Ryan Holiday

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Imagine being this good.

Even though she was under unimaginable stress, even though she was suffering a parent's worst nightmare, watching as her only child was overcome by mental illness, by depression, by alcoholism, even as she was doing the agonizing work of understanding her own role in her daughter's difficulties.

Joan Didion was still writing.

It wasn't for publication.

It wasn't even for one of her famed notebooks, although I talk about that in the journaling chapter of Wisdom Takes Work.

These were summaries of her therapy appointments for her husband, typed up as their then 30-something daughter, Quintana, spiraled into addiction.

Helpless to save her daughter, but desperate to do whatever she could, Didion was trying to process an overwhelming and deeply painful situation.

The private thoughts were not intended for anyone but her husband.

And yet, when they were discovered in a small file near Didion's desk and published as notes to John, we carry the book in the painted porch, after the death of all three figures, they make for profoundly moving reading, detailing in Didion's clear and refined writing style what it is like to watch as your child seems bent on self-destruction.

They also proved that even in private, Joan Didion was apparently incapable of bad writing.

In a way, this is a similar story to Marcus Aurelius' meditations.

We have a man suffering and struggling.

We have a man in the midst of a very specific, singular experience, being the emperor of most of the world and also having a difficult child.

And here he is writing almost entirely for himself.

And yet from the very specific came something universal and helpful to countless people after his death.

We have a man whose literary gifts made even his personal admonishments to himself into literature.

And both of these books, Joan Didion's Notes to John and Marx's Meditations, these private thoughts of influential people going through turbulent times in their lives have resonance in both their writing and their message.

Whether the writing was for themselves or for others, their gift was so apparent, their ability to reach people.

And we're lucky to have this timeless, universal gift available to us now.