Air-Conditioned Unease

On​ 6 December 2000, during a snowstorm, Joan Didion was sitting in the waiting room of an office in Manhattan reading a copy of National Geographic. She was lost in an article about polar bears and their cubs and regretted having to stop reading when her therapist called her into his room. Roger MacKinnon, who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own psychiatrist that her mother was depressed and should see someone, which was like telling him she knew of a car that needed fuel or a dog that wanted a bone. Didion’s relationship with the blues was one of the things that defined her.

On first reading Didion’s bare, undigested notes from those sessions, I felt that the therapeutic drama was like a production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck as directed by John Cassavetes. Between MacKinnon and Didion, the process of interviewing must have been pretty electrifying. ‘My only advantage as a reporter,’ she wrote in the preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem, ‘is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.’ Then there was the John Wayne thing: he was a hero of Didion’s childhood (‘In John Wayne’s world,’ she wrote in an early essay, ‘John Wayne was supposed to give the orders’). But it was the polar bears in the waiting room that really stuck in my mind. I tracked down that issue of National Geographic and tried to imagine someone reading about polar bear cubs in an office on a freezing New York day, knowing the reason she was there was to talk about the extreme vulnerability of her only child. ‘In spring,’ the story begins, ‘polar bear mothers in Manitoba’s Wapusk National Park emerge from dens with cubs three months old and ready to face the world. The sow has fasted for as long as eight months, but that doesn’t stop her young from demanding full access to her remaining reserves.’

Didion’s essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, from 1966, is where readers first met Quintana, in the year she was born. ‘Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old,’ Didion writes,

I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

We catch another glimpse of Quintana, aged three, in The White Album, this time at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, ‘blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei’. Didion reports that Quintana wanted to go to the beach. ‘She cannot go to the beach,’ she writes, ‘because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected.’ Eight years later, Quintana is on the road with her mother during a book tour. ‘I had left California,’ Didion records, ‘equipped with two “good” suits, a box of unanswered mail, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, six Judy Blume books and my 11-year-old daughter. The Judy Blume books were along to divert my daughter. The daughter was along to divert me.’

By that stage in her young life, Quintana was already looking for someone to be. ‘My daughter was developing opinions’ is the way Didion puts it. In a diary Quintana was assigned to keep by her fifth-grade teacher in Malibu, she wrote that she’d ‘had an interesting talk with Carl Bernstein’. As a result of Didion’s essays and of photographs we’ve seen, those of us who didn’t know Quintana are likely to picture her in Malibu, somewhere her mother called a place of ‘isolation and adversity’. ‘We moved to this house on the highway in the year of our daughter’s fifth birthday,’ she writes in ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, and ‘in the year of her twelfth it rained until the highway collapsed, and one of her friends drowned at Zuma Beach, a casualty of Quaaludes.’ John Bryson’s photograph of the family on that warm promontory from 1976 now offers a premonition of the cold front ahead of them. Quintana looks at the camera as if suspicious at being seen, while Didion, next to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is balanced between a whisky glass and a lit cigarette, looking at Quintana. The difficulties are already inscribed in the dry air between them.

Maybe we only begin to understand our families when we recognise the stories we can’t bear to tell about them. Didion would one day write an entire book about Quintana, Blue Nights, in which these problems go uninvestigated. In that strange, anaesthetised book, Didion handles her guilt by enacting a baroque protection on the page, refusing to expose Quintana, even after death, to the kinds of scrutiny for which Didion was justly famous. I understand why she wrote it that way. One’s children’s vulnerabilities are inseparable from one’s own, and the cause of them, we fear, must lie in part with us. Quintana had come to Didion and her husband as an adoptee fresh from the hospital where she was born, and whatever wasn’t part of her DNA was learned, no doubt, among the crashing waves and blasted egos that came to edge her life. This isn’t to criticise the Didion-Dunnes or their world, but merely to recognise that depression gains a great deal of its power by handing the sufferer’s loved ones responsibility for it or blaming them for worrying about it too much. Either way, this lose-lose fandango can topple the busiest minds on the planet. Didion was dealing with the matter in the strictest privacy when she went to see Dr MacKinnon.

She would have been mortified at these notes being turned into a ‘book’, and that’s because they are not a book, not even provisionally. They are intimate notes she wrote to keep her husband abreast of a developing medical situation. Even your average quality-control freak (and Didion was above average here) wouldn’t want the shrapnel of their scattergun anxieties and thoughts to be displayed like this. The idea that authors should go around destroying notes and manuscripts they don’t intend for publication is only ever posited by people who aren’t writers. If Didion had wanted these notes out in the world, she would have arranged it. Every serious writer has notes and drafts that are not published, and never will be, for the simple reason that they are not publishable. We keep everything, not in the expectation that it will one day end up in Barnes & Noble, but because we know from experience that it might prove useful to jog a memory, fashion a scene or recall a character. I don’t know a single writer who spends time rummaging through their boxes looking for things to burn. There is certain to be a great deal to feel shy about, but unless you’re Henry James, or somebody else fascinated by the idea of authorial control even after death, leavings are just leavings. You appoint literary executors in the hope that they will show good judgment. Notes to John exposes Didion and Dunne to the coarse explicitness they had yearned to avoid when it came to Quintana, creating a permanence for incidents that were hugely painful but not always instructive, for thoughts that reached but didn’t always grasp.

We can’t libel the dead, but we can exploit them. By finding these gossipy books interesting, I show my own duplicity in the use of biographical material, yet I console myself with the notion that what has been revealed cannot be unrevealed. People’s troubles are no less involving for being unwelcome. Quintana believed that Didion and Dunne were a united front, or a single person, and this caused her to feel she was ultimately alone and unimportant. (‘I thought it was your job to work for Mr Preminger,’ she tells them, ‘and it was my job to get taken care of by Mrs So-and-so.’) Didion didn’t like AA or Al-Anon and perhaps that was part of her denial of her own father’s depression. These things unfold over a year’s worth of sessions with MacKinnon, as does the idea that Quintana felt (or was made to feel) in some way responsible for the fragility of her mother. We see Didion riven and anxious, but also culpably sensible, telling Quintana she should simply ‘make a decision to be happy’. We don’t find revelations, but little implosions of perception and an occasional rallying of the artist’s resources. As a reader, one begins to experience the pleasures of disloyalty, the keen imbibing of information about a beloved friend who you’ve always known had problems. By and by, it adds brushstrokes to the picture of a writer we thought we knew.

The girls Didion grew up with hoped for a white dress. But when Didion thought of marriage, the image that came ‘was myself getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark glasses and getting my picture taken’.

‘You don’t think that’s unusual?’ MacKinnon asks her. ‘I’ve never encountered a childhood divorce fantasy.’

If the accretion of detail amounts to a charge, then it’s the one everybody who’s read Didion’s work would expect: that she was emotionally unavailable. It begins of course with her parents. We learn that she only ever threw up before three public events, and each time one or both her parents were in the audience. There is a suggestion in the notes that Didion and Dunne were resisting Quintana’s recovery because they were at some level addicted to her being dependent on them. But what emerges even more clearly is that Didion felt hopeless because the Quintana situation was hampering her work. For some people, work is the best and most reliable antidepressant, and Didion had been saying this with elegance since she first found her talent. She was in tune with the times; she was comfortably numb. With the years, however, parenting took her out of her defences, which means it took her out of her prose. And that was a headache of an entirely different order for someone with Didion’s habits of mind. She loved and cared for Quintana, but the costs were extortionate.

One of the things Didion bequeaths to her followers is a certain anxiety about legitimacy, or the right to speak, or the right to silence. Everywhere nowadays, there are slim novels full of zonked susurrations on this subject, showing the reader that the speaker might or might not be trusted with the story. Yet very few of those writers write sentences that seem inseparable from a sense of public disorder, as hers do. ‘I tell you these things about myself only to legitimise my voice,’ says Grace Strasser-Mendana, ‘a student of delusion, a prudent traveller’, in A Book of Common Prayer, written in the mid-1970s and set in the political miasma of Central America. ‘We are uneasy about a story until we know who is telling it. In no other sense does it matter who “I” am: “the narrator” plays no motive role in this narrative, nor would I want to.’ In all of her novels, Didion’s characters are wrapping themselves in stories or running from them, and such is life. ‘Novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with,’ she told her nephew Griffin Dunne in his film documentary about her, Joan Didion: The Centre Will Not Hold, which came out in 2017. The threat of those she loved coming to grief is always present in her work and is often foretold. ‘On those pages she had tried only to rid herself of her dreams,’ we’re told of Grace’s friend Charlotte in A Book of Common Prayer, ‘and these dreams seemed to deal only with sexual surrender and infant death, commonplaces of the female obsessional life.’

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ is the way Didion’s collection The White Album begins. But we also move away from stories in order to survive. We can feel imprisoned by other people’s versions of who we are, especially if their urge is to blame. On one hand, the Didion-Dunnes were selfish writers who exuded ambition and fragility, but on the other, they supplied their daughter with everything she could hope for, including love, while failing to offer her the ultimate gift of not being themselves. Quintana was clearly lovable, but not always likeable, as her mother admits during one session. The daughter would say that ‘she was going to die tonight and nobody even cared,’ which is the sort of thing addicts say, but also the sort of thing American girls say in TV shows, where there is always a difficult daughter denuding the family’s exalted identity and turning the American dream of provision into a nightmare of denial.

In the ‘way-west’ myth that underpins Didion’s idea of her Californian self, there is always the struggle to get there. ‘You drop baggage,’ she wrote, ‘you jettison the piano and the books and your grandmother’s rosewood chest, or you don’t get to Independence Rock in time to make the Sierra before snowfall.’ At the time of these sessions, Didion was struggling to write about her ‘California mythology’, what she at one point calls ‘the burying your child on the trail story’. At some level she hadn’t yet worked out, she appeared to blame the way she was as a person and a writer for the losses that were experienced by the people closest to her. ‘All my life,’ she says to MacKinnon in one of the later notes here, ‘I have turned away from people who were trouble to me. Cut them out of my life. I can’t have that happen with Quintana.’

The​ first time I met Didion was in 2007, two years after Quintana died. I was placed next to her at a dinner in some weird Italian-Japanese restaurant in New York and what I remember most about that night was the tameness of her voice, the shrewdness of her listening. At one point during our conversation, she beckoned me closer to hear something important. I was hoping for a deathless secret of the sort once whispered to her by Ernest Hemingway or Greta Garbo. ‘Whenever you’re in Los Angeles,’ she said, ‘you must always stay at the Beverly Wilshire.’

‘The hotel?’

‘Yes. Always.’

That was it. We spoke about her husband – I had been a fan of his book Harp when I was young – but not about Quintana. When she was ready to go home I went outside with her to find her a cab. She liked the volume of my wolf-whistle (bad boys, misspent youth) and when the cab stopped we had a sort of hug right there in the road.

Jean Stein, the editor and writer who was hosting the supper, went on to talk about Quintana after I went back inside. ‘You know something?’ she said, twisting a hand in the air. ‘She would only read one book. Again and again she read it. My book about Edie Sedgwick. They had similar problems.’ What Stein had in mind were the problems of privilege, especially the kinds of privilege associated with the West Coast. As the daughter of Jules Stein, who founded the talent agency MCA, Jean grew up in a house in the Hollywood Hills, and just as she understood Edie and Quintana (two Californians who came to New York), she shared something of their sun-kissed desperation. Ten years after that dinner, Stein threw herself off the balcony of her apartment on the Upper East Side.

The writer Eve Babitz was Californian in the way Mao Zedong was Chinese or Billy Connolly is Scottish – for a living. Serially a model, a photographer, a spirited memoirist, a groupie and one of those irrepressible joint-rollers-to-the-stars, Babitz was fun at a party, but from an early age allowed no good deed to go unpunished. Lili Anolik has now produced her second book on Babitz, a book in which our heroine is not as good a writer as Didion and it’s somehow Didion’s fault. Anolik easily converts Didion’s talent and discipline into ‘greedy and grinding ambition … She did anything and everything necessary to go all the way.’ Anolik wants it both ways, though: ‘This book likes her greedy and grinding ambition, likes her cold core.’ Maybe if I was a cage-fighter, a writer for Vanity Fair or a member of Trump’s press team, I’d find it natural to imagine that two interesting women cannot be interesting at the same time. That seems to be the guiding ethos of Anolik’s book.

The year Quintana was born, Didion and Dunne were living at 7406 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. Didion and Babitz moved in similar circles, though Didion was never up to her eyes in psychedelics like Babitz was (‘It all sounded like marmalade skies to me,’ Didion said of the counterculture and its music). Nevertheless, she helped Babitz get her first story published in Rolling Stone and they were occasional friends. Helping other writers is not guaranteed to bring thanks and rewards; the resentment will often be in direct proportion to the kindness. Thus, in Anolik’s account, Didion and Dunne, who were certainly ambitious and socially exclusive, become the conquering cheats of the social scene. Dunne is a drinker with a ‘crazy Irish temper’ who caused Joan to become ‘worried about violence’. Meanwhile, in a chapter with the title ‘Fuckable’, Babitz shows us all how to live:

Eve walked like a groupie, talked like a groupie, fucked like a groupie, but a groupie she was not. A groupie, as I understand the term, is a person who bestows sexual favours on celebrity musicians. Only the musicians Eve was favouring sexually weren’t, at that time, celebrities. As Steve Martin observed to me, ‘Nobody was famous yet.’ And besides, Eve wasn’t looking to turn a one-night stand into a long-term partner, the groupie goal and endgame. ‘God, the last thing Eve wanted was a boyfriend,’ said Laurie [Eve’s cousin]. ‘She just wanted to exchange body fluids.’

In times to come, Babitz would make her main contribution to the lexicon of the era, saying that she was suffering from ‘squalid over-boogie’.

‘Squalid over-boogie’ is imperishable. It proves that the best account of Babitz’s sensibility, wrapped in the hot anomie of her style, is to be found in her own books. As refreshing and trouble-making as the Santa Ana winds, she writes freeway prose, orange grove prose, Whisky a Go Go prose, and nothing anybody says about her is equal to the weird emptiness she conjures up in the off-kilter spaces of her storytelling. She is no Joan Didion, but why should she be? Where Didion can be sub-zero, Babitz radiates heat like the bonnet of a Ford Mustang stranded in Death Valley in August. Where Didion has a scent of jasmine, Babitz smells of the cocaine sweats.

Glinting through the fronds of memory, we see the manners of the time. We see the arguments and the reckonings. We see the hedonism. And perhaps we also see the beginnings of those hauntings that would take the fun out of it all. In the title essay of The White Album, Didion would capture better than anyone that bad-trip-ness, the journey from feeling part of some community or other to seeing the way that the community was laced with darkness, or pullulating with threat and loss. Didion had initially felt like a normal Californian who signed contracts and worked, participating ‘in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house’, but death was on the horizon and the part of town where she lived would come to be known as a ‘senseless-killing neighbourhood’.

In September 1968, Didion and Dunne gave a party at Franklin Avenue for Tom Wolfe, to celebrate the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Janis Joplin arrived and asked for brandy and Benedictine in a water glass. ‘Music people never wanted ordinary drinks,’ Didion noted. ‘They wanted sake, or champagne cocktails, or tequila neat.’ Griffin Dunne, who was thirteen at the time, was accosted by the elderly film director Otto Preminger. ‘I have taken ze acid,’ he told Griffin, ‘and I am having a bummer. Ze people here are evil, and you are ze only light that is pure.’ Outside the party, on the street and in the hills, a new threat was gathering. A lot of cars were stolen from outside the party that night. ‘There were rumours. There were stories,’ Didion wrote later:

Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” – this sense that it was possible to go “too far”, and that many people were doing it – was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community.

