Motherhood 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.
For the three years recorded here, Didion rationally feared the death she’d always irrationally dreaded. Quintana is indeed, MacKinnon informs her, a patient with a high suicide risk. So should the mother remain beside her, smothering her with love, reminding her of the parents she needs to live for? Or should she leave her daughter to her own devices, and risk living with guilt for ever? The circles are tragic, unresolvable and tedious, and no doubt recognisable to many parents.
Why did she write about the sessions, week after week? Mainly, because this is just what she did. “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion justifies itself.” Didion was self-medicating with pen and paper as Quintana self-medicated with alcohol. The notes were also useful in involving her husband John Dunne in the process. He’s addressed as “you” throughout and their rather moving closeness is manifest on every page, not least because Quintana rails against it, asking them to act more independently.
What’s the justification for publishing, though? Biographically, the notes are of reasonable interest, clarifying the stakes of the late great books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Within three years of the final therapy session, Quintana had recovered, married and then died of physical illnesses that also precipitated her father’s fatal heart attack. This wasn’t the suicide or the overdose that Didion prepared for – nevertheless, she was left alone, writing yet again for survival.
There’s a crude fascination in seeing some of the raw material behind this, but there’s also something shameful about it. We’re invading Didion’s privacy – at times less as a mother than as a writer. She’s caught in the act, writing workaday, clunky prose. It’s there right from the first page: “I then said that I had tried to think through the anxiety I had expressed at our last meeting.” Didion wore dark glasses even as she walked down the aisle at her wedding, yet here she is naked with her eyes bare and uncertain, puzzling away at how to support Quintana with AA when she disapproved of it intellectually: “AA both isolated the alcoholic from everything that wasn’t AA and made the alcoholic see him or herself as perpetually sick.”
It’s odd to be reviewing a book by a complex writer, whose work I have engaged so deeply with, that I don’t think counts as part of her oeuvre. It isn’t especially illuminating to see a woman without much capacity for self-reflection stumbling her way through a crisis aided by a therapy-speak she doesn’t quite want to master. Her novels and essays derive their power from the fact that she and her characters refuse to know themselves, acting out their neuroses with passion and grandeur, and in doing so reveal the fault lines of the larger culture. That is what we need from her; it isn’t on display in these notes.