The Whole Idea of Knowing the Truth

Elizabeth Barton trawls through the newly opened Joan Didion archives at New York Public Library to learn about the making of the author’s first book.

By Elizabeth BartonApril 30, 2025

JOAN DIDION AND JOHN GREGORY DUNNE ARCHIVE, New York Public Library, New York, ongoing from March 26, 2025.

Over two years ago, several hundred people gathered to celebrate Joan Didion’s life at a Manhattan cathedral. That day, the writer Susanna Moore offered a warning to those who still yearned to know Didion better: “Drop the whole idea of knowing the truth.” This is probably a wise suggestion, but there’s now fresh temptation: the opening of Didion’s personal archives at the New York Public Library last month. Might this be a chance to find some truth?

At over 300 boxes, the collection feels like a curriculum on her life. If truth were impossible, I thought, then at least this might be an opportunity to figure out who she wasn’t. Artists do use negative space this way. After all, in “Why I Write,” Didion does this explicitly: “I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual […] I do not think in abstracts.” On the other hand, she realized that she was good at capturing details: “I could locate the house-and-garden imagery in The Portrait of a Lady as well as the next person, ‘imagery’ being by definition the kind of specific that got my attention.” This turned out to be a revelation. Didion the novelist would begin each story with a distinct image: the humid haze of an airport in Panama (1977’s A Book of Common Prayer) or a woman in white floating through a hotel lobby (1970’s Play It as It Lays). The way out became the process. 

I managed to look through three boxes, which comprised just a small sliver (not even a blip, really) of her life’s work. But I found that they did their part in fleshing out the young Didion—the not-yet-novelist, the Vogue editor in New York throwing out ideas, wanting to write a novel fast.

The contents of the boxes represent a small evolution of media: telegrams, chunks of torn-out moleskin pages, emails printed unevenly. There are many, many notes—some amounting to nothing, some obviously building toward something. There are stacks of rejections. It was noticeable, even at first glance, how quickly Didion jumped from one idea to the next. Two letters describe a book project that was later abandoned, and that sounded completely different from her eventual debut. The first, written in 1961 and addressed to Maureen McGivern of The Saturday Evening Post, reads:

Late in 1962, Doubleday will publish a book I am doing for them about what happens to girls between the time they leave school and the time they marry. (Two chapters from that book—one about working in New York, the other about working in San Francisco—have been in Mademoiselle; the rest will appear first in Mademoiselle and possibly in one or two other magazines.)

The second, dated 10 days earlier and addressed to the PR office of American Airlines, seems to have been composed in a frenzy of energy:

I would like very much to talk to you about a book I am writing […] It is a report on young women living and working away from home—how they live, why they’re where they are and doing what they’re doing, what they think—in seven American cities: New York, San Francisco, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas.

By doing away with the American-working-girl book, she chose not to write about New York from New York. It seemed like she didn’t want to stare down the present. It seemed like she could, though, work her way west and capture California.

Much is said about Didion’s precision and carefulness; this glimpse at her early process reveals just how much we still get wrong.

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Featured image: Kathleen Ballard. Writer Joan Didion, full length portrait, 1970. Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, UCLA Library Digital Collections. CC BY 4.0, library.ucla.edu. Accessed April 25, 2025. Image has been cropped.