“Our jaws were just hanging open,” Kiely said.
Their first visits coincided with an auction last year of Didion’s personal effects, whose runaway sale prices — $9,000 for a set of blank notebooks, $10,500 for some stained pots and pans — they watched with amazement. (Kiely said that the auction, which raised a total of $1.9 million for charitable causes, did not affect the price paid for the archive, which the library is not disclosing.)
The auction, Kiely added, “tells us a lot about the great fondness for Joan Didion — not just her work, but something about her authorial persona that people find both fascinating and seek to emulate.”
And the archive, Golia said, reflects Didion’s cultivated awareness of her self-presentation.
“With women writers, they are managing their own literary talents and also managing their images,” she said. “She was remarkably talented at both. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
The archive, Golia said, includes no personal diaries. But it does offer a rich vein of personal correspondence, including both family letters (more than 140 of them from her college and Vogue years) and correspondence with the couple’s wide circle of friends and colleagues, among them Richard Avedon, Helen Gurley Brown, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Diane Keaton, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Norman Lear, Jacqueline Onassis, Philip Roth and Charles Schulz.
There’s a “touching” correspondence, Golia said, with John Wayne (about whom Didion wrote the 1965 essay “John Wayne: A Love Song”) and missives from Tennessee Williams, including a dried-flower collage inscribed to her from 1973.
Williams “was someone who recognized Didion’s brilliance immediately, became quite enamored of and close to her,” Kiely said.
