In advance coverage of Notes, Didion’s executors (a cohort that includes her agent, her longtime editor, and Knopf’s current publisher) take special care to emphasize that when the memos were discovered, they had been printed out and arranged chronologically in a file folder near the author’s desk, as if the gesture of organizing documents in a 50-cent folder constitutes an instruction to publish its contents in a glossy $32 hardcover decades later.

Didion’s life and work were governed by her infamous capacity for restraint. She exercised an almost anachronistic degree of discretion, a level of dignity that would not be possible for public figures who came after. But even casting aside Didion’s persona, this was a writer famed for her meticulous perfectionism, a woman who rewrote her drafts dozens of times until every sentence sang. It’s difficult to imagine her agreeing to publish a book whose first line is, “Re not taking Prozac”. Perhaps if Didion had the opportunity to fashion these memos into a project with more direction and economy, this book would have earned its place within her body of work. But as it stands, one wonders whether Didion would even grant that Notes to John qualifies as a proper book, a unit of composition that could be stacked alongside Didion’s masterful nonfiction collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album.

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Joan Didion's insufferable disciples

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In her private transmissions to her husband of nearly 40 years, Didion comes across as guarded and self-censoring. In a work of this nature, we hope to unearth at least a few stray details that might complicate our understanding of the author’s inner life. The only interesting aspect of this project is the gesture itself — the impulse to catalogue her therapy sessions and report them to her husband. But the tone is perfunctory and clinical, written as if under a court order to document her therapeutic insights.

Didion & Babitz, Lili Anolik’s tabloid-adjacent double biography of Didion and the artist Eve Babitz, published last year, delivers many times more compelling insights into Didion’s mindset. Anolik writes, “Engraved at the top of her stationary was Joan Didion Dunne, but she always … ran a line through the Didion”. This prompts Anolik to wonder: “If ‘Joan Dunne’ was how she wished to be known, why didn’t she order stationary with a Joan Dunne engraving? Was it because she wanted to call attention to the fact that she, a major writer, was allowing her identity to be subsumed by that of her husband, a minor writer?”

In this case, Didion’s scattered personal effects are more revealing than her private writings to her closest confidante. Anolik isn’t the first observer to clock the author’s cosmetic deference to her husband, although she provides the most complete accounting of it. Also from Didion & Babitz, a letter that Babitz wrote but did not send to the diminutive Joan Didion in the Sixties: “Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it were not for the fact that he regards you a lot of the time as a child, so it’s alright that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more alright because you are always referring to your size.”

The balance of power in the Didion-Dunne marriage was delicate. The couple’s lifelong friend Dan Wakefield remarked on their shared magazine column: “The Saturday Evening Post wanted Joan to do a column called Points West. She said she would, but only if she could alternate writing the column with John, and only if she and John could each have their own separate byline.”

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Is the Tradwife just a kink?

By Poppy Sowerby

Like Andy Warhol, Didion saw something in American culture before the culture saw it in itself. She was ahead of her time, a sort of proto-trad-wife — a breadwinner masquerading as a beauty queen. Didion would have married into an affluent single-income household had that been her ambition, devoting herself to motherhood and family life, writing in her spare time. But, as Anolik keenly observes, Didion wanted both “the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.”

Like the tradwives that came after her, she could not suppress her careerism, nor could she suppress her appetite for fame and attention. Contemporary conservative influencers monetize the performance of motherhood and housekeeping, but Didion carved out the archetype when it still possessed an aura of newness, rejecting the burgeoning counterculture, conforming to an Old World model of femininity and making it look cool. She’s rarely credited for her supreme contribution to the phenomenon that is the socially conservative It Girl. Every time she denounced the spirit of the age — the Sexual Revolution, the women’s movement, almost every aspect of the Sixties — her star rose higher.

But Didion continually failed to live up to her traditional aspirations, even in her fantasies. She told Dr. MacKinnon: “I keep hearing that small girls imagine themselves as brides, princesses in wedding dresses. I never had: my earliest picture of myself being ‘married’ was getting a divorce, leaving a courthouse in a South American city wearing dark sunglasses and getting my picture taken.” Indeed, at no point did she encourage her daughter, Quintana, to date or consider marriage. She spent the bulk of these therapeutic sessions bemoaning Quintana’s unwillingness to seize the opportunities Didion found for her in photograph. She continually expressed frustration that Quintana’s focus seems to be on “leaving her job rather than going somewhere specific”.

