Joan Didion, Conservative It Girl

Let’s assume that writers maintain diaries and correspondences with a spirit of exhibitionism, attuned to the possibility that these texts might eventually inform their biographies or even get published. Notes to John, published by Knopf under the direction of Joan Didion’s literary executors, is an informal accounting of the author’s sessions with her psychiatrist, Roger MacKinnon, addressed to her husband, John Dunne. These appointments occurred within a two-year interval at the end of the Nineties and largely revolved around the couple’s 34-year-old adopted daughter, Quintana — her depression, her alcoholism, and, most disturbing to Didion, her lack of professional ambition.