Saturday with Joan

Spending my Saturday with Joan Didion... or I mean, with her things.

A photo of Joan from the boxes that I’d never seen before

On a rainy Saturday, my final one in New York for a while, I took the L train to the N and popped out just east of Bryant Park, from where I opened Apple Maps and carefully navigated my blue GPS dot to the paws of Patience and Fortitude, at the base of New York’s Public Library.

I had an appointment to see Joan Didion, or what was left of her that could be sorted into boxes. She’s dead now, obviously, but her things have been made available to every eager researcher who makes an appointment on the internet.

My search led me through parts of the library I’d only seen in photos. And eventually, I found my way to the Rose Main Reading Room, where I signed some contracts, slapped on some purple rubber disposable gloves, and was left alone to sort through the itemized remnants of a woman I’d so long admired.

I love Joan in the way musicians love Bob Dylan – passionately and unoriginally. She was a well-sung hero, the mother of New Journalism, which means she (along with other journalists like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese) was one of the first people to write about true, observed things without being utterly boring about it. She was also one of the first writers to tell me things I’d never realized I’d always believed.

My fascination with Joan, like the musician’s fascination with Dylan, extends beyond what she wrote to who she was: her large sunglasses, her mohair throw, her house in Brentwood, her relationship to her husband John.

“We are here in this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” Joan wrote about her marriage in The White Album, which John then edited for publication.

And so, I was eager to dig through Joan’s things — to find more traces of who she was that I could, frankly, copy. But in the end, even your idol’s things are simply just that: things.

The remnants in these research boxes were so commonplace that it was almost underwhelming. I sifted through years of her daybooks, noticing that she seemed to love eating at Balthazar. I read her college letters to her parents. I stared at the photos she’d kept on her desk. I ran my (gloved) fingers over her in-line screenplay notes. I recognized her handwriting to be so terrible, it was almost illegible. And I sat back amused when I discovered that even at the age of 87, she’d kept her undergraduate rejection letter from Stanford propped on her desk. A woman really after my own heart.

I sorted through all of it, and when I was finished, I returned the boxes to be scrutinized by the next person and left to meet a friend for coffee.

I am not one to extrapolate meaning out of something when there is none. And so I will save you the poetic gesticulations of attempting to find significance where no significance exists. But I will affirm that it was nice, for just a few hours, to spend my Saturday with Joan.