Want a piece of Joan Didion?

A catalogue listing property from the collection of Joan Didion, which will go to auction on November 16, has stirred a swell of excitement among Didionophiles. Items from the sale, which is being hosted by the Stair Gallery, New York, can now can be pored over at leisure.

The 224 lots reveal Didion’s personal effects to have been as rigorously edited as her prose was. They are also very stylish.

Objects include a stack of her favourite books, including Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood and Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland; her IBM Wheelwriter 5 typewriter (estimate $800-$1,200), the oversize faux-tortoiseshell sunglasses she wore to star in the 2015 Céline campaign shot by Juergen Teller (estimate $400-$800); desk ephemera, including a box of Pilot Precise v7 writing pens and paper clips ($200-$400), and a stack of 13 blank notebooks ($100-$200). For those keen to cherish her domestic life, there is silver-plate flatware, monogrammed napkins, Le Creuset pans and a set of five aprons including one bearing the wisdom that “Maybe Broccoli Doesn’t Like You Either” ($200-$400). 

There is art, by friends, including works by Ed Ruscha, Sam Francis, Brice Marden, Vija Celmins and Richard Diebenkorn. And portraits, including those shot by Julian Wasser for Time magazine, in 1968, that find Didion in flip-flops and smoking by her Stingray Corvette outside her home in California (estimate $1,500-$3,000).

Looking through the lots, even the most mundane of items listed are infused with the vapour of iconography. Perhaps more than most other 20th-century figures, Joan Didion brings out the simpering fangirl in even the butchest people. “This is a true writer,” wrote Patti Smith following Didion’s death in December 2021. “Farewell brave sister, master of pain and ink.” The two women were close friends, which should come as no surprise as Didion was friends with all the cool folk of the era: the sale includes two pictures by Smith; a photo of chocolate bunnies and another of Hermann Hesse’s typewriter.

Just what it is that ignites such ardour is harder to put one’s finger on. Of course, she is appreciated for her singular writing style and her unsparing cultural criticism. But while she was a prolific writer, she was no author of accessible fiction and she didn’t exactly knock out the bestsellers. In interviews, her persona was sharp and bold and cool — traits that stood out in a culture where women were typically raised to be people-pleasing and placid.

In many ways Didion represents a perfectly unthreatening “badass”: her appeal was in being so massively aspirational. She was also a conundrum. A punchy feminist in possession of slogan aprons with a weakness for a Spode dinner service. A good spouse, married for 40 years to the writer John Gregory Dunne, but who resisted becoming too wifey. According to the 2017 documentary The Centre Will Not Hold, Didion would sleep late in the morning while Dunne did all the domestic chores and went off on the school run. She would then get up, drink a Coca-Cola and start working.

Perhaps more than most other 20th-century figures, Joan Didion brings out the simpering fangirl in even the butchest people

She is beloved because she knew her own mind and was unapologetic about being decisive. She is beloved for her brand of personal style that combined hipster and hard-edged career woman. She is beloved for a packing list — “2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover sweater . . . cigarettes, bourbon . . . Tampax” — taped inside her closet between 1979 and 2014, and still regurgitated endlessly on social media. More controversially, she is beloved for her thinness, and boasting a silhouette as lean as her syntax.

Didion was canny in limiting her public image to a number of highly curated portraits. Compared with today’s wellspring of Googleable imagery, Didion did few sittings to speak of and each was scrupulously staged for maximum impact. In her essay “Why I Write” she is very forthcoming about her preoccupation with “imagery” as being . . . “the kind of specific that got my attention”. She brought the same super-vigilance to her own image: like a modern influencer, she had an acute awareness of how to telegraph her brand message. Pictures unfailingly capture her looking sophisticated, smoking, and a little standoffish.

To that end, the estate sale allows us a tiny bit more access to her private life than the bits she shared in her lifetime. Fans will recognise the tall Victorian-style rattan armchair in which she was photographed, somewhat uncomfortably, reading to Quintana Roo, her daughter: it is being offered for an estimated price of $500-$700, with pillows, seat cushion and “scattered staining”. But it’s the knicky-knacky things that offer more fragments of personal colour: the scuffed white pans all stained with use, the amber-handle desk scissors, the beach shells and pebbles (estimate $100-$200) and numerous pairs of hurricane lamps bought to counter power cuts in California. Each little item seems to reveal a fragment more about her daily life than her handsomely, well-furnished bookshelves.

As with any auction, the November sale will further disperse the Didion legend: the one in which she still lives in a silver-gelatin tinted state of bohemian privilege, skewering cultural tropes and downing Coca-Colas. The woman for so long on a pedestal is finally becoming accessible. Everyone wanted some Didion cool. Now, they can actually own some.

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