This is kind of a funny month for me, because it seems to be a month in which I have not a single freestanding opinion. Just reviews! No thoughts! Well, OK.
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Notes to John (Joan Didion, 2025)
Is Notes to John an exercise in making money off of the Joan Didion estate while the money’s good? Yes.1 But that’s all right, or at least it’s all right with me. When somebody’s dead I am fine with publishing their diaries and their shopping lists (or packing lists, in Didion’s case) and anything else. In the case of Notes to John, the people who could be hurt by this book are also dead. Everybody’s dead. It’s fine.2
I am a late convert to Didion. A looong time ago I read her novel A Book of Common Prayer solely because the title appealed to me, as I was then an Episcopalian, when I was browsing at a bookstore.3 I’m not sure I actually knew who Joan Didion was at the time, and whatever it was I was expecting from a book with that specific title, I did not get it. Later on, I encountered Didion most often as a lifestyle brand, and I mostly avoided reading her because I didn’t like what she seemed to represent—a commitment to an “aesthetic” mode of life, in which one is “a writer” and chronicles the vibes and has a lot of feelings (but in an ironized, distanced sort of way). I read the Barbara Harrison take down of the general concept of Joan Didion and I thought it was funny.4 I didn’t read (and still haven’t read) The Year of Magical Thinking, etc.
Last year, though, I read The White Album and the essay about the water system in California made me realize that I was an idiot.5 Didion is great.
OK, fine. Didion is great. But is Notes to John great? I’m not sure the category applies (she says, having annoyingly invoked it in the first place). The notes in here served a particular purpose for a particular audience: John, that is, Didion’s husband. But if you are interested in this kind of thing, if you are a literary voyeur, you will get something out it. I am, I am, I did.
Notes to John is a sad book. The issue around which Didion and her psychiatrist circle is her overprotectiveness toward her daughter, Quintana Roo, who has, in her thirties, become an unemployed alcoholic. The message Didion is trying to take to heart throughout is that while her daughter is struggling, she can accept that Quintana is responsible for her own life. If she steps back, a disaster is not going to happen. It does not mean abandoning her daughter, but treating her as an adult. When Didion worries about her daughter making this or that mistake, the response is that Quintana probably will make those mistakes, and then she’ll correct, and it will be okay. But you, the reader, are probably aware that a disaster is going to happen, that Didion’s daughter will die before the age of forty.6 That death doesn’t have anything to do with what Didion does or does not do now. It is just coming.7
Sometimes I find writing that make a bit of a thing over what the authors view as Joan Didion’s refusal to acknowledge her daughter’s alcoholism. I never really got this complaint pre–getting into Didion and I don’t get it post–getting into Didion. To pick a recent example, here’s Evelyn McDonnell in LitHub:
Notes reveals the myriad ways in which Didion failed to fully reckon with Q’s mental health issues in her books. Despite Q’s extensive stints in rehab, detox, AA, therapy, etc., as detailed in these notes, Didion remained in denial about her daughter’s addiction. In Blue Nights, she brushes off Quintana’s alcoholism. After all, to admit her daughter’s drinking problem, she might have had to admit her own, and her husband’s.
I don’t think that this is true of Notes to John—Didion explicitly wonders if her own habit of having a drink every evening contributed to Quintana’s alcoholism and also wonders if being around parents who drank a lot and hosted parties where people drank a lot was a factor. She asks the same questions in Blue Nights (which is self-lacerating about her failures in motherhood in ways that are frankly unreasonable). More to the point, though, Blue Nights is not a chronicle of every way in which Quintana’s life was a mess. It’s about grief. It is about how a loved and cherished child, for whom one makes special lunchboxes every day, can still become a demon-ridden adult and die young. Is that not, you know, the truth? Leaving aside the part where Didion is constantly accusing herself of maternal failure, do these things need to be somebody’s fault to be worth discussing? Is the idea that the book would only be “honest” if Didion said something like “it’s true I was only an okay mother and that my daughter was an addict, but, nevertheless, I mourn my fuckup child”?8
I don’t know. Notes to John made me cry, Blue Nights made me cry. The latter is certainly a messy book and veers between moments of high polish and what reads like frantic typing. Is it “good,” I don’t exactly think so, but is it “dishonest,” no.
