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What We Knew Without Knowing

In notes to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, the writer reflected on her sessions with the psychiatrist Roger MacKinnon.

I said that I had told her, as an example of this, that I had thought myself in a dead-end situation in my twenties and had finally come to a conscious decision to change it—in this case to break off a relationship with someone destructive and get on with my life. You drop baggage, you jettison the piano and the books and your grandmother’s rosewood chest, or you don’t get to Independence Rock in time to make the Sierra before snowfall. I said that I was more and more aware of this, that you were too, that we had talked about it, that both of us had trouble thinking of words or maintaining a thought long enough to follow it through, that I had said to you that it was emotional overload, stress, and to some extent I supposed it was but it was worrisome.

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