The placement of dried flowers pressed between sheets of plastic, the name “Quintana” written on the neat letters of the child on the top.
Yellow Post-it notes of poems written in cursive: “My mother is not a sigh/She doesn't eat pie/Maybe she can fly.”
In a pocket-sized, handmade paper notebook, composed as a Mother's Day gift, Quintana, the current adult daughter, pasted a series of photos of her mother, Joanne Didion, on a television screen, and her blurry toes in the foreground.
Memorial items are like parents gather. A portion of the scrap paper depicting amateur artwork, loosely scribbled mishibs, and daughter's “signs” lies on self-identification as “a budding singer, actress, comedian.”
However, Didion, who passed away in 2021, did not store these specific memorabilia in his family's personal belongings. Rather, she submitted them as work research materials. While writing “Blue Nights,” a 2011 memoir about the death of her only daughter Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, in 2011, I submitted it along with notes, articles and drafts I drew along with early drafts.
This moving and revelationary ephemera from Quintana's life is one of the 240-foot joint archives of her author's parents Didion and John Gregory Dunn. The research file provides physical evidence of how embedded Didion's personal life lies in her professional work.
Alongside these memorial Didion she kept a stack of dateless printed pages entitled “Notes.” Overall, around 20 pages are numbered on the pages, but some numbers are repeated, suggesting that she originally wrote them as separate documents, and later hid them together. The notes in it are related not only to “Blue Knight,” but also to 2005's “Year of Magical Thinking.”
This was what happened in chronological order. On Christmas 2003, Quintana was hospitalized due to a flu that turned into pneumonia, which had turned into coma. Five days later, when he returned home from visiting his unconscious daughter at the ICU on December 30th, Dan, at the dinner table, ended in the range of “normal moments,” as I wrote in my 2005 book, but nevertheless died suddenly from a heart attack.
A year and a half later, on August 26, 2005, Quintana also died, as well, a series of health emergencies that have precisely caused the Dion to become somewhat opaque (the Christmas flu that turned into pneumonia turned into septic shock and eventually resulted in cerebral hemorrhage).
“I'm writing about this because otherwise I'd be dead,” Didion entered into the “Memo” document. “This is not the book I want to finish. Once I'm done, we'll finally leave.”
Based on the entries just before and after these lines, she appeared to refer to “magical thoughts,” but there is no clear boundary in the file between thoughts intended to be one memoir of sadness and another memoir of sadness. Given the very intertwining timelines of these two catastrophic losses, it's not surprising that her notes are too.
Except that Didion completed “Year of Magical Thinking” just a year after Dunne's death, he wrote in the same memo file, “I started this account on October 4th, 2004,” and “It ended on the last day of 2004.” Quintana passed away six weeks before “Magical Thoughts” was released. Didion did not publish “Blue Nights” for another six years.
Although written in a truncated, deeply referenced way that suggests that their only reader is themselves, Didion's notes reveal the steps in her writing process. They also reveal details of her family's life, which her book does not. (The Journal of Conversations with therapists, “Notes to John,” will be published next month in 1999.)
In addition to remembering her panicking at Quintana's first loose teeth, “My only idea was to take her to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center in 30 miles of town,” Quintana's cousin Tony quickly pulled her teeth. These lines went on to “blue night” almost verbatim.
What didn't do that: “I didn't understand addiction.”
This material directly reveals the simultaneous lightness and depth of Kuntana's relationship with her parents, and “Changes of Quicksilver” will be observed in the daughter's personality throughout her life.
Among the materials in the collection is a collage of photo cutouts created by Quintana while working as a photo editor at Elle Décor in her 20s. Her casual humor with her parents is evident in the handwritten letter on pink paper on the other side. To the right of the former president's cutout in his profile is a cropped photo of the woman's butt and thighs in a tight miniskirt. “Sorry – this is a stupid, very obvious little joke I found interesting.”
A few days later, she continued to write notes in more heartfelt words than she thanked her parents for their strict advice. “I don't know how good this NRT is for me,” she said. She appears to be referring to the “non-residential period” at Bennington University, where students can take several weeks off to gain work experience. “It's amazing how clear and obvious my 'reel' from Bennington is. Everything I was telling me in Los Angeles seemed so pointless and foreign to me.
In Quintana's “Blue Night” of substance use, “She was depressed and she drank too much, so this was because she was called to have taken the medicine herself.” Didion in the book does not state whether her daughter's drinking contributed to her Cascade's illness. She spends more time analyzing Quintana's complicated feelings about her own adoption, late.
“I saw charm, I saw calm, I saw the despair of suicide,” Didion wrote in the book. “What I've never seen or actually saw, but couldn't recognize, was “a desperate effort to avoid abandonment.” ”
“Adoption was a field that John and I couldn't discuss until very late,” she wrote in the note. “Q I worry about how I deal with it, how she deals with me.” These sentences alone are underlined in the pen, but I've never made it into a book.
Many of Didion's published writings, particularly her daughter's mental health (she was given many psychiatric diagnoses over the years, leading to multiple personality disorders), can feel like whispering to hear reader tension, but never do. What we were hearing was loud and clear. Didion and Dan took her home from St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California. Her arrival among the cultural elites of Hollywood, Malibu and Brentwood. Just months before she got sick, Raygarland's Upper Westside marriage to musician and bartender Jerry Michael.
“Look: History of the nuclear family,” Didion said. Also:
Christmas card.
“Princess” dress.
When I took her on a tour
“In fact, I no longer cherish these kinds of memorabilia,” she wrote in “Blue Night” of baby teeth, which Tony saved into a satin box after pulling.
“I believed that by preserving memorabilia, 'things' and totems, people could make people fully present and stay with me,” she writes. “In fact, it only helps to make it clear how inadequately they are for the moment they were here.”
She held them anyway.
