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“Our jaws have been simply hanging open,” Kiely mentioned.
Their first visits coincided with an public sale final 12 months of Didion’s private results, whose runaway sale costs — $9,000 for a set of clean notebooks, $10,500 for some stained pots and pans — they watched with amazement. (Kiely mentioned that the public sale, which raised a complete of $1.9 million for charitable causes, didn’t have an effect on the value paid for the archive, which the library shouldn’t be disclosing.)
The public sale, Kiely added, “tells us rather a lot concerning the nice fondness for Joan Didion — not simply her work, however one thing about her authorial persona that individuals discover each fascinating and search to emulate.”
And the archive, Golia mentioned, displays Didion’s cultivated consciousness of her self-presentation.
“With girls writers, they’re managing their very own literary abilities and in addition managing their pictures,” she mentioned. “She was remarkably proficient at each. She knew precisely what she was doing.”
The archive, Golia mentioned, contains no private diaries. But it surely does provide a wealthy vein of non-public correspondence, together with each household letters (greater than 140 of them from her faculty and Vogue years) and correspondence with the couple’s huge circle of pals and colleagues, amongst 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 mentioned, with John Wayne (about whom Didion wrote the 1965 essay “John Wayne: A Love Music”) and missives from Tennessee Williams, together with a dried-flower collage inscribed to her from 1973.
Williams “was somebody who acknowledged Didion’s brilliance instantly, turned fairly enamored of and near her,” Kiely mentioned.
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