Joan Didion's therapy session has published. Should they be public?

The personality of Joan Didion has extended as large as his literary canon. This photo of her holding a cigarette just like this, daring the camera to reveal what she thinks, says everything: you will not be able to find the key to the puzzle that is me.

The Memoirs published after the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana – “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) and “Blue Nights” (2011) – are his most personal, excavated by his sorrow to produce works that turn in, heartbreaking, restricted, operatives. It is excruciatingly introspective but in perfect control of each sentence and emotion – retain, save or repeat words to produce observations that shine with intelligence and insight, but keep their author shaded.

Didion died in 2021 At 87, and her literary administrators authorized the publication of the observations she documented during a particularly heavy personal period when she saw a psychiatrist to navigate the alcoholism of her daughter and possibly suicidal trends. These sessions are capsulized in “Notes in John», Journal type entries which were sent to the husband of Didion, who was mainly absent from the appointments.

The Didion therapist – A Freudan Strict named Roger Mackinnon – was in regular communication with the Psy de Quintana. Mackinnon shared information gleaned from Quintana with Didion, without the knowledge of Quintana. It seems that Mackinnon has never met Quintana, and yet he does not hesitate to characterize his co -depence, or to interpret certain behaviors as manipulators, or to reject the fear of Didion that she can commit suicide. When Didion expresses his guilt that his adopted daughter is in such a “labile” state, he offers:

“Don't blame yourself, it's a very difficult person, a very difficult case.” “You feel imprisoned by her responsibility,” he says. “You allow him to keep you prisoner.” This is used to reassure Didion. Meeting after the meeting, they repeat the theme: Quintana's problems may have been exacerbated by the impenetrability of her parents' link or by her mother's trend at the distance. In the words of Mackinnon to Didion: “You rather lack spectacularly the skills to deal with other people.”

The question that haunts this book is whether an author so private that she has revealed her diagnosis of breast cancer with two friends – Alice and Calvin Trillin – would have liked her intimate and unpublished reflections to be shared with the readers. Close friends and a family who survived them seem separated on this issue, the majority descending on the side of probably not. The document would have been made public in the archives she bequeathed to the New York public library, but if it is deposited without the attention that a book launch obtains, they could have been relegated to darkness.

Fame is undoubtedly a rare, but also cruel gift, with each bread crumb as an essential index. I came out of “notes to John” feeling discouraged and saddened – although literary scholars can read it as a context to deconstruct the work of a great writer. To the Freudian analyst of Didion, the mother-daughter dynamic was everything, and the book suggests that the mother has not failed. She professed love for Quintana, about whom she is obsessed. But here, she is ambivalent both on the maternal role and even, sometimes, on her daughter. She admits to Mackinnon: “He came to my mind in several points that I did not as Son. “She said,” All my life, I turned away from people who had problems for me. Cut them in my life. I can't have that happening with Quintana.

From the outside, Didion seemed to be impenetrable, glamorous, incredibly gifted and invulnerable. But Quintana, reveals these pages, saw her mother as a “fragile”, if she intimidated. How did Didion considered? “A friend pointed out one day,” she wrote, “that if most people had very strong and competent exteriors and were a bowl of jelly inside, I was quite the opposite.” Its ethereal look has masked its interior stonité and probably facilitated its extraordinary powers of observation and reporting. This volume enters this shell to expose a woman entering her older years as treating emergency rooms, hip fractures, dizziness and the need to lose shoes with red suede heeled and hoop earrings that distinguished her external style. She continued to share the details of her “late life crisis” until 2012 with Mackinnon if no one else, well after Quintana and John had left, and 10 years after having stopped documenting their sessions.

In the end, “Notes to John” can be a gift. Didion broke the barriers, refusing to feel remorse on the valuation of his career above all and to forge a language which can only be described as a Didione. Should his insecurity and parental doubts be in the public domain? Almost everything is now. She should know that as Icône, her life would be studied from every angles for the decades to come. And yet, I wish her the intimacy she enjoyed. But these last revelations thicken the mystery: who was Joan Didion?

Haber is a publication writer, publisher and strategist. She was director of the Oprah reading club and editor -in -chief of books for O, Oprah magazine.