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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
such a perfect companion piece to the year of magical thinking and blue nights. i'd always read how much of a unit joan and john were, but this truly illustrated how deeply they revered each other. i started tearing up at the part where joan mentioned quintana was worried about what would happen to her if she lost john. this book also gave such deeper insight into joan's relationship with quintana and the complexity of the mother-daughter bond they had. there were so many bits and pieces where i could see how joan's life had even influenced her fiction work. truly so special to be able to start connecting the puzzle pieces. joan forever.
i don’t think i can rate this one - not because i didn’t get something from it, but just because it feels weird to assign a value to someone’s therapy notes? even after reading the year of magical thinking twice and blue nights once, the last pages of this book that talk about joan losing both her husband and daughter in such a short period of time still felt like a gut punch. notes to john works perfectly as a companion piece to those two memoirs, especially blue nights. even within these personal notes, didion still sounds like didion. however, we get a much deeper insight into events throughout her entire life that affected her, maybe some of the reasoning behind her detached writing style. the conversations she had with her therapist about how love and worry go together for her hit hard for me, i think a lot of people will be able to take some sort of lesson from these notes.
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
informative
reflective
sad
tense
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
A very intimate look into Didion’s private life and family relations, mostly centered on her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. Filled with poignant honesty about addiction; what it’s like to live with addiction, and what’s it like to help a loved one through it. This is the most I’ve read from Didion on her relationship with her daughter.
Didion transcribed many of her therapy sessions, written in a letter-like style to update her husband, John Dunne, on the psychiatric opinion held of their daughter’s alcoholism. These “Notes to John” span the length of a year and bring with them Didion’s signature spark with words as she writes about private and raw matters. A gift from beyond the grave meant for the eyes of those who love her work.
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced