Joan Didion without her style

Joan Didion , who died aged 87 in 2021 , is almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear what she means to say’ She set forthright, cagey tone as early as her first , reputation-making essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem .

The Year of Magical Thinking was written in the aftermath of the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne , in 2003 .

It was also in part about their daughter, who had become seriously ill and was admitted to hospital a few days before Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack.

Blue Nights was in a sense Didion ’s second effort to be direct about this “area” (itself a strikingly nebulous, evasive word).

Notes to John is an undeniably interesting book, if not an obviously stylish one.

It reads as a functional chronicle of Didion’s exchanges with MacKinnon , delivered as “directly and flatly” as she perhaps ever mustered.

The best way Didion can help Quintana is by accepting that she ca n’t .