Joan Didion’s incredibly expensive estate sale turned me into a literary voyeur

JOan Didion’s old stuff was auctioned off this week and I’d like to say I had no interest in owning it. I’d like to say I didn’t even bother to look at the online catalog for An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion, the Stair Galleries estate sale. But like a teenage fangirl drawn to the literary flame, I pored over the descriptions of all 224 lots. God is hidden among the little things.

I didn’t bid on anything from Didion’s Manhattan apartment – the prices were shocking. A photo of the author in her Corvette Stingray sold for $26,000 (£22,000) on Wednesday. A pair of Celine faux tortoiseshell sunglasses — not even the black pair she wore in a 2015 campaign for the brand — cost their new owner $27,000.

The items, selected by auction house specialists who work with Didion’s family, aimed to show a side of the author that is less known to her readers. They succeeded. I own every book the Sacramento native published before she died a year ago at the age of 87, but I never would have guessed that the author, who managed to marry California casualness with East Coast steels, would own so many novel kitchen aprons . My favorite read, “Maybe Broccoli Won’t Like You Too” and was covered in dryer lint (proof of use!).

For those interested in the long trawl, the auction images and descriptions are embedded with satisfying bits and pieces of Didion trivia. Any serious fan would recognize the mammoth desk for sale as the same one seen in 1976 life Magazine photo spread with Didion’s husband John Dunne and their daughter Quintana Roo. But did you know that her desk was actually a badly chipped oak table?

I spent hours clicking through the catalog with a voyeuristic abandon that would be as embarrassing to me as it was to the famously aloof Didion herself Filling drawers – fitting into the image of her I’d pulled from her essays. The same idea is reinforced by the wallet portraits seen today on everything from tote bags to fridge magnets. For example, when I noticed a souvenir from Maya’s on Saint Barts in the auction, I immediately opened a new window in my browser. “Permanently closed.” I flipped through old photos of the waterfront restaurant, trying to picture Didion with her shiny bob and scowl, still face, enjoying the tropical sunset.

There were three entire auction lots devoted to unused writing paper. Between the empty Moleskines lay an incongruously small notebook that was bound to resemble a Penguin edition pride and prejudice. I say inappropriate, but how well do I really know Joan Didion? Selling so much of her stuff, she was shown to put personalized bookplates on her books: “From the library of Joan Didion.” Did you know Didion had personalized bookplates? Has she sometimes noticed that the stack is running out and refilled it?

Could you have known from Didion’s succinct prose and impeccable style that she always had her coat covered with shells? You would have guessed it from those glamorous, no-frills dinners she describes it in The White Album that her guests sat on yellow slipper chairs decorated with brightly colored butterflies? It is known that Patti Smith played at Quintana’s funeral service after her death in 2005, but not that a photo taken by Smith hung in Didion’s apartment. Was she thinking about that sad day every time she passed it?

Anyone who read Didion’s 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking knows the devastating impact her husband’s sudden death had on her. Thanks to the estate sale – to benefit medical research and the Sacramento Historical Society – we now know the exact dimensions of the Pembroke table where John Dunne’s heart attack took place. But the table is the chilling exception in an auction made up mostly of precious rather than provocative objects — first editions, art books, the lantern collection in which Didion documents magical thinking. “Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, storm lamps for storms, enough water and food to get us through any geological event we encounter. I leaned these fragments against my ruinswere the words that came to mind at the time.” Didion’s copies of TS Eliot’s poems were also for sale.

Dig deep enough into the catalog and there are little puzzles to be solved. An ebullient thank you from the American painter Charles Arnoldi, for example, made me wonder what kind of good deed needed to be repaid. Also for sale are two watercolors of Hawaii painted a decade after Didion published her 1969 confessional essay In the Islands life Magazine. “We’re here on this island in the middle of the Pacific instead of filing for divorce,” she wrote without sentimentality. Yet decades after their near-divorce, she would still decorate with the islands’ rainbows and frangipanis—paintings that instinctively feel charged with personal meaning.

Didion was known to be unusually observant, but she found journaling tedious. “I never managed to keep a journal,” she wrote in the essay On Keeping a Notebook. “On the few occasions that I have dutifully attempted to record the events of a day, I have become so bored that the results are mysterious at best.”

But the auction objects selected by Didion are a kind of diary of her domestic life. Broken-back cookbooks and embroidered napkin sets hint at what meals she prepared and for how many. The books she received from famous authors – Michael Ondaatje and John Burnham Schwartz were among those who inscribed their “admiration” – formed a circle of flattering peers.

But I don’t have to own her to imagine how Joan Didion feels to own her. How intimidating it may have been to receive a monogrammed silver tea set from his family after marrying the wealthy Dunne clan. I don’t need to own the yellowing quilt draped over Quintana’s bed in a bedroom that stayed with her into adulthood to understand the closeness involved. It’s enough just to have a look.