Estate Sales, Celine Sunglasses, and Hollywood Gossip: My Joan Didion Rabbit Hole

If my current reads mixed with my google searches, it would be this post on reading Joan Didion, mourning Carrie Fisher, and spiraling into 70s Hollywood

This is a free post for subscribers of Landline, a pop culture and history newsletter for people who care about the Titanic, and the the Kate Winslet vehicle of the same name. Consider subscribing to the paid plan to get my weekly email of recommendations and links, a podcast episode, and more! You can also help me spread the word by sharing it with a friend who would love it.

This week I want to write a little about what I’ve been reading of late, and the rabbit holes it’s sent me down. Mainly, I got curious about Joan Didion and it led me to Carrie Fisher.

Every blue moon I read something that makes me obsessed with exploring a friend group via biographies, memoirs, and histories. I guess what started my on my latest was reading Didion & Babitz months ago. TLDR, it tracks the parallel writing careers of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two writers who were inherently interested in the common themes of Hollywood, the counterculture, and California in the 1970s. Didion was more formal in her training, interning at Vogue and publishing from a polished persona that seemed always self-assured and at a remove. Like Virginia Woolf’s work, I read Didion’s essays and enjoyed them more than her novels (I wonder if this will change with time). I was new to Babitz reading this book, but she presents at Didion’s opposite; she is almost too open, scattered, but wickedly sharp with her words (like Didion) and, at times, turns them on Didion herself. Didion and her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, mentored Eve in her writing but felt she lacked discipline (story checks out, her partying schedule made it difficult to finish work). This book is kind of like reading about a rivalry, but doesn’t satisfy in that Didion doesn’t seem bothered by Eve or her antics. She is coasting too high on her life as a novelist, essasyist, and screenwriter, all firmly established in the 1970s. It definitely made me more curious about Eve Babitz, but also feels like an attempt to resuscitate her reputation at the expense of Joan Didion.

Realizing this book presents Joan Didion as a more human, perhaps ambitious character, made me reflect on the ways Joan Didion gets written about, especially since her death in 2021. I see quotes from her work out of context in memes on Instagram, and read women authors name-dropping her in interviews in terms of influences often (which I totally get). Still, I always sort of wonder about her because, as much of her work as I’ve read, she still feels really distant or unknowable.

Prior to the Didion & Babtiz book, I’d read Didion’s essays, her early novels, and The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both memoirs about her grief. The first recounts the year after her husband’s sudden passing and the second the grief of losing her daughter with whom she had a complicated relationship. My memory of reading most of these things is the feeling of being in someone’s head, but only seeing what they want you to see. It’s kind of like watching Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind after it’s been cleaned of any unpleasantness. She also wrote positively about John Wayne, which is a forever red flag for me.

For the past few months, this book has led me to explore Didion and her world.

One rabbit hole I fell down was the coverage of her estate sale in 2022. It begs the question of whether we can know someone through their objects, and why millennials in particular are so obsessed with Didion. PLEASE get into this:

“An Annotated Guide to the Joan Didion Estate Sale.” Literary Hub, 2 Nov. 2022

Sophie Haigney, “The Paris Review – at the Joan Didion Estate Sale by Sophie Haigney.” The Paris Review, 18 Nov. 2022

Jessica Francis Kane, “I Went to See Joan Didion’s Things. It Changed Me.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 15 Nov. 2022,

Anna Kodé, “Joan Didion’s Estate Sale Items Paint a Picture of Her Life.” Nytimes.com, The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2022

“An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion.” @Bidsquare, 2022

(This shows the items up for auction and how much each ultimately went for. For the overly nervy/curious)

‌

Julian Wasser’s “Joan Didion with Her Stingray Corvette.” (estimated to sell for $1,500-$3,000; it sold for $26,000)

One of the things I learned reading these was that Didion sold some Celine sunglasses (which she helped make famous) to finance a documentary made about her by her nephew, Griffin Dunne).