The Manson murders happened in August 1969 and Joplin was dead soon after that.

Didion’s world was Californian to its core. The light is there, but it isn’t the chilled-out hippiedom of ‘California Dreamin’’ that rises from her prose so much as an air-conditioned unease and a time-lengthening poolside ennui. Her stories are full of Coke bottles and cigarettes, blister packs of Nembutal and copies of Life magazine. It’s as if a special kind of American dread is forming itself into a commercial or a lifestyle instead of a life. ‘She knew a lot of things about disaster,’ we are told of Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays and her headachy thoughtfulness is strangely in sync with the landscape of deserts and bright blue forevers. Reading Didion’s fiction, you feel transported into a dry haze of dejection, ‘the still centre of the daylight world [at] the corner of Sunset and La Brea’, while the characters, like Didion herself, hope against hope for some minor revelation in the domestic quarter. Not quite solid, her characters float around various kitchens of the mind, dealing with corn-muffin mix and Spanish onions, hoping to triumph with their summer squash succotash. But part of Didion’s struggle, it seems to me, was to render something substantial out of all that sunlight. In her memoir Where I Was From she describes taking a walk in old Sacramento with her mother and daughter, the latter new to it all. ‘Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility,’ she writes. ‘The wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from. It was only Quintana who was real.’ In 1978 they moved to a new house in Brentwood to be nearer the child’s school.

Quintana’s​ cousin Griffin worked for two elderly ladies at the Dakota building in Manhattan when he was young – one of them was Jean Stein’s sister, Susan, and the other was a Southern actress named Ruth Ford. Ford played Carlotta in the screen version of Didion’s Play It as It Lays and called the police the night John Lennon was shot outside her building. As related in The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin’s sister, Dominique, was murdered less than two years after Lennon by her ex-boyfriend, and these murders can seem to the reader part of a pattern, a story of America and celebrity in the late 20th century. Tina Brown asked Dominique’s father, Dominic (Nick) Dunne, to write about the trial of the man who killed her, setting him on a new career as Vanity Fair’s special correspondent on meurtriers célèbres. In Graydon Carter’s recent memoir, we hear of Didion and John Gregory Dunne having dinner ten years later with the Vanity Fair staffer Wayne Lawson.* ‘Wayne was seated between Joan and John,’ Carter writes. ‘John leaned across and said to Wayne, “Isn’t there any way you can stop my brother writing these ridiculous pieces about O.J. Simpson? He’s making a fool of himself.” Joan snapped at him, saying, “John, please!”’

Griffin opens up a deeper seam of worry about the problems of the Didion-Dunnes:

Before she became an actress, Dominique earned a little pocket money staying over at their house in Brentwood to babysit … Quintana, while they were out of town on business. Q, as her family nicknamed her, was a precocious ninth grader at Westlake School, where Dominique had also gone. Some of the nights my sister babysat, Q gave her a run for her pocket money by sneaking out of the house to hook up with older kids partying in Holmby Hills. Dominique would track her down to whatever Less than Zero bacchanal she found Q in and drag her drunk ass back to Brentwood. Those evenings usually ended with her holding back Q’s hair over a toilet bowl while Q puked and begged Dominique not to tell her parents. When John and Joan returned, they’d asked their niece if Q ‘wasn’t too much of a handful’, as if knowing she was but feared hearing the details. Dominique once told me that John and Joan’s denial about Q’s behaviour was to cover their desperate worry that they had no clue how to deal with her.

In Notes to John, we hear about the effect Dominique’s murder might have had on Quintana. Didion begins by speaking about her brother’s children.

I said I thought those children had been encouraged growing up to see one another as potential threats, and this extended to Quintana, so they had never been close. I said she had always been closer to your nieces and nephews [‘your’ means her husband, to whom the notes are addressed], particularly to Dominique. I talked again about her insistence on going to school all the week Dominique was on life support, her refusal to be part of what amounted to a death watch … One thing I’ve never talked to her about is whether it affected her attitude towards boys, men, boyfriends. Did it make her at some level distrustful?

