Entertainment
Review: Joan Didion's 'Notes to John' may be a gift. And yet, I wish her the privacy she relished
Book Review
Notes to John
By Joan Didion
Knopf: 224 pages, $32
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Joan Didion’s persona has loomed as large as her literary canon. That photograph of her holding a cigarette just so, daring the camera to reveal what she’s thinking, says it all: You will be unable to find the key to the puzzle that is me.
The memoirs Didion published after the deaths of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana — “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) and “Blue Nights” (2011) — are her most personal, excavating her grief to produce works that are by turns deadpan, wrenching, restrained, operatic. She is excruciatingly introspective but in perfect control of every sentence and emotion — withholding, sparing or repeating words to produce observations that gleam with intelligence and insight but keep their author shadowed.
Didion died in 2021 at 87, and her literary trustees authorized the publication of observations she documented during an especially fraught personal period when she was seeing a psychiatrist to navigate her daughter’s alcoholism and possibly suicidal tendencies. Those sessions are capsulized in “Notes to John,” journal-like entries that were addressed to Didion’s husband, who was mostly absent from the appointments.
Didion’s therapist — a strict Freudian named Roger MacKinnon — was in regular communication with Quintana’s shrink. MacKinnon shared information gleaned about Quintana with Didion, unbeknownst to Quintana. It appears as though MacKinnon never met Quintana, and yet he doesn’t hesitate to characterize her codependency, or to interpret certain behaviors as manipulative, or to dismiss Didion’s fear that she might take her own life. When Didion expresses guilt that her adopted daughter is in such a “labile” state, he offers:
“Don’t take all the blame on yourself, she’s a very difficult person, a very hard case.” “You feel imprisoned by responsibility for her,” he intones. “You’re allowing her to hold you prisoner.” This serves to reassure Didion. Meeting after meeting, they repeat the theme: Quintana’s problems may have been exacerbated by the impenetrability of her parents’ bond, or by her mother’s tendency to distance. In MacKinnon’s words to Didion: “You rather spectacularly lack the skills for dealing with other people.”
The question haunting this book is whether an author so private that she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis to just two friends — Alice and Calvin Trillin — would have wanted her intimate, unedited reflections to be shared with readers. Close friends and family who have survived her appear split on this issue, with the majority coming down on the side of probably not. The document would have been made public in the archive she bequeathed to the New York Public Library, but if deposited there without the attention a book launch garners, they might have been relegated to obscurity.
Fame is no doubt a rare gift, but also cruel, with every bread crumb counting as an essential clue. I came away from “Notes to John” feeling discomfited and saddened — though literary scholars may read it as providing context with which to deconstruct a great writer’s oeuvre. To Didion’s Freudian analyst, the mother-daughter dynamic was everything, and the book suggests that the mother fell short. She professed love for Quintana, about whom she obsessed. But here she is ambivalent both about the maternal role and even, at times, about her daughter. She confesses to MacKinnon, “It had occurred to me at several points that I didn’t like her.” She says, “All my life 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.”
From the outside, Didion seemed to be to be inscrutable, glamorous, insanely gifted and invulnerable. But Quintana, these pages reveal, saw her mother as “fragile,” if intimidating. How did Didion view herself? “A friend once remarked,” she writes, “that while most people had very strong, competent exteriors and were a bowl of jelly inside, I was just the opposite.” Her ethereal look masked her interior stoniness and likely facilitated her extraordinary powers of observation and reporting. This volume penetrates that shell to expose a woman entering her elder years as dealing with emergency rooms, hip fractures, vertigo and the necessity to shed the red suede high-heeled shoes and hoop earrings that distinguished her outward style. She continued to share details of her “late life crisis” until 2012 with MacKinnon if no one else, well after Quintana and John were gone, and 10 years after she stopped documenting their sessions.
Ultimately, “Notes to John” may be a gift. Didion broke barriers, refusing to feel remorse over valuing her career above all else and forging a language that can only be described as Didionesque. Should her insecurities and parental doubts be in the public domain? Most everything is now. She must have known that, as an icon, her life would be studied from every angle for decades to come. And yet, I wish her the privacy she relished. But these latest revelations only thicken the mystery: Who was Joan Didion?
Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.
Desert Warrior, 2026.
Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley, Ghassan Massoud, Sharlto Copley, Sami Bouajila, Lamis Ammar, Géza Röhrig, Numan Acar, Nabil Elouahabi, Hakeem Jomah, Ramsey Faragallah, Saïd Boumazoughe, and Soheil Bostani.
SYNOPSIS:
An honorable and mysterious rogue, known as Hanzala, makes himself an enemy of the Emperor Kisra after he helps a fugitive king and princess in the desert.