It apparently didn’t occur to Didion that work might not provide the same salvation for Quintana as it did for her and Dunne. Status was Didion’s prescription for alcoholism and depression. Superficiality was her prized maternal wisdom. She told her doctor, “I had said repeatedly over the past few years — when Quintana expressed unhappiness or hopelessness about her situation — I had tried to explain that she had to make a decision to be happy. That there was an actual benefit to putting on a happy face”. Over the course of a few dozen sessions, the author cobbled together an impression of Quintana’s well-being based on her enthusiasm for her professional life and her capacity to manage basic daily tasks. In one of her first sessions, Didion expressed confusion at Quintana’s backslide into addiction, saying, “She had seemed fine, a blizzard of efficiency — I had even today gotten a check for medical reimbursement, with the paperwork all efficiently highlighted, ready for filing”. And that’s what the Didion estate has delivered with Notes: efficient paperwork, ready for filing.

The notes that were originally printed in Didion’s files end in 2001, although the collection includes an additional brief from 2003, recovered from Didion’s computer, written eight months before Quintana’s death. The picture these transmissions paint is of a woman whose capacity for understanding the people in her life extended only to her husband. Even then, there were instances in which the mask slipped, and Didion’s cultivated docility to her husband disintegrated. In 1969, Didion wrote that she and Dunne were on vacation at the Royal Hawaiian hotel, “in lieu of filing for divorce”. Another telling moment from Didion’s biography: after miscarrying in her early 20s, she expressed regret at “having missed an interesting moment in Cuba”.

This flippant cynicism — abortion reduced to tourism — is not entirely in line with Didion’s carefully cultivated persona: a good Protestant girl, the debutante from Sacramento who got her start in National Review. These disclosures reflect what Anolik calls Didion’s “contradictory extremes … concealment and exposure, mystery and blatancy”. The paradoxes are expertly woven into her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking, written when Didion was at the height of her abilities, and could reflect on Quintana’s death with transparency and control. The problem with Notes is that it is devoid of paradox; it’s exposure without concealment, blatancy without mystery, a woman writing to and for her husband. Whether or not these memos were interesting to John Dunne at the time of their writing, they are unlikely to be of interest to the general reader.

But someone who more clearly embodied the figure of the satyr, and is in the process of being cancelled, was Norman Mailer. According to an article by Michael Wolff in the Ankler, plans to publish a collection of Mailer’s essays for the centenary of his birth next year have been abandoned by his publisher Random House. Wolff writes that a junior staff member was offended by an essay Mailer wrote in the 1957 entitled “The White Negro”, in which Mailer rhapsodises about the revolutionary potential of black people in a slightly creepy way. But it’s not exactly clear why the Mailer book has been cancelled. In any case, you can still read the “The White Negro” at Dissent magazine.

The essay valorises rebellion. It is about wanting “to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self”. Mailer was repulsed by anything bourgeois or conformist; he loved Jazz, which, he wrote, made a “knife-like entrance into culture”. The main character of “The White Negro” is the “hipster”, whose Mecca was Greenwich Village in New York, and who tended towards existentialism. Mailer was a Philosopher of Hip, which constituted a “ménage-à-trois” made up of the bohemian, the juvenile delinquent, and the Negro. The Hip was the marriage of black and white, but it was “the Negro who brought the cultural dowry”.

James Baldwin described the essay as “slumming”, but he also recognised that Mailer had taken Hip more seriously than the pretentious, patronising Jack Kerouac set. Indeed, Mailer wrote that “the over-civilised man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic”. But “to be a real existentialist … one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the ‘purpose’”. Black Americans had this purpose because they were so marginalised in society; they lived life to the full because life was on the edge for them.

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The essay is not especially offensive. It relies on crude stereotypes about black people to advance its points, but it’s not The Turner Diaries. If anything will truly cancel Mailer, it is not outrage but indifference. How many people under 40 still read his work today?

In his own time the satyr was never marginalised by the American cultural establishment. In fact, his career was enabled by the fact that post-war America opened the door to things it had previously seen as threatening. Mailer was a straight white man, and so the cancellation of his essay collection could be seen as another strike against an enduring hierarchy. But he was also a Jew, and when he was growing up, many of America’s top universities, like Harvard and Yale, had quotas that limited the number of Jews they took in.

And so Mailer became the Don Juan of the literary world: Alfred Kazin once described him as the “Rabbi of screwing”. Norman Podhoretz said he was “immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage”. Mailer loved to arm wrestle with strangers and fist fight. This fed his fame. By 1960 he was firmly established as a public intellectual, but he wanted more drama, more violence. That year he decided to run for mayor of New York City. In November, during a party to celebrate his candidacy, he stabbed his wife Adele Morales and nearly killed her. Morales refused to press charges, and Mailer ultimately received probation and a suspended sentence.

He got off not only legally but socially. Rather than cancelling him, many of his contemporaries supported him. James Baldwin saw Mailer’s violence as a form of emancipation: “It is like burning down the house in order, at last, to be free of it”. Lionel Trilling, one of the most distinguished critics in America, saw it as a “Dostoyevkian ploy”, a way for Mailer to “test the limits of evil in himself”. In 1969, Mailer decided to run for Mayor of New York again. He was encouraged to do so by his friend, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

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By Sarah Ditum

So Mailer’s relationship with women is not straightforward. Kate Millett tried to make it seem so, in her book Sexual Politics: she condemned him for misogyny. In response, Mailer wrote “The Prisoner of Sex” for Harper’s magazine, in March 1971. His dispute with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, he wrote, was its evasive attitude to biology. Women, because of their reproductive capacities, were men’s “only connection to the future”. But feminists sought to disentangle themselves from this reality. Women, he wrote, “were a step, or a stage, or a move or a leap nearer the creation of existence”. Without women, men would be deracinated: what would be the point of living if you can’t pass on your genes?

Although Mailer slept with many women, he denounced contraception. Every fuck was meaningful to him. Sex was an existential force, rather than a recreational activity. And this partly explains his appeal: he scrutinised life with a passionate intensity. This is insane, you think, reading some of his work. But you can’t stop reading. His seriousness can be invigorating.

This explains, I think, why Joan Didion — who has been canonised as a feminist saint after her recent death — endorsed Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex,” writing that his view “strikes me as exactly right”. Didion herself wrote a critical essay in 1972 about feminism, arguing that the movement was becoming trivial and infantilising: “Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.” The novelist Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted her irritation at the cancellation of the new Mailer essay collection, was also sympathetic to “The Prisoner of Sex,” writing that Mailer “is shameless in his passion for women, and one is led to believe anything he says because he says it so well”.

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Shameless is the perfect word for Mailer. He was invited to participate in the Town Hall debate in April 1971, sponsored by New York University and the Theater for Ideas, on the topic of women’s liberation. The panel included Germaine Greer. He was his usual abrasive self, threatening at one time, in response to jeers from the audience, to expose himself:

“If you wish me to act the clown, I’ll take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it, and then I’ll walk away and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown you the real one.”

He also exposed himself in his writings, which can be compelling, or embarrassing. The two are inextricable: he risked embarrassment constantly because he was so naked in his passions and ambitions and insecurities. He stalked the twentieth century like a proud satyr: hideous, provocative, funny and insightful, and always true to himself.

This could make him a good fit for our time, where explicitness is tolerated, even if the explicitness we tolerate is often shrouded in paradoxes. We have the increasingly byzantine etiquette of online dating, but we can also watch anal gang bangs with a couple of clicks. Some contemporary figures are cancelled because they openly believe in biological sex, while some historical figures who promoted sex with children are celebrated.

Obscenity was treated in a less hypocritical and more transparent way in the past. We still have taboos; but it’s increasingly unclear what they are now. It seems Mailer isn’t being censured for nearly killing his wife, but for writing an essay about black people in an overly enthusiastic way.

