At The Whimsical Intersection Of Joan Didion And William F. Buckley

After viewing former presidents, athletes, and rock stars with a friend at The National Portrait Gallery one afternoon years ago, I stopped in front of a photograph from 1970. In it, a tiny woman, enveloped in a flowy pantsuit threatening to swallow her petite frame, leans against a white Corvette Stingray. “Here is my great role model,” I said to my friend. “Susan, meet Joan Didion.”

Didion died last December at age 87. Last month, however, her legend resurfaced in a much-hyped estate sale sponsored by Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York: “An American Icon: Property From the Collection of Joan Didion.”

Steering clear of corporate media, I only heard of the Nov. 16 event a week before on Facebook. A member of one of the left-leaning literary binders I joined long ago was gloating about how the collection of William F. Buckley books belonging to Joan Didion had only garnered $150 in bids, while a stack of books by women poets tallied three or four times as much.

There were 224 items up for auction, ranging from fine art to furniture, glassware, and dishes. I had little interest in the author’s American faux bamboo and pine writing table, her Le Creuset enameled cast-iron Dutch ovens, or even her iconic sunglasses. My focus was on those Buckley books, despite the fact that my husband and I already possess three of the five titles.

The idea of owning books written by Bill Buckley which had belonged to Joan Didion seemed a worthy pursuit. From the age of 22, Didion’s work spoke to me, the young, single — all I want to do is live in New York me — essayist and conservative selves yet to surface.

I was introduced to Joan Didion in the mid-1980s at Hunter College. My favorite professor Nick Lyons assigned our class the writer’s famous essay, “Goodbye to All That,” the final piece in her iconic collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

That essay details the author’s early adulthood in New York City; what it felt like to be a young, single woman transplanted from sprawling California to Manhattan. Its edgy, concrete prose, so personal to the writer yet so universal, explained my obsession with New York. Why I wanted — no, needed — to move to the city immediately after high school. I could not articulate the necessity or the reason, but Joan Didion explained it perfectly.

“Quite simply, I was in love with New York,” Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” “I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

Didion Gets the Washington Treatment

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote. My favorite Didion story isn’t, ironically, a New York story. It’s a Washington story. And because it is set in Washington, it is a political story.

In the 1990s, I was neither an essayist