In November 2022, when items from the estate of the American writer Joan Didion were sold at a charity auction in Hudson, New York, most made 10 times their estimate. Twenty-three linen napkins embroidered with Didion’s initials went for $14,000. Thirteen (blank) notebooks went for $11,000. A pair of faux tortoiseshell Céline sunglasses – in 2015, at the age of 80, Didion famously became the unsmiling new face of the French fashion house – were sold for $27,000. The most expensive lot was a portrait of Didion painted, not by one of the famous artists whose work hung on the walls of her Upper East Side apartment, but by a complete stranger, from an author photograph. It reached a price of $110,000.
In her new book about Didion, Evelyn McDonnell turns her nose up at all this consumption: such a “display of materialistic idolatry was hard to watch, even for a Didion fan”, she writes, caught between admiration for the superstar writer’s discernment (oh, those Le Creuset pans) and distaste for her relative wealth (when Didion’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, tells McDonnell her client’s “basic” dresses cost a few hundred dollars, she’s distinctly sneery). Unfortunately, by this point, her attitude sounds a bit hollow, or it did to my ears. Is she, after all, really any better herself? You can’t help but notice that McDonnell’s book bears something of a resemblance to an auction catalogue, its author’s desultory, magpie approach to Didion slowly but surely reducing the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and many other classics of American journalism to a collection of disconnected bits and pieces.