The notes from Didion’s sessions with MacKinnon go on to refer to the ‘unpleasantness’ with John’s brother, Nick. The man who strangled Dominique had worked as a sous-chef at a restaurant frequented by the Didion-Dunnes and was defended by an attorney hired by the restaurant. Patrick Terrail, its owner, sent an orchid to John and Joan at the time of the arrest, including a note that said, ‘My heart breaks for you.’ Nick saw it and interpreted it as a treasonable offence on the part of his brother and Didion, whom he (wrongly) assumed were still visiting the restaurant, despite its unconscionable defence of the man who was believed to have murdered his daughter. It was a horrible mix-up.

For a long time, the story behind Quintana’s illnesses and the Dunne family feud remained pretty dark, secreted, some of it, within the cracks of Didion’s memoir-writing. But it is now plain to see. The lawyers defending the man accused of Dominique’s murder had painted her as a loose woman, a virtual participant in her own death (they always do), and the Didion-Dunnes worried that Quintana would be called to the stand. So they took her to Paris for the duration of the trial. ‘There is little research,’ Griffin Dunne writes in his book, ‘for how often extended families turn on each other in the event of the sudden death of a relation, but if there were, my parents and the Didion-Dunnes would have been a case study.’ Didion and her husband brought Quintana back on the day of the sentencing. The perpetrator got just six years, and that afternoon, Griffin’s brother sent a second orchid to the Didion-Dunnes with a note, as if from the sender of the first one. It read: ‘Victory is Ours, Love, Patrick Terrail.’ The sense of disorder and betrayal could hardly have been deeper. In time, the Dunne brothers made up, but they are said never to have discussed their daughters, what they as parents did or didn’t do, or should or shouldn’t have done.

It’s all there in the cold climate of Didion’s writing. Dominique’s murder struck a long-lasting chord, which reaches from the past of Didion’s essays and Californian fiction to her future interest in female victimhood, in the way Americans vary their concern depending on the colour and class of the victim. In all of it, one might detect the vulnerability of Quintana and the shadow of Dominique. When things begin to fall apart for her daughter and when Didion’s husband dies while Quintana is in intensive care, the shock takes nothing away from Didion’s feeling of inevitability, and she struggles for the one thing she always had as a writer – control. Suddenly, she can’t make the story up and she can’t fix her life on the page. In her masterpiece, The Year of Magical Thinking, published in 2005, she is here but not here, and in the writing she can only lay a few footprints in the snow, soon covered again by drifts.

By then, she’d felt for years that she and Dunne had failed their daughter. Quintana had grown up loving leis. Stephanotis was the exotic flower of her childhood, and she chose them for her wedding braid the day she got married in New York in 2003. In his wedding toast, her father spoke of the house in Malibu and of the Pacific Ocean, hoping the sunshine they had shared would find its place in her married life. There were memories he couldn’t share. Like the time Quintana phoned the state psychiatric facility in Ventura County to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy (she was five years old). Or the time she called 20th Century Fox to ask them what she needed to do to be a star. At the age of thirteen, she spoke to her mother of ‘the novel I’m writing just to show you’.

‘I said that was what truly broke our heart,’ Didion wrote after seeing MacKinnon. ‘To see how hard she was trying. We had tried to make her life easy and we hadn’t. I don’t mean “easy” in the obvious sense of good houses, good schools, etc. I mean easy in the sense that she would be free both of her own and our history.’

‘Our heart,’ she wrote. Two writers, one heart.

Perhaps Cyril Connolly missed the point. It’s not the pram in the hall but the thing in the pram, for whom the enemy of promise is the typewriter in the study. ‘Maybe you dealt with her at a distance,’ the shrink said to Didion.

‘I dealt with everybody at a distance,’ she replied.