NB: I feel a bit too friendly with the writer to review the book on here—I suppose I still need to figure out how to handle things like this, as they will continue to happen—but I read and enjoyed
’s recent book about Didion and the movies, We Tell Ourselves Stories. I found the material about Didion’s film criticism really interesting,9 and I found that it gave me, as a longtime Didion avoider, a useful way of thinking about her whole career. I also read and enjoyed Andrew O’Hagan’s piece about Notes to John in the London Review of Books.10The Comforters (Muriel Spark, 1957)
Robinson (Muriel Spark, 1958)
Memento Mori (Muriel Spark, 1959)
I’m sure somebody, somewhere—perhaps here, in this very comment section!—is willing to go to the mattresses for The Comforters as their favorite Muriel Spark novel. I think it’s pretty bad. Not “bad for Muriel Spark,” but actually, just bad. It got great reviews when it was published, apparently, and I do find it interesting to read in light of what she’d go on to do later, because much of her later technique is present in this book, it’s just not used well.11 But even trying to summarize the book really makes it clear what a mess it is: so, this guy becomes convinced that his grandmother is part of a smuggling ring, so he writes to his ex-girlfriend about it, but his ex-girlfriend (a recent convert to Catholicism) has become convinced that they’re all characters in a book.… Also, there’s an evil woman with very large breasts and no internal life.12
While The Comforters is a bad book only Muriel Spark could have written, her second book, Robinson, is an okay book that lots of people could have written. In this book, the three survivors of a shipwreck end up marooned on an island that is owned by a wealthy English eccentric (that’s Robinson); they are stuck there waiting for the seasonal pomegranate boat to arrive. At a certain point Robinson disappears and seems to have been murdered, and then the question of which of them did it becomes the problem they are all preoccupied with as they continue to wait for the boat. Unlike The Comforters, which just has too much going on, Robinson is polished and contained. Aside from the fact that the female narrator is another recent convert to Catholicism and has some good jokes about her own religious practice, nothing about it feels very Muriel Spark to me; if you gave this book to somebody with the identifying material removed I’m not sure they’d know who wrote it.
Memento Mori, however, is another story. With this book, Muriel Spark emerges as unquestionably Muriel Spark and really in full possession of her talents. She lets her interest in random and extreme violence have full play: one of the elderly characters gets beaten to death. She is willing to be the omniscient and unkind recording angel of her characters’ actions, thoughts, and feelings. She tells us what they think; then, she tells us that they are mistaken:
Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong. But the first few weeks after Mrs. Pettigrew came to the Colstons’ to look after Charmian she sat in the kitchen and told Mrs. Anthony of her troubles.
She is also willing to be inexplicably weird. The conceit of Memento Mori is that a circle of elderly friends, ex-friends, rivals, etc start receiving phone calls reminding them that they must die. Two characters independently float the idea that the caller is Death himself. This appears to be true. Why are these people being called on the phone by the personification of Death? They just are. In this novel Spark knows when she has to go all the way and when she can withhold.
Part of what made The Comforters so flawed was its odd device of the metafictional narrator, whose presence provides Spark the excuse she needs to slide in and out of the consciousnesses of others. (It’s an equivalent of the way early novels often have their narrators explain how they came to be writing all this.) The narrator is also a way of getting around things she doesn’t much want to do: the villainous large-breasted blackmailer simply disappears when not required for the plot because she is a fictional device.13 In Robinson, the blackmailer (male, this time) is viewed from the limited perspective of the first person.14
In Memento Mori, she just does it, no excuse provided, and she fully commits to what that requires of her. The blackmailer (a woman domestic, like the first) has an internal life like anyone else. It’s just unpleasant and deceitful. Even the worst and meanest people do not simply disappear because we are no longer looking at them. Like everybody else, they get their shot.
I did not read the Lily Anolik book that came out last year about Didion and Babitz. But, in fairness to the people who put this book out, it does seem possible that this publication is something of a riposte to that book, which seems to speculate that Joan Didion would pretend to have migraines so she could bait her gay alcoholic husband into hitting her, going off of Laura Kipnis’s review:
Following Babitz’s cue, Anolik is especially needling when it comes to Didion’s marriage, which she finds both ridiculous and sinister. Dunne secretly had the hots for Babitz, but was also secretly gay. The evidence? Two gay friends claim that John seemed gay (one insisting, “He wouldn’t take his eyes off my crotch”). Anolik says that Dunne, who had a notoriously bad temper, secretly hit Didion, because she was what he pretended to be: successful. (Evidence of physical abuse? None.) “Soft-spoken, bird-boned Joan … was the real pro and little toughie,” leaving Dunne to “conceal how feeble” he was. “Scratch a bully, find a crybaby,” she taunts. What was Dunne crying over? “Exhaustion from all the caretaking Joan required” because playing the invalid was her favorite strategy—the migraines, and even an MS diagnosis, were all her trying to get ahead.
Because in Notes to John, Didion actually does talk about dating somebody (Noel Parmentel, I assume) who hit her in her twenties. Anolik would not have had access to these notes as far as I know, because they were embargoed, though I’d guess it would not have mattered all that much if she had.
That said, what does leave a bad taste in my mouth about Notes to John is the presence of an introduction, notes, and afterword written by some person who is, as far as I can tell, completely uncredited.
I still remember the bookstore, though it’s sadly closed now.
I still think it’s funny: “Oh, come on! Does one have to be upper class to understand about marble pastry tables? My grandmother, who came from Calabria, understood about marble pastry tables; so do I, and I live in Brooklyn in a cosmetically renovated tenement. Julia Child talks about marble pastry tables in McCall’s, for heaven's sake. Is Didion the only classy lady around?” OK but I don’t understand about marble pastry tables. Somebody explain marble pastry tables to me.
