WHAT WE KNEW WITHOUT KNOWING

Notes to John Gregory Dunne.

- BY JOAN DIDION

"I said I wasn't sure where we left off,” Didion wrote to her husband, about a session with her psychiatrist. "Dr. MacKinnon said why not begin where you are now."

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne met in the late fifties, when she was working at Vogue and he at Time. They married in 1964, and in 1966 they adopted a baby girl, giving her a name from the Yucatán: Quintana Roo. Together, Didion and Dunne lived out one of the most collaborative literary marriages in American history. Last week, after two years of preparation, the New York Public Library opened the Didion-Dunne archive to the public. Among its three hundred and thirty-six boxes of material is a thick file of typewritten notes by Didion describing her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon, beginning in 1999. Addressed to Dunne, the entries are full of direct quotations and written with the immediacy of fresh recollection. Didion was concerned about Quintana and her struggles with depression and alcoholism, but she was preoccupied, too, with aging, with creative fulfillment, with the complex dynamics of their family. She recorded her thoughts with the cool, forensic clarity she was known for. These entries will be published in book form as “Notes to John.” Readers of her memoirs “The Year of Magical Thinking,” written in the wake of Dunne’s sudden death, in 2003, at the age of seventy-one, and “Blue Nights,” about Quintana’s death less than two years later, at thirty-nine, will recognize how these notes inform those final books—the striving to understand and the sense of futility that comes with it. “Life changes fast,” Didion famously wrote. “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” She died in 2021, at eighty-seven.

-David Remnick

29 DECEMBER 1999