He’d probably be delighted. The brouhaha with Random House will likely make more people pick up and read Mailer’s work; and he would rather be loudly castigated than consigned to obscurity. This attempt to bury him may undermine a more efficient form of cancellation — cultural amnesia.

But they protest too much, these Hollywood liberals. In terms of end-product, Hollywood is the propaganda factory of American conservatism. Periodically, some opinionator will complain that the right-wing point of view is censored, barred, banned in popular culture today — perhaps pointing to some (largely market-driven) decision to cast a non-white lead in a superhero franchise, or some bit of awards ceremony handwringing. The counter-evidence would be: Fast & Furious 9, Toy Story 4, Avengers: Endgame, The Star Wars saga, Die Hard, Rocky I-V, Wonder Woman, Working Girl. Every western, every war movie, every film in which a determined individual rises above a mediocre/corrupt/unbelieving collective to impose their will upon their fate — usually with some homilies about the importance of family, an insistence on absolute Truth, and a bit of ultra-violence along the way.

Ron Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy — streaming on Netflix from Tuesday — is quintessential. It’s the sentimental tale of a bright kid from a bad town who lifts himself, by his bootstraps, no less, to personal success. In her role as “Mamaw”, the foul-mouthed heart-of-gold Appalachian matriarch, Glenn Close even commits to wearing bad teeth — which means she is now seen as a dead cert for an Oscar nod. In fact, the only thing that distinguishes Hillbilly Elegy from basic Hollywood fare, other than its off-the-charts Ron Howardian mawkishness, is that its source material is explicit in its conservatism. For the real-life Vance is a proud representative of the white working class, who once described Donald Trump’s message as “an oasis in the desert” for his people.

Back in the 1960s, Vance’s hillbilly grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw), became internal immigrants, moving 100 miles from rural Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio, in search of work at the Armco steelworks. Even when work was plentiful, violence, alcoholism and a general cussedness were features of daily life. When the jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 80s, poverty, drugs and despair were added to the mix. But one child believed… and Vance made it out, first becoming a Marine, then a Yale Law School graduate, then a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, then a bestselling author at 31.

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Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t mention Trump — but the timing was apt. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Vance was presented as a sentinel of not only the hillbillies (whom he describes as his people; quite specifically Scots-Irish farmers who settled in the Appalachians), but also the white working class en masse.

“You cannot understand what’s happening now without first reading JD Vance,” wrote Rod Dreher in an interview that crashed the American Conservative website. “His book does for poor white people what Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book did for poor black people: give them voice and presence in the public square.”

So Hillbilly Elegy became a set text for modern conservatives, the book that — as a commenter on the Times website recently put it — “explains exactly why Trump was needed and is still needed”. Vance toured the news channels as a sort of thinking person’s deplorable and helped reframe identity politics for the only minority in America (as Mamaw had taught him) whom it was socially acceptable to insult. And for liberals, back in 2016, reading Hillbilly Elegy became an act of imaginative penance.

The book is deeply moving. Vance writes with clarity and empathy and captures, as few are able, the experience of family dysfunction from the perspective of a child. You cannot help but root for him — and wince at the bloody noses and black eyes, the Pepsi that his mother put in his bottle from nine months, the dim comments from the privileged people he meets when he finally breaks into those elite coastal enclaves. Hell of a family, the Vances. Mamaw literally set fire to her husband as a punishment for falling asleep drunk on the sofa — and she was the stable one. Vance’s father abandoned the family to become a Christian fundamentalist; 15 stepfathers came and went. When JD was 11, his drug-dependent mother (Amy Adams in the movie) lost her temper while driving and floored the accelerator, threatening to kill them both. When the case eventually arrives before a family court, JD looks around and realises that all the other families look like his.

The scene is presented a little differently in the film, but in the book it’s where the personal becomes political. “They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed ‘TV accents’ — the neutral accent that so many news anchors had, the social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.”