With aspirations of being a historical epic harkening back to the sword and sandal blockbusters of yesteryear, Rupert Wyatt’s seventeenth-century Arabia tale is about as generic and epically dull as one would expect from a film plainly titled Desert Warrior. Yes, there appear to be real locations here, and there are some admittedly sweeping shots of various tribes storming into battle on horseback and camels, but it’s all in service of a mess that is both miscast and questionable as the work of a filmmaking team of mostly white creatives.
The story of Emperor Kisraa (Ben Kingsley, a distracting presence even with only one or two scenes) rounding up women from other tribes to be his concubines, which inevitably became the catalyst for a revolution led by Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart), uniting all the divided clans and strategizing battle plans for flanking and poisoning, is undeniably ripe for cinematic treatment. The problem is that what’s here from Rupert Wyatt (and screenwriters Erica Beeney, Gary Ross, and David Self) is less than nothing in the primary creative process; no one seems to have a connection to Arabic heritage or culture, but they have made a flat-out boring film that is often narratively incoherent.
Following the death of her father and escaping the clutches of oppression, the honorable Princess Hind joins forces with a troubled, nameless bandit played by Anthony Mackie (he totally belongs here…), who seems to be here solely to give the movie some star power boost without running the risk of white savior accusations. Whatever the case may be, it’s jarring, but not quite as disorienting as how little screen time he has despite being billed as the lead and how little characterization he has. It is, however, equally disorienting as some of the other names that show up along the way.
As for the other factions, Princess Hind talks to them one by one, giving the film an adventure feel that fails to capitalize on using beautiful scenery in striking or visually poignant ways at almost every turn; the leaders of these tribes also often have no character. There also isn’t much of an understanding of why these tribes are at odds with one another. This movie is filled with dialogue that consistently and shockingly amounts to vague nothingness. Nevertheless, each tribe doesn’t take much convincing to begin with, meaning that not only is the film repetitive, but it’s also lifeless when characters are in conversation.
That Desert Warrior does occasionally spring to life, and a bloated 2+ running time is a small miracle. This is typically accomplished through the occasional fight scene between factions that also serves to demonstrate Princess Hind coming into her own as a warrior. When the tribes are united in a massive-scale battle, and that plan is unfolding step by step, one certainly sees why someone would want to tell this story and pull it off with such spectacle. However, this film is as dry as the desert itself.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist
Entertainment
Eddie Murphy’s son and Martin Lawrence’s daughter welcome first child: ‘That baby gonna be funny!’
Eddie Murphy is celebrating not just his lifetime achievement award, but also the arrival of his third granddaughter, perhaps the funniest baby alive.
Murphy’s son Eric and Martin Lawrence’s daughter Jasmin have welcomed their first child together, baby Ari Skye.
On Saturday, Murphy was honored with the 51st AFI Life Achievement Award at a gala in Hollywood and told reporters that he had recently celebrated back-to-back milestones.
“I just had my first grandson two months ago, and I had my third granddaughter two weeks ago. And I turned 65 a month ago,” he told “Entertainment Tonight” ahead of the gala. “It’s raining blessings on me.”
The ceremony celebrated his storied career across comedy and film, and featured tributes from fellow funnyman Dave Chappelle and “Shrek” co-star Mike Myers. The special will premiere May 31 on Netflix.
The “Dr. Dolittle” star also gushed about his new grandbaby to E! News, and told the outlet that being honored for his work was “a wonderful thing” but that his legacy wasn’t his work.
“My legacy to me is my children,” he said.
Asked whether he or Lawrence offered their kids any parenting advice as they prepared to welcome Ari Skye, Murphy said he’s more of a lead-by-example kind of dad.
“You don’t give advice like that,” he told the outlet. “Your kids don’t go by your advice. Your kids go by the example you set. They watch you. Stuff you be saying, they don’t even pay that no mind. They watch and see what you do.”
In March, Jasmin and Eric posted photos from their lavish baby shower on social media. The shindig included a three-tiered pink cake, pink cocktails garnished with meringue that looked like clouds and balloons galore. “The most beautiful and special celebration for our baby girl,” the couple captioned the post. “Thank you to our parents and everyone that made this day so magical! Ari Skye Murphy, you are SO loved already!!”
Excitement around Ari Skye’s arrival had been brewing in the media long before the couple even announced they were expecting. Murphy joked about a potential grandbaby when Jasmin and Eric were dating back in 2024, during an interview with Gayle King.
“They’re both beautiful,” he said. “They look amazing together. And it’s funny — everybody’s like, ‘That baby gonna be funny!’ Like our gene pool is just going to make this funny baby.”
Murphy agreed, saying: “If they ever get married and have a child, I’m expecting the child to be funny.”
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