Joan Didion's cookbooks
Joan Didion's cookbooks
On the lure of contagion magic.
For several weeks now, I’ve spent more time than is necessary thinking about the Joan Didion estate sale. It’s something that most people cared nothing at all about, but those who did care cared a great deal. An American Icon: Property from the Collection of Joan Didion turned out to be one of the biggest literary events of the year – at least in terms of the essays it generated. I seemed to have an endless appetite for them. I read them avariciously, these multiple, overlapping interpretations about what it meant to covet her unused notebooks or her seashells (always the seashells!).
One of the more interesting pieces was Hannah Gold for The Baffler, who gets to the heart of why we want to own an object touched by someone we admire, the term being “contagion magic,” which feels right. How a desire to get to the essence of Didion (a writer who cultivated a sense of unknowability) gets redirected to the things she touched, what she wore, what she owned. It’s the contagion more than the magic that Sophie Haigney is alert to in her piece for The Paris Review, which brings into focus the allure – as well as the ghoulishness – of the auction itself: “The drama of an auction is incremental—sometimes one watches with incredulity as bids pile up; one senses a momentum, even a bidding war between two particular people, and it becomes tantalizing.” She notes that the seashells sold for US$7,000, the unused notebooks for US$11,000.
Roxanna Robinson, for the New Yorker, sidesteps the viscera of the auction and focuses instead on Joan Didion’s style – in her writing as well as her person. “If style is vividly present in Didion’s writing, it is as vividly present in her own life,” writes Robinson. “Her clothes, her accoutrements, the things with which she surrounds herself, are part of this project.” In this framing, the fascination with Didion’s things is rendered gently sympathetic rather than voyeuristic: “We have read her sentences, and so we own them, anyway. We will always own them. It is why we read. But it’s because we have read them that we enter this space. We want to walk among her things, to see how it feels to be in the presence of her presence.”
What I wanted, even more than Joan Didion’s copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel or Joan Didion’s copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, was Joan Didion’s copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s The Art of Eating, included in a lot titled “Small Group of Cookbooks and Books on Food.” For me, it was The Art of Eating that provoked the pull of contagion magic. As if owning it would give me a little piece of Didion and Fisher both.
Fisher makes sense in Didion’s collection. Both writers have a documentary eye, a certain austerity of line; both reach for the plainest of adjectives. Fisher keeps her life private but exposes her appetites on the page. Didion lays bare her life but her desires remain obscure (“the most striking thing about Didion’s self-disclosures was how little they disclose). There is a sympathy between them, a particular way of writing that embodies both distance and intimacy.
For a vanishingly small moment, I considered placing a bid. I imagined looking at the tattered spine on my bookshelf, the pleasure it would give me. I wondered if that pleasure would last or whether contagion magic dims with time (or perhaps, more likely, with proximity). Instead, I returned to Joan Didion’s recipes. I thought about making her pasta with vodka sauce, of serving it in a big white bowl, with honest bread and a glass of good white wine. Contagion magic: perhaps all I actually needed to do was to cook.
Good things to read
Haley Nahman on cosmetic procedures and the limits of ‘destigmatization’: “However comforting we may find beauty practices […] we have a responsibility to return again and again to the ideology underpinning this industry: who it targets, who it punishes, who it pays.” – via Maybe Baby
I loved this essay by Julia Armfield on bodies and body horror. It’s long, but so worth it. – via The White Review
“What does it mean for a show that compels museumgoers to confront racism to invite them to opt out of looking at a historical image?” A fascinating dive into one museum’s failed attempt to reckon with the complexities of artist Philip Guston and the American Jewish relationship to anti-Black violence. – via Jewish Currents
In case of interest
For The Age, I reviewed Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ transcendent performance at Hanging Rock, and wrote about the modernist sculptors who shaped Melbourne.
And for my Vogue Living debut, I interviewed the fabulous Luke Edward Hall about the aesthetic influences that have shaped him and the design rules he loves to break.
One more thing!
I’m still on Twitter for now, but if you’ve left or are considering leaving the platform, you can also find me on Hive, where I’m currently posting like it’s my alt (username is my first and last name!).