But having written about the litany of failures in education, healthcare, the labour market, the justice system and wider American culture, Vance makes a fairly unconvincing turn. I read hoping to find out what lies beyond terms like “white trash”; Vance seemed to be saying to me — yeah, we are kind of trash. The fact that Vance is honest about his conflicted feelings doesn’t really help to iron them out. He sets great store by “hillbilly justice” (i.e. pointing guns at family members) — which “never failed me”. But he also wonders. If family honour is so important in his community, why are domestic abuse and family breakdown so rampant? If hillbillies are so hardworking, why do we give up on good jobs and moan about the economy on Facebook? And despite his purported pride in his people, he proves deeply resentful when any of his peers receive any crumbs of his success.

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It would be inaccurate to characterise Vance as a cheerleader for Trump. He’s actually smarter than that. In his interview with Dreher, Vance warned — prophetically — that while Trumpism offered a cheap thrill, the man himself offered nothing to treat the root causes of American despair. He’s the OxyContin of Presidents. At best, he made people understand that their pain was economic as much as cultural. But Vance’s real disappointment with Trump — “the tragedy of his presidency” — is that he encouraged white working class voters to blame others for their problems.

The book turns out to be rather more old-fashioned: a diatribe against what Vance terms “learned helplessness”. Its broadsides at “welfare queens” have been mainstream in American politics since at least the Nixon era (when they were commonly directed against African-Americans). And its celebration of individual uplift is pure Hollywood. If he could change one thing about his community, Vance says, it’s the feeling people have that their choices don’t matter. They do — I am living proof of that, he says. “These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”

Well, sure. We all need to feel that our choices matter. But the fact that Vance only made it out by the skin of his teeth — and hillbilly VCs remain a rare breed — suggests that merely exhorting the people of Middletown, Ohio, to make better choices isn’t going to do much. As his book makes clear, a poor kid only needs to make a handful of bad choices to fail and 100 good choices to become a success. The opposite is true for rich kids: three of four decent choices all-but guarantee success; you need to continually mess up to truly mess up.

Instead of questioning the nature of those choices, Vance doubles down on those who made bad choices. That is, who lack his combination of intelligence; a hard-as-nails Mamaw; Amy Chua — the actual Tiger Mom of legend — stepping in as his mentor; and so on. Luck in other words. You need luck. Can’t we do better than luck?

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The part that conservatives often quote with a triumphal “YOU SEE?” is where Vance dismisses naive attempts to improve his people’s lot through education — despite the fact that education provided his own route out. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.’”

But that’s not the end of the conversation. It’s the beginning. OK, so what can be done to improve parenting? Infrastructure investment, job creation, paid parental leave, basic healthcare, nutrition programs, wage protection, income support? The sort of protections that American politicians have systematically dismantled over the last 40 years or so? Might be worth a try? And maybe a problem like the opioid epidemic was created by governments and corporations. This isn’t to deny the agency of Vance’s mother, who fell prey to heroin-addiction. It’s merely to admit that fixing it might involve more than just telling people to make less trashy choices. It may not turn wolves into lambs. But it might save a lot of kids unnecessary pain.

The message I took from the book was rather darker than the one that Vance purports to offer. What he seemed to be saying is: these people neither want nor deserve your sympathy or your help. And what a comforting message that must be for those who have outsourced jobs, dismantled social security and widened the economic divide over the years. And there’s a further implication too. These opiate-ridden post-industrial communities may hate big city liberals; but not nearly as much as they hate Billy down the road, who cheats on his food stamps; or Marcie next door, who has five kids by five different fathers; or Duane who pulled his gun on his wife in the restaurant.

It’s hopelessness internalised. Easy to stir up if you’re a cynical enough politician. It’s often forgotten that Tories only really started making in-roads in the “Red Wall” towns not with Brexit but with George Osborne’s “Skivers vs Strivers” speeches circa 2013 which went down a storm in post-industrial British towns.

As for the movie. I suspect conservatives will hate it as it does that thing Didion describes, of pretending irreconcilable political differences don’t exist. Liberals will hate it too as it does  that “sickeningly irresponsible” thing (as one review had it) of asking audiences to sympathise with a conservative. But let’s not pretend its combination of schmaltz and violence, of myth and identity is anything other than purest Hollywood, the absolute mainstream of American culture. It’s the water and we are fish — we don’t even notice it.