Writing, said Joan Didion, is a hostile act. “It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture,” she told The Paris Review in 1978 for the Art of Fiction series. “It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way.”
Most of us, however, have been dying to let Didion wrench our minds around in any way she pleases. Now, with the opening of the Didion and John Gregory Dunne archives at the The New York Public Library, there are new opportunities to be reshaped by the thinking of these two literary lions.
The archives were acquired by the library in 2023. Their contents are both personal and professional, according to an earlier announcement, and include correspondence between the couple and writers and celebrities such as Margaret Atwood, Candice Bergen, Helen Gurley Brown, Michael Crichton, Nora Ephron, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Keaton, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Norman Lear, Jacqueline Onassis, and Philip Roth, to name just a few. There are also “several hundred photographs,” and drafts of screenplays (“26 in total”) that Didion and Dunne collaborated on. There are also details on dinners, of which Didion was famous for hosting, and a typed note announcing the couple’s marriage.
The opening of the archive comes three years after Didion’s death, in 2021, and almost 22 years after Dunne’s, who died in 2003. “The opening of this rich, expansive, and deeply personal collection will spark a new generation of scholarship on Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne,” said Julie Golia, associate director of the Rayner Special Collections Wing, and Charles J. Liebman senior curator of manuscripts in a NYPL statement. “Their extraordinary lives and careers, and their impact on American literature, journalism, and popular culture.”
The collection is open to anyone with a library card and is housed in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue.
