The dialogue with MacKinnon is related with enough precision that you wonder if Didion was running a tape recorder in therapy ... Written with Didion’s constitutional meticulousness ... Not a finely cut sapphire. More like a cloud of diamond dust ... Rough, incomplete, raises more questions than it answers, slightly sordid and absolutely fascinating ... Darkening some of the dazzle of an important star, clarifying but also complicating our view.
An intimate chronicle ... Written with her signature precision though without her usual stylistic, incantatory repetitions, it is the least guarded of Didion's writing ... [The entries'] power lies partly in their rawness ... May offer insights to other parents grappling with their own children's substance abuse.
Dry, lambent ... Plainspoken, blunt, and even a bit quotidian ... One can’t help but feel like a voyeur ... An act of intimate storytelling ... The book will comfort anyone with a struggling addict in their family ... Rivet[ing].
The famously guarded Didion details her worries and guilt about [her daughter's] chronic alcoholism more openly than she did in the books she later wrote on that painful period ... Poignant ... The hopelessness and vulnerability she acknowledges belie Didion’s cool and controlled public image.
Offers a new perspective on one of the most important—and surely the most tormenting—people in Didion’s life: Quintana Roo Dunne, the daughter she and John adopted in 1966 ... Much of Notes to John will feel familiar to anyone who’s coped with a loved one cycling between recovery and relapses. Her notes capture the maddening, circular nature of this dilemma ... MacKinnon doesn’t always come across as capable of getting to the bottom of it.
Joan Didion retains a stony grip on readers’ imaginations ... The part of Didion’s psychiatrist couldn’t have been more perfectly cast ... The filigreed touch of Didion’s style is apparent ... It would be misleading, however, to give the impression that Notes to John is a writerly performance akin to The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. It survives as a peculiar appendage to Didion’s oeuvre, and I’m not sure any writer wants a peculiar appendage attached to their oeuvre, especially a fine calibrator such as Didion ... Its value is less literary, more biographical-psychological. Direct and personal, shorn of vanity, Notes to John is a more sympathetic self-portrait than the finished memoirs, because the worry, confusion, doubt, regrets, and frustration are rendered plainly, without fancy fretwork and mood music.
The writing she does to understand the world is not necessarily the writing the world is meant to see ... Although the phrasing in these letters is sometimes as precise as that in Didion’s published work, so many of her other stylistic flourishes are gone ... More than direct, Notes to John is naked, unadorned ... Why do we need to see writers (or anyone) at their most open and despairing to be convinced that they are also human? ... This book is not art, because art-making lives in the act of crystallizing the mess of life into a tighter, sharper form ... What we see of Didion in these pages is that, at least for three years, the sharp seer and brilliant stylist felt more desperate, less in control, in life than she ever did inside the books she published. I’m not sure why we need a new book to know that.
I came away from Notes to John feeling discomfited and saddened—though literary scholars may read it as providing context with which to deconstruct a great writer’s oeuvre ... May be a gift ... Yet, I wish her the privacy she relished.
If the prose bears, in places, her signature indirection, it is also revealing and unadorned ... Becomes all the more heartbreaking because it is so recognizable ... A cracking of the family façade ... What emerges is the portrait of a life, or lives, in progress, the fear and sorrow less of a writer than of a human, a mother, wrestling with a fallout she cannot contain ... For all its rawness, its sense of open-endedness, Notes to John has the feeling of an integrated work ... Alive and febrile.
Because no editor is named, we don’t know who cleaned up the text, or chose the title, or wrote the introduction, afterword and explanatory footnotes–the suggestion, to the unalert reader, being that Didion did it all herself. This omission lends a slippery and underhand appearance to the whole enterprise ... Her notes are as meticulous and polished as anyone else’s finished copy ... Mackinnon’s responses to his patient’s concerns are so wise that Notes to John might be usefully shelved under 'self-help' ... Makes for uncomfortable but compulsive reading ... She may not have wanted these pages published, but what an experience it is, watching Didion beat back tragedy with her brilliant mind, as the hurricane hurtles her family’s way.
Misguided ... 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 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 ... That is what we need from her; it isn’t on display in these notes.
It would be hard to argue for blithely granting these accounts the status of unquestionable truth ... And yet, they are so direct, so apparently filled with vulnerability and doubt and distress, that it is also difficult to see them as polished or perfected; they read clearly, but reel with uncertainty and the fear of things falling apart.
Didion was a stylist, in other words, and a good one. Notes to John is not like that ... The title is misleading, even cynical, in its suggestion that this book will be about Didion’s relationship with her husband, John Gregory Dunne ... Her usual wit is almost entirely absent ... The book also features what MacKinnon said to Didion in their sessions. Some of this is interesting ... But much of his advice is Hallmark-level banal ... So this is a frequently boring book, which has none of Didion’s most important thought processes—the thinking that comes, as any writer knows, only in the process of writing ... A protective mother to the end, she chose not to write much about Quintana’s alcoholism, yet in this new book here it is, exposed, for all to see ... Notes to John is a scrapbook of secondary material. Reading it for an experience of Didion’s work is like trying to listen to Abbey Road by looking at photographs of the recording equipment.
