Notes to John by Joan Didion review – a writer on the couch

There’s a crude fascination in seeing the contents of a literary celebrity’s therapy sessions, but we’re surely invading her privacyMotherhood is a state of continuous loss that is meant to culminate when the dependent baby becomes an independent adult. Joan Didion survived this, as many mothers have, by keeping constant watch over her adopted daughter Quintana, fearing “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet”. She also survived it, as fewer mothers have, by writing obsessively about the loss she feared. In her arid, fevered masterpiece Play It As It Lays, published when Quintana was four, the narrator’s breakdown is precipitated by her daughter’s long-term hospitalisation with an unnamed mental disorder. A Book of Common Prayer is about the disappearance of the protagonist’s criminal revolutionary daughter. “Marin was loose in the world and could leave it at any time and Charlotte would have no way of knowing” – a description that could be applied to motherhood in general.The coddling failed. Quintana drank to self-medicate for anxiety and by 33 she was an alcoholic whose therapist wanted her mother to participate in the treatment. And so in 1999 Didion, who had hitherto protected her inner life with her trademark dark glasses and stylish sentences with their wilfully “impenetrable polish”, found herself seeing Freudian analyst and psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon. Now her notes on their sessions have been, in my view misguidedly, gathered from her archive and packaged as a book. Continue reading...

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