For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve kept a notebook, filling dozens of them over the years. Some I still have, others I’ve mislaid or tossed. My notebooks, both the online and paper versions, serve a hybrid function—as a fiction workplace for story ideas, character sketches, plot premises, what-ifs; and also as a therapy couch for my thoughts and feelings, for the highlights and lowlights of my personal life.
At times, the two functions blend: I’m writing about myself and transition into a first-person fiction narrative. Or I’m writing notes on a story idea and it reminds me of a personal situation I begin to explore.
Would I want someone reading my notebooks, which I’ve never intended for anyone’s eyes but my own? What about after I’m dead—would it be okay for someone to crack the spines and read them?
It’s about to happen to Joan Didion, the influential and prolific essayist and fiction writer who chronicled society and culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and who died in 2021 at the age of 87.
Her journal, labeled Notes to John, was discovered in a filing cabinet next to her desk after she died. John was her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003.
The journal entries begin in December 1999. According to the early media leaks, many of the entries recount sessions Didion was having with a psychiatrist at the time and address her struggles with anxiety, guilt, and depression. If that isn’t private correspondence to the self, I don’t know what is.
An article in The Guardian calls the diary—soon to be a book—“astonishingly intimate.” The article states: “As we know from a letter she wrote to a friend at that time, her family had been having ‘a rough few years’ when Didion started writing Notes to John. The psychiatrist sessions detailed in the journal include discussions of Didion’s childhood, alcoholism, depression and her adopted daughter, Quintana. Didion spoke in the sessions about her relationship with Quintana, who lived with mental illness and alcoholism, and died in 2005 aged thirty-nine.”
Didion didn’t leave instructions on how to handle this material. Nor did she destroy it. But her trustees, including her agent and publisher, are bringing Notes to John to the public market.
Never would I put myself in the same universe as Joan Didion as a writer, yet I can’t help thinking about my notebooks seeing the light of day; to have my family, my friends, my loyal readers let in on the musings of my inner self.
I turned to some of my old notebooks, specifically the ones from a three-year period when I was living in Santa Cruz, California in the early 1990s, a time I would call “a rough few years.”
What a struggle it was.
I don’t want anyone to read that I selfishly cared about only two things: writing and love. I don’t want anyone to read how I’d just made the decision to end it with L who I was living with and at one time thought I would marry. But when she asked me once, “Why don’t you want to marry me?” I didn’t have an answer, but I realized she was right. I especially don’t want anyone to read that I soon regretted the breakup, the thought I’d try to get back together with her, never did try, which meant I’d made the right decision in breaking up with her, which I continued to regret anyway. Why would I want to share that humiliating sequence?
Also, my first novel was written but roundly rejected by publishers, a blow to my confidence. I was engaged in a horrific battle with a second novel, my notebook packed with pages and pages of notes on characters and plotlines that in darker moments with my pen in hand became rantings about my mental state and lack of success. I kept financially afloat working in a restaurant, teaching at a local college, serving as the editor of a weekly paper—none of them were my future. I had a few friends and a list of short and futile relationships. On and off with the manipulative V who confirmed L’s conclusion of my character as all too capable of being “remote and cold.” There was J who had a grip on me for months yet I couldn’t understand why. S who was all-around good but my heart wasn’t in it.
In other entries I wrote about a visit to my family back east during which my father said I was “on the fringes” of the family, apparently because my four siblings were married and had kids and I was . . . see above.
Why would I want anyone to read about these struggles and shortcomings? It’s embarrassing and possibly boring.
I eventually wrestled my challenges, made changes, and my life veered in a better direction. Harriet has a lot to do with that, and our kids, and my continued commitment to writing novels.
I still keep a notebook. This way I stay in touch with who I am—and who I was over the years. I don’t know how the rest of you deal with yourself, but for me Didion said it best in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook” from her 1968 Slouching Toward Bethlehem:
“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Joan Didion
P.S. I’ll be reading Notes to John when it comes out, and probably feel like a voyeur.
