Joan Didion, Mother - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

In 2021 , on the day before Christmas Eve , Joan Didion died, and I surveyed her books — praising her ability to give the impression that “she was saying something deeply meaningful about the 20th-century American experience,” and A Book of Common Prayer .

After filing my piece about Didion’s oeuvre, I left her alone for 14 years . Then, in June 2021 , I decided to write for The American Spectator about the awful movies she’d scripted with her husband.

John Sutter : Joan Didion remained something of an enigma to me.

He says she was always concealing more than she was telling.

Sutter says a newly published volume by Didion entitled Notes to John is of such uncommon interest.

She says it's a diary, covering the period from December 1999 to January 2002 , in which she records in detail her conversations with her psychiatrist.

Notes to John confirms that Didion lived her life in denial about a lot of things, kept an emotional distance from everyone around her, clung to status symbols as if to a life raft.

Bruce Bawer : Underneath her self-absorption and self-mythologizing, she was remarkably deficient in self-knowledge, and, while playing in her books, in fact understood very little about other people.