Joan Didion is a figure mythologised in near-messianic terms. Her intelligence, originality, craft, humour, candour and style formed a singular, fascinating essence. That essence is what gives value to the items auctioned in her estate sale this week. The sale, at Stair Galleries in New York, offered (very wealthy) members of the public the opportunity to buy her sunglasses (a Celine tortoiseshell pair sold for $27,000), blank notebooks ($9,000), several typewriters (one sold for $6,000), hurricane lamps (a group sold for just over $4,000), her writing desk ($60,000), a stack of her favourite books ($26,000) and various paintings.
What each item of the sale offered most of all, though, was a sense of proximity to a beloved but elusive figure, who, despite her liberal use of personal anecdotes and disclosures, always maintained a sense of distance in her writing. A woman described by her friend the writer Susanna Moore, as “both enchanting and reproachful”.
There has long been a cultural fascination with objects the famous surround themselves with. Celebrity estate sales tend to be the subject of lurid coverage – and who can forget the histrionic paparazzi culture of the 2000s, when journalists would scale mansion fences to photograph the contents of A-listers’ bins. As a child I remember reading, with fascination, every magazine article I could find listing the ludicrous backstage demands of famous musicians (exact numbers of scattered petals, helicoptered-in food, preparation instructions such as “all skin removed” on mangos or chicken), as if these lists detailed intimate revelations.
The idea that a famous person’s nature can be reduced to their tastes, habits and quirks can turn any banal anecdote into a seemingly fascinating revelation: Joan Didion never used a decorator. Joan Didion gave me her hand, and she was so thin it felt as if I was holding a butterfly. As a teenager Joan Didion typed out chapters from Ernest Hemingway novels to see how they worked. Joan Didion was the master of the author photo. Joan Didion was an eccentric … she did not answer the telephone.
The possessions of a famous writer hold a particular allure. Brilliant writing remains a mysterious thing: it is the product of wide reading, practice, talent and environmental factors that are endlessly speculated about (and, again, mythologised). Profiles of novelists tend to include a passage detailing a childhood spent as an outsider: X moved around a lot; Y credits their powers of observation to the five years of adolescence they spent mute. Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” has been fetishised in glossy magazine features where renowned writers give tours of their homes.
And writers themselves contribute to this mythos by advertising their fussiness over routines. Hunter S Thompson spent his days doing cocaine, acid and drinking Chivas Regal whisky until midnight, when “Hunter is ready to write”. The airport novel doyen Dan Brown claims he rises at 4am every morning, stopping work only to perform push-ups on the hour.
Didion was no stranger to such self-mythologising. She tended to portray herself as sombre, meticulous, glamorous, dignified and odd, often under the veil of dry, ironic humour. In Vogue she wrote of being eight years old and “trying to improve the dinner hour by offering what I called ‘lettuce cocktails’ (a single leaf of iceberg lettuce and crushed ice in a stemmed glass)”, while imagining herself as a 24-year-old divorcee, wearing “dark glasses and avoiding paparazzi” in Argentina.
You could see the fascination with Didion’s possessions, in particular, as nostalgia for an age when writing was more dignified and glamorous. When Didion died last December, Barry Pierce wrote in Dazed magazine that this heralded “the death of the ‘chic’ writer”, the end of an era when writing and glamour were intertwined. In certain quarters of contemporary writing there has been a vogue for a marked dowdiness of self-presentation: many recent personal essay collections and novels have detailed the vagaries of renting in grotty house-shares, working in boring entry-level jobs, or the difficulty of attracting a boyfriend.
But I’m not sure this thematic grottiness is all encompassing, or a strictly recent trend. A lot of writing back then was diet tips for housewives and husband-netting advice for secretaries. If we feel the past was a more dignified era, Didion felt so too. In her essay On Self-Respect, she wrote: “Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about,” as she laments that the concept of “character” has lately fallen in prestige. It can be easy to forget that part of the reason we remember Didion is not because she was representative of her times, but because she sat slightly outside them. Whether her views look wrong or right in hindsight, on feminism say, or the Central Park Five, they were often not shared in her milieu. She wasn’t of her era, exactly. She was who she was.
To me the fascination seems tied up with a different modern phenomenen. I wonder if it isn’t more about the wealthy wanting to appear cultured and erudite: glamour seeking substance, rather than the other way around. Who is spending $27,000 on a set of books which could be bought for about $60, after all, but someone very rich? When I read about Didion’s estate sale, the first thing I thought of was the celebrity book stylist, a figure rumoured to curate appropriate books for famous people to wield while out and about, so they may telegraph an appropriate interest in culture and politics; vapidity and unseriousness are qualities to eschew.
When so much of what surrounds us feels cheap and fleeting, legacy and substance accrue a poignant, extraordinarily heightened status. People end up spending thousands of dollars on a quality which was never for sale: the thing that makes Joan Didion’s possessions so interesting, which has nothing much to do with materiality at all.
Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast
