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A Korean theatre troupe tackles Agamemnon... Addison Rae ab workout... Didion on the treadmill... "Psychic surgeons"... finally write your novel part 2

I downloaded the new Joan Didion on audiobook and listened to an hour and a half while doing my non-taxing gym routine and grocery shopping this morning. It’s six hours in total. I wrote my thesis on Didion’s fiction (something I find more absurd than embarrassing) and maintain that the perfect gift for a woman hosting me in a tropical location is A Book of Common Prayer. I’ve read it in Jamaica, Costa Rica, Manhattan without air conditioning, etc. I purchased this book on audible because Julianne Moore reads it…and I’ll never get it out of my head that Sally Mann runs to Proust, and therefore I have to exercise to audiobooks as well.

I was wary. I don’t really admire Didion’s late books (Blue Nights, A Year of Magical Thinking). I found them unnecessarily opaque. I felt like she cheated. The erasure of Quintana’s problems from these works rightly annoyed perceptive critics. (I detested the film about her life. Pure hagiography by an underemployed nephew.) I’m surprised to report that the new book, Notes to John, is intriguing. I thought it was a cash grab, and I’m sure it is, but I am not disappointed at all. In fact, I’m struggling to start work today, knowing that I could instead be listening to it.

It’s not a literary manuscript. These are detailed notes on her psychoanalysis sessions. What surfaces is a portrait of Didion as a mother and a real person (thoughtful, careful, devoted to John, somewhat blithe). Didion has gone to a doctor specifically to discuss problems with Quintana. In fact, the impetus for the sessions is that Quintana told her therapist that Didion should go to therapy. (Quintana, rather bitchily, does not think John needs therapy.) The insights are tough going. One painful incident is when her daughter’s young friends are quoting their mothers’ favorite sayings, and Quintana pipes up and says Didion’s is, “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush, I’m working.”