Her papers and John Gregory Dunnes open to researchers at the New York Public Library today.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Joan Didion, unsurprisingly, took a lot of notes.
Theyre very intertwined, says Meredith Mann, one of the librarians managing the new collection.
I was very taken with how personal the collection was.
And you cant fully understand one without the other.
Didions birth certificate, with her footprint and her mother Eduenes fingerprint, dated December 5, 1934.
The next morning, she wrote Im smiling again.
(Much smaller.)
Whereas, setting it down on paper, she is completely direct.
- I want the book postponed until early spring.
The Didion-Dunnes daybooks record mundanities and milestones alike.
Dunne got $483.86 forStudioandDelano.
(Theyre mostly typewritten, though one bears the handwritten addition what am I saying here.)
As a consolation, she invited Didion to a party at her house to celebrate the issue.
Didions desk diary reveals that she saved the date and likely went.
It is extremely difficult for me to pick a specific thing I dislike in people.
I dislike everything about them, especially at eight-thirty in the morning.
Didion was not above keeping letters of post-publication praise from her subjects.
Both Billy Wilder and John Wayne wrote to say that theyd liked what they read.
