that people with healthy patterns don’t. There’s clearly a very powerful dependency that goes both ways between you and her.”

He wanted to know how old Quintana was when we got her, the details of the adoption. We talked at some length about that, and I said I had always been afraid we would lose her. Whalewatching. The hypothetical rattlesnake in the ivy on Franklin Avenue. He 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. If you don’t deal with these fears at the time you have them, you displace them, obsessively on dangers you can control—the snake in the garden—as opposed to the danger you can’t control. “Obviously, you didn’t deal with this fear at the time. You set it aside. That’s your pattern. You move on, you muddle through, you control the situation through your work and your competency. But the fear is still there, and when you discovered this summer that your daughter was in danger you couldn’t manage or control, the fear broke through your defenses.”

I said I may have been overprotective, but I never thought she saw me that way. In fact, she once described me, as a mother, as “a little remote.”

Dr. MacKinnon: “You don’t think she saw your remoteness as a defense? When she uses remoteness herself as a defense? Didn’t you just tell me? She never looks back?”

2 February 2000

. . .
I said that repeatedly over the past few years—when Quintana expressed unhappiness or hopelessness about her situation—I had tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. That there was an actual benefit to “putting on a happy face.” I said I was encouraged to hear that some of what was said at Hazelden seemed to echo this—the “look good to feel good,” the “as if” theory—the point being to act “as if” you believed the slogans, and suddenly you found you did believe. I said that I had told her, as an example of this, that I had thought myself in a dead-end situation in my twenties and had finally come to a conscious decision to change it—in this case to break off a relationship with someone destructive and get on with my life.

Dr. MacKinnon wanted to know what was destructive about the relationship. I explained that the person in question was very smart, and had believed that I was very smart, which at an insecure time in my life had been valuable, but that this person was also very destructive to himself, drank too much, was too depressed to work or even take care of himself, etc.

Dr. MacKinnon asked if he was much older than I was. I said he was older than I was, but not greatly so—I guess eight or nine years. Dr. MacKinnon asked if he were an alcoholic. I said it wasn’t a word I used at the time but I supposed he so defined himself, since he later went into rehab and as I understood it hadn’t drunk since. I said I didn’t actually know because we no longer spoke—we had remained friendly after you and I were married but then he tried to sue me over a character in a novel.

“Was the character based on him,” Dr. MacKinnon asked. I said more or less, yes, but basing a character on him wasn’t really the problem—the problem was that the “character” did something in the novel that this person had done in real life and didn’t want people to know about. Dr. MacKinnon asked what it was. I said that the character had beaten up a woman in circumstances pretty much the same as this person had beaten up a woman I knew. Or so I had believed.

“Did he ever hit you?” Dr. MacKinnon asked.

I said yes.

“Did your parents hit you?”

I said no, they never even spanked me. Once my mother slapped me but it was totally understandable.

“Then wasn’t it a pretty world-shaking thing to get hit by this man?”

I said yes, it was, but I had at the time been able to rationalize it, or distance it, as “literary,” “real life,” an example of romantic degradation.

“Did you blame yourself?”

Definitely not, I said. I blamed him. I blamed him or alcohol or something else, not myself. I said I had naturally asked myself this, since everything you read about domestic abuse is based on the notion that the victim blames herself. I didn’t.

“Yet you remained friendly even after you were married?”

I explained that we were all friends, that you and I had in fact met through this person.

“Your husband didn’t resent this friendship?”

Why should he have, I said.

“Most people are possessive about the people they’re married to. Wouldn’t you resent having an old girlfriend of his around?”

No, I said. In fact, an old girlfriend of yours had been over the years—although we rarely saw her, because she lived in England—one of our best friends. I had even once called her (she worked for BA) to get Quintana onto a flight from Nice to Heathrow.

“You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

No, I said. What are you talking about?

“It’s as if you operate on a different level. Maybe it’s the entertainment industry.”

“If you mean many people I know get married a lot of times and stay on good terms with their ex-wives and husbands, that’s true.”

“Only a very small percentage of people do that. In the rest of the world, people regard their wives or husbands possessively.”

“I think they’re unhealthy.”

I said, in a conciliatory way, that in fact your parents had been married only once, my parents had been married only once, my brother has been married for 40 years, and you and I were married 36 last Sunday. So we were not entirely operating on entertainment-industry rules.

“You mentioned a few weeks ago that your father had been depressed.”

I said yes, he was. I said I had looked a few weeks ago at the letters he had left in his safe deposit box for me and my mother. My mother had given them to me just after he died, saying that she could not bear to read hers, “so you take it.” There had also been one for my brother but I never saw it. At the time I was given the letters, right after he died, I read them once and then put them in a box—I didn’t want to dwell on them. A few weeks ago, when I took them out of the box and read them again, I noticed something—I hadn’t noticed it before—that shocked me. The letter to Mother was dated 1953, and the letter to me 1955. The letter to me began by saying that certain things were happening that suggested he wouldn’t be around much longer, and the letter to Mother didn’t say but implied the same thing.