Joan Didion and John Dunne's NYPL Archives are a Treasure Trove
At some point in the last decade, Joan Didion's famed elusiveness has evolved into a sort of dare. She has been the subject of a documentary, five biographies, and an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The 2022 estate sale of Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, auctioned off blank notebooks, seashells, and hurricane lamps for thousands of dollars. Now, as the New York Public Library opens the sprawling Didion Dunne Archive, we have another opportunity to see the world through her clear, cool eyes.
A treasure trove in 336 boxes, the archive includes items dating as far back as the 1840s—when the ancestral Didions crossed the Oregon Trail—all the way to her death 2022. There is correspondence between Joan Didion and Nora Ephron, John Updike, and fan mail from Judy Blume. There are registrations for varietals of orchids cultivated in Malibu in the names of Didion, Dunne, and their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne. There are manuscripts of Dunne's book Quintana and Friends and movie contracts for Didion and Dunne's screenplay for A Star is Born (1976). It is, in a word, expansive. When the acquisition was first announced in January 2023, it was determined to be 150 feet long; it took just over two years to be catalogued.
Beginning March 26th, however, anyone with a New York Public Library card will be able to schedule a visit with the Didion Dunnes in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Schwartzman Building on Fifth Avenue. Per a librarian, the library has already reported a high number of appointments. Visitors can reserve up to five boxes at a time for two-hour appointments in the library's Brooke Astor Russell Reading Room.
The transparent enormity of the archive, from videos to Quintana's artwork to Didion's Presidential Medal of Freedom, explains the years it took for the archive to become public. Following Didion's death in 2021, her literary executors formed the Didion Dunne Literary Trust, which now manages the couple's intellectual property. In 2023, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired Didion and Dunne's sprawling archives through the trust, which spokesperson Paul Bogaards called an 'ideal home for their archive.' He went on to declare, 'The archives provide detailed documentation of their writing and creative process and an intimate window into their lives. They will be a welcome and essential resource for future generations of readers, students, and scholars of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.'
After visiting the archive, researchers and fans will expand our understanding of Didion and Dunne, but it is unlikely that anything will finally resolve Didion's elusiveness. As a writer, she was a sharpshooter sending dispatches from the Sea of Tranquility. Her appeal is in the downbeats of the passive voice. As a cultural icon, that same appeal is in her minimalist packing list, first published in The White Album (1979). In the archives, we're gifted her typed (and later annotated) inventory from the family's Los Angeles home at 7406 Franklin Avenue. For all that minimalist imagery and style, though, there is a maximalism in her cultural and literary omnipresence, which carries over into the breadth of the archive itself.
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