It also shows how the Didion “brand” has changed, because… the idea that Didion spends all her time weeping and being unable to move heavy things is definitely not the current Didion brand.
Last year was also when I discovered that Didion’s daughter had died of pancreatitis. This gave me an odd feeling—sharing a medical diagnosis with somebody is a moment of feeling both very self-centered about it but also feeling the opposite way at the same time.
As Didion comments in a letter quoted in an afterword, it’s not even clear that Quintana’s death was related to her alcoholism: “I still have trouble sorting out how much of what happened to her was alcoholism and how much depression and how much an only marginally connected cascade of disastrous medical events.”
The knowledge that disasters happen looms over this book in the form of Didion’s niece and Quintana’s cousin, Dominique Dunne, who was murdered by her boyfriend. At one point Didion records falling silent during a session and when her doctor asks her what she’s thinking about, Didion replies:
I said I was thinking about Dominique. I had so many times regretted not talking to her. The boyfriend had always given off bad vibrations. Dominique’s mother felt them, and let Dominique know she didn’t like him, which infuriated Dominique, and at least at the beginning I hadn’t wanted to fall into the role of another obstructive mother in her life. But it began to be clear she wasn’t happy. She was drinking too much, she was overanimated, she had the flush of unhappiness. I could have talked to her.… But things came up, the opportunity didn’t immediately present itself. And the next thing I knew she was dead.
Her doctor (correctly) points out that this might not have made a difference and indeed probably would not have made a difference. Nevertheless, what Dominique’s occasional presence conveys is that sometimes the worst thing really does happen.
In short, if I had to summarize my problem with a certain kind of critic’s problem with Didion—not everybody’s—it would be that a lot of them sound like this to me:
There’s a certain maternal performance desired here that we are not getting from Didion, because we are not her children.
For instance, that Didion was in a sense the original version of the “is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a beautiful face, huge” approach to the movies: “To engage my glazed attention a movie need be no classic of its kind, need be neither L’Avventura nor Red River, neither Casablanca nor Citizen Kane; I only ask that it have its moments.”
There are definite moments of wit and charm in the book. Here’s one:
‘But you know,’ said the girl, ‘there’s another side to Willi Stock. He’s an orgiast on the quiet.’
‘A what?’
‘Goes in for the Black Mass. He’s a Satanist. Probably that’s why Eleanor left him. She’s so awfully bourgeois.’
Caroline suddenly felt oppressed by the pub and the people. That word ‘bourgeois’ had a dispiriting effect on her evening — it was part of the dreary imprecise language of this half-world she had left behind her more than two years since.
She really wants you to think about this fact:
Mrs Hogg’s tremendous bosom was a great embarrassment to her — not so much in the way of vanity, now that she was getting on in life — but in the circumstance that she didn’t know what to do with it.
When, at the age of thirty-five she had gone to nursery-govern the Manders’ boys, Edwin Manders remarked to his wife,
‘Don’t you think, rather buxom to have about the house?’
‘Don’t be disagreeable, please, Edwin. She has a fine character.’
Laurence and Giles (the elder son, killed in the war) were overjoyed at Georgina’s abounding bosom. Giles was the one who produced the more poetic figures to describe it; he declared that under her blouse she kept pairs of vegetable marrows, of infant whales, St Paul’s Cathedrals, goldfish bowls. Laurence’s interest in Georgina’s bulging frontage was more documentary. He acquired knowledge of her large stock of bust-bodices, long widths of bright pink or yellow-white materials, some hard as canvas, some more yielding in texture, from some of which dangled loops of criss-cross straps, some with eyelets for intricate tight-lacing, some with much-tried hooks and eyes. He knew exactly which one of these garments Georgina was wearing at any given time; one of them gave her four breasts, another gave her the life-jacket look which Laurence had seen in his dangerous sea-faring picture books. He knew the day when she wore her made-to-measure brassière provided at a costly expense by his mother. That was about the time Georgina was leaving to get married. The new garment was a disappointment to the children, they felt it made her look normal, only, of course, far more so. And they knew their mother was uneasy about these new shapely protrusions which did so seem to proceed heraldically far in advance of Georgina herself; the old bust-bodices were ungainly, but was this new contraption decent?
But the little sting of “the elder son, killed in the war” is an example of the kind of collapse and dilation of time that she deploys so well in her mature work.
“However, as soon as Mrs Hogg stepped into her room she disappeared, she simply disappeared. She had no private life whatsoever. God knows where she went in her privacy.”
I was trying to remember if there are other, later Spark novels (that I’ve read) in the first person, and then remembered my favorite is—Loitering With Intent.
This Didion book sounds so sad. It is wild how all five year olds (my daughter is five) are cute and precious and most adults are really not cute and precious, and many adults are a terrible mess. When does it change? Seems impossible to deal with.
Is it bad that that plot summary made me want to read the Comforters…