The last time​ I saw Didion she was in London. She told her editor Clare Reihill that she would like to meet up, so the three of us had dinner at Scott’s on one of those Sunday nights when the West End seems emptied out. We spoke about cars and she said how much she’d loved driving in LA when she was young. She was even thinner than usual, but she ordered a huge T-bone steak with chips and ate it all. Throughout the meal, the topics would come and go (writers, the theatre, magazines, New York) and she would say single, uncertain things which were somehow crystalline even in their uncertainty. Again, the quality of her listening never varied. Some people are self-conscious in a way that doesn’t reach out to others, but Joan’s self-consciousness made us complicit – it was all part of her beautiful skill. After dinner, I drove her in my Volkswagen Polo back to the Covent Garden Hotel, and she seemed tired. ‘I’d invite you in for a drink, but I don’t think I could stand up,’ she said, gathering the straps of her nice bag.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ I said.

‘That’s right. Soon.’

We imagine we can reach past people’s pain. Didion gave the impression it might be possible, but wasn’t it just hope over experience? Part of her nature and her aesthetic was to feel responsible even for her own disconnectedness. To take responsibility for your own life was central to her idea of self-respect and showing ‘character’. Maybe it was part of where she was from. ‘Not much about California, on its own preferred terms,’ she wrote, ‘has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.’ Maybe that is why we think of ourselves in a new way once our parents are gone: our separateness is confirmed. ‘Who will look out for me now,’ Didion writes later in Where I Was From, italics her own. ‘Who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from?’ And if your child dies, that separateness must be of a different order, a stymie on your sense of plausible continuation. In Didion’s later work we see a well of loneliness so deep that her own strange style is itself estranged. She went on living after John and Quintana, but was animated to the ends of her nerves by loss.

Maybe it helps, in that situation, to have a personal assistant who needs validation and saving even more than you need it yourself. Cory Leadbeater was a Columbia student encouraged by James Fenton to come and work with Didion when she needed a hand. It was supposed to last for six months but went on for nine years. She in fact needed relatively little, but Leadbeater needed a lot, and she taught him about ‘fish and the New York Review and love’. Her ‘approval meant enough’ for Leadbeater ‘to beat away a lifetime of existential dread and fear of going unnoticed. It seems to me now one of the greatest gifts of my life that she was willing to make my problems her problems.’

It appears to be one of the hazards of literary life in America, that if you hire an assistant they will one day write a book about your fridge. Your way of cooking fish. They will credit you either with saving or destroying their life (see books by Salinger’s assistant and Lillian Hellman’s if you want the full American Gothic). In this diverting genre, Leadbeater is good company and is his own man. ‘So many of the trappings of Joan’s crowd irked me,’ he writes, ‘their clothes I loathed, their affected accents, their quick adoption of whatever opinion was shared by Ben Brantley [the New York Times’s theatre critic] – but I knew also that these were the people who had found a way to live a life in letters.’ Eventually, he feels that his book ‘is a catalogue of my various dishonesties’. So far, so Didion. Leadbeater lives with her for a while and helps her, and then he meets someone and has a daughter of his own to worry about, a new clock starting as Didion’s is ticking down.

‘I remember that once when we were snowbound,’ she wrote in Where I Was From, ‘[my mother] gave me several old copies of Vogue, and pointed out in one of them an announcement of the competition Vogue then had for college seniors, the Prix de Paris, first prize a job in Vogue’s Paris or New York office. You could win that, she said.’ When I went back to this, and read the word ‘snowbound’, I thought again of Didion in the waiting room, reading about polar bears. Her life was always about mothers and daughters, about independence, about magazines (Quintana had worked on one) and getting away.

In the last period of her life, when she was living with the losses in her family and trying her best to protect Quintana, I think you can see in Didion’s writing that she was finally coming home to how afraid she had always been. Looking back, you might wonder not only about the writer and mother she was, but about the girl she had been all along, the girl to whom her adopted daughter, among other things, was an objective correlative. We have children, some of us, in order to be fully ourselves, then we discover a mystery beyond all that, of how hard it is to be responsible for somebody else. ‘Once she was born I was never not afraid,’ she wrote. ‘The source of the fear was obvious: it was the harm that could come to her. A question: if we and our children could in fact see the other clear would the fear go away? Would the fear go away for both of us, or would the fear go away only for me?’