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JOAN DIDION: Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner, and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Those four short lines, read there by Joan Didion during a 2005 interview with NPR's Susan Stamberg, mark the opening of her memoir "The Year Of Magical Thinking." The book chronicles Didion's grief in the year after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, collapsed and died at their dining room table in December 2003. At the time, the couple's only child, Quintana Roo, was fighting for her life in a nearby hospital. Quintana would recover but would end up dying less than two years later after a series of related illnesses, all made worse by her long struggle with alcohol. Didion explored that loss and her relationship with her daughter in the book "Blue Nights," which was published in 2011.
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DIDION: Well, as a writer, the first thing you think of doing when you don't know what you're - when you don't know what you - what to think about something or what you're going to say, and so you work it up. I mean, that's the phrase. You get the information.
DETROW: "Blue Nights," along with "The Year Of Magical Thinking," combined to form something of a canon of Didion's grief - a canon that has resonated widely and deeply in the years since the two were written. Didion died in 2021, but now there is another entry in that collection of work. "Notes To John" is a collection of detailed reports that Didion wrote about meetings with her psychiatrist during a time that she described to a friend as a rough few years for her family. Didion's longtime editor Shelley Wanger found the notes in Didion's office.
SHELLEY WANGER: I didn't come across them until after Joan had died and the literary trustees were in her apartment - there are three of us. And that's when we found them. That was 2021.
DETROW: What was your first response?
WANGER: These look very interesting, like nothing we'd ever seen before.
DETROW: I spoke to Wanger, as well as the publisher of Alfred A. Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, about the discovery, as well as their decision to publish "Notes To John."
Jordan Pavlin, what, to you, is the value of this document in book form? Why publish these notes?
JORDAN PAVLIN: Well, in my view, "Notes To John" sits on the shelf beside "The Year Of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," and it illuminates the wrenching losses in those books with haunting clarity. Quintana's illness and her death feel quite mysterious. And in "Notes To John," Didion fills in those blanks and gives us a very clear picture of Quintana's battle with alcoholism and the degree to which her body had been compromised over a long period of time.
DETROW: This book makes it clear just how much Joan was actively thinking about that. It seemed like every single day, just kind of struggling with how to help her daughter - when direct intervention was helpful, when giving her space was helpful. Just constantly thinking through, am I doing the right thing? Am I being as helpful as possible?
PAVLIN: This is a mother in anguish.
DETROW: You know, I want to ask both of you this question, and Shelley, I'll start with you. Joan Didion is somebody who, as we all know, shared so much of her personal life in her work. There's a moment in the documentary "The Center Will Not Hold" where she directly addresses this when she's asked a question about whether she and her husband ever worked out an understanding of what was off limits - what wasn't for their work.
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DIDION: You used your material. You wrote what you had. And that was what I happened to have at the moment.
DETROW: But she did it in this very polished, intentional way. And there has been some criticism of the decision to publish these notes. How are you responding to that?
WANGER: Well, I think what is so fascinating is that they are like a complete document, and they also touch on these subjects in a way that's both sensitive and incredibly interesting. And they're not horrifying in any way. They are a wonderful read.
And also, we felt that it was important to do a book because otherwise, people go into an archive, and nothing is restricted in this archive. It's all open to anyone. You might have people slightly taking bits and pieces and misinterpreting it. So it seemed really much better to publish it as a whole and bring it forth as a book.
PAVLIN: And Scott, can I jump in here? It's Jordan.
DETROW: Please. Please.
PAVLIN: I mean, just to be direct, the - I think the question that many people have asked is, would Didion have wanted this work published?
DETROW: Right.
PAVLIN: And the truth is, we can't know, but we do know that she kept a meticulous record of her life's most monumental battle, which was the struggle to save the life of her child, and that she preserved this record with great care, in chronologically ordered pages. And she left the material in an extremely well-organized file cabinet beside her desk, where she most certainly knew that it would be found.
DETROW: Did you ever think, like, well, maybe she would have just directly said something to us if she wanted this published? Was that a conversation among you and the other executors?
WANGER: No, that kind of - there wasn't that kind of conversation about anything. You know, Joan and John kept these amazingly organized files. There were many in their apartment and downstairs in the basement. And they - obviously, they knew what was in everything, and they saved everything. And so I think that Joan would just assume that these organized files were something that would go into her archive. And there was no need to say, oh, I don't want this published or that. That was never a conversation.
DETROW: I - as I read "Notes To John," I was flipping back and forth and simultaneously reading "Blue Nights." And you're right, there are several sessions where Didion writes through things that she and the doctor were talking about, and you can almost see a few chapters that parallel and expand on those thoughts. I'm wondering - we've talked about the writing style. We've talked about how this was reflected in her work. Did either of you learn anything about Joan Didion as a deeply worried parent from these notes that you didn't know before?
PAVLIN: The one line that struck me with particular force - I just found this heartbreaking. Toward the end of "Notes To John," she says to her psychiatrist, I thought I was on top of this. And one feels that she's not only speaking as a parent here - meaning I thought I was on top of my daughter's illness - but as a human, as a writer. Didion spent so much of her life guarding against catastrophe and against existential shipwrecked (ph). And one just feels the colossal force of this calamity entering her life and the recognition that she was not, in fact, on top of it.
DETROW: That was Knopf publisher Jordan Pavlin as well as Joan Didion's longtime editor Shelley Wanger. "Notes To John" is out today.
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