I know virtually nothing about this person, so I picked up his recent memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club . This book is a great read for Hollywood gossip and a sense of “being there” by a person who seems to get the draw of his book is that he was famous adjacent and paid attention (no shade; this is a great genre of book!) His aunt was Joan Didion, and they were close (he did make a doc about her) and he has many a casual anecdote about his proximity to very famous people: he grew up nextdoor to Pat and Peter Lawford and was Kennedy adjacent, Sean Connery saved him from drowning in the family pool at 4, he tried to hit on Janis Joplin at one of his aunt’s parties, etc. He was best friends with Carrie Fisher and lived with her in New York when both were struggling actors and she despaired over a film she was making called Star Wars. This man knows why we’re here. This was a fun read, and I’d recommend it for anyone who, like me, wants to get a sense of the 70s scene in Hollywood and New York. Note, his sister Dominique, herself a rising star, was brutally murdered by her boyfriend in the 1980s, a tragedy he writes about at length in case it's too much for some folks (the world is hard enough right now!)

Further fleshing out my “Joan Didion and/or 70s Hollywood” world deep dive, I read a biography of Carrie Fisher called Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge. I have always loved Carrie Fisher, though I had not seen Star Wars until adulthood. I was first introduced to her through her appearances on talk shows I watched growing up, and was taken by her wit and her unapologetic intelligence. I liked her sense of humor, her self-deprecation, and the fact that she didn’t have to prove how smart she was (she just was). These are all highly attractive traits to me then and now. I have read all her memoirs and love her writing. This biography bummed me out a bit to learn the depths of her self destructive instincts, and the really painful elements of her relationship with Debbie Reynolds. In later years, they seemed so simpatico and codependent. It’s hard to read about someone you admire being so hard on themselves. The book draws out how much Carrie had to parent Debbie through her divorces while living with the abandonment of her dad (who left Debbie and the family for Elizabeth Taylor). The tough parts of this book are tough. I kept hoping the ending would be different. Still, what stood out to me was what an incredible friend Carrie was to people in her life, and genuinely kind, and that’s the thing that I want to carry with me from that book. That, and being married to Paul Simon is my personal nightmare.

Last up, I read articles about Notes to John, or a notebook Joan Didion kept of her treatment by psychiatrist Dr. Roger MacKinnon between 1999 and 2002. The book, published this week, features her record of conversations about her daughter, with whom she had a tense relationship. Even Blue Nights, a book about her daughter’s death, does not seem to offer this much candor about her daughter’s alcoholism, or Didion’s attempt to manage her relationship to her and her daughter’s illness.

Now, the internet is debating whether it should have ever been published:

For: The New York Times

Against: This reddit thread is instructive of lots of anti-publication takes. This author notes that reading the diaries of writers after their deaths (published without explicit permission) feels like a betrayal of their trust and can also ask you to confront the prejudices they kept hidden.

The lack of clear direction from Didion is somewhat of a surprise, given how contested an issue that has been for authors planning their estates. It does kind of beg the question of whether a person who remained at such a remove in her work (even if she felt she was being revealing) would want her therapy notes published after her death? She did leave them intact with her papers, knowing her executors would collect them and present them without restriction for use by researchers (her papers are now open to researchers at the New York Public Library).

I have no clue how she would have felt, I just know I want my Gmail archive wiped clean and/or my laptop shot out of a cannon at Dollywood after my death.

Call Me! (or not!)

I’d love to hear from you! Drop your thoughts in the comments to share with the Landline community, or reply to this email to contact me. You can also find me on Instagram, or email me. I don’t have a dedicated phone line yet (just like in my youth), but maybe someday I’ll achieve Claudia status and get a Landline.

Thanks for reading!

This is a free post for subscribers of Landline. Consider subscribing to the paid plan to get my weekly email of recommendations and links, a podcast episode, and more! You can also help me spread the word by sharing it with a friend who would love it. Thank you for being a friend!

Note: All books referenced in Landline can be found in my bookshop.org storefront from which I earn a small percentage of all books purchased.