‘I dealt with everyone at a distance’: what do Joan Didion’s therapy diaries reveal about guilt, motherhood and writing?
The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativityLast month, the New York Public Library opened the doors on one of its most thrilling acquisitions of recent times: the archive of Joan Didion and her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. After two years of preparation, both scholars and anyone with a library card can arrange a visit to pore over the material contained in a total of 336 boxes of correspondence, photographs and screenplays from the couple’s joint projects, which included the 1976 version of A Star Is Born and the film that in 1971 provided Al Pacino with his first leading role, The Panic in Needle Park.Alongside material evidence of two long writing careers, there is much that is deeply personal: paperwork recording the naming of orchids in honour of Didion, Dunne and their adopted daughter Quintana, the couple’s only child; kitchen notebooks and lists of party guests; the handmade cards and pressed flowers that the young Quintana made for “the best mom ever”. But it is infinitely more troubled times that are the subject of a new book drawn from the archive, Notes to John – accounts of Didion’s sessions with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon at the turn of the century, in which she discussed her daughter’s struggles with alcohol addiction and depression and the writer’s attempts to excavate the roots of their relationship in her own formative years. Continue reading...
The writer’s previously unpublished notes from her sessions with a psychiatrist offer an incredibly intimate insight into her relationship with her daughter, depression and creativity
Last month, the New York Public Library opened the doors on one of its most thrilling acquisitions of recent times: the archive of Joan Didion and her husband and collaborator John Gregory Dunne. After two years of preparation, both scholars and anyone with a library card can arrange a visit to pore over the material contained in a total of 336 boxes of correspondence, photographs and screenplays from the couple’s joint projects, which included the 1976 version of A Star Is Born and the film that in 1971 provided Al Pacino with his first leading role, The Panic in Needle Park.
Alongside material evidence of two long writing careers, there is much that is deeply personal: paperwork recording the naming of orchids in honour of Didion, Dunne and their adopted daughter Quintana, the couple’s only child; kitchen notebooks and lists of party guests; the handmade cards and pressed flowers that the young Quintana made for “the best mom ever”. But it is infinitely more troubled times that are the subject of a new book drawn from the archive, Notes to John – accounts of Didion’s sessions with psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon at the turn of the century, in which she discussed her daughter’s struggles with alcohol addiction and depression and the writer’s attempts to excavate the roots of their relationship in her own formative years. Continue reading...
