A Sneak Peek at the Upcoming and Never-Before-Read Joan Didion Diaries

We may never know what state Joan Didion was born in, or what she did for a living, although researchers remain optimistic of someday learning more about these critical gaps in her personal history.

Details remain tantalizingly scarce. We know, for instance, that Didion was the same size as Chester the cricket from A Cricket in Times Square, and that like him, she slept each night inside a box of matches from Harvey’s, but we have no idea whether she liked planning dinner parties, whether she liked shift dresses, or even what she thought of The Doors. We don’t even know for sure what she looked like, since she was never photographed, although the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena does own a sketch of Didion drawn by Gay Talese on the back of a college-lined cocktail napkin in 1973.

But scientists report significant breakthroughs in Joan Didion testing every day, and there is no telling what we may be able to reconstruct in the future. You may have heard, for instance, that a previously-undiscovered journal has been recently unearthed in one of Didion’s filing cabinets, and will be published by a HarperCollins imprint later this year.

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Previously in The Chatner’s Joan Didion coverage:

“Hello, Anna Wintour. I like your severe gray bob.”

“Hello, Joan Didion. I like your severe gray bob.”

Joan Didion runs through her enemies list:

“Joni Mitchell’s been after me for years, ever since I abandoned her in the corridors beneath the basement of the Berkeley Community Theater with a man from the Air Force named Richard.”

Joan Didion and Jane Fonda trapped in a Waldorf salad:

“We were served by a friendly waiter – I believe him to have been a cricket – but imagine my surprise when he mentioned casually over popovers that it is not the year nineteen and seventy-two. Well, I fell right over and tumbled into my own Waldorf salad, and have been clinging for life to a grape for several hours now.”

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The Chatner has obtained an early look at the diaries, and is reprinting them in part here, with permission of the trustees of Didion’s estates.

May 3rd, 1999:

Dear Diary,

I am so, so proud of my first thoracic segment. It is trapezoidal in shape. It is smooth and without ridges. It is without dorsal ridges and it is without lateral ridges, for I do not need either. It is robust, it is well-sclerotized, it is sleek and cool to the touch. I am so, so lucky to have such a splendid first thoracic segment, which enables my forewings to lie flat against my body, even when I have folded my hindwings fan-wise underneath them. It is well-adapted for flight, my first thoracic segment.

Linda Kasabian still owes me twenty-five dollars for that dress I bought her during her trial. It is one thing to participate in the Tate-LaBianca murders but it is quite another to leave your debts of honor unpaid, especially when if it hadn’t been for me I don’t think she ever would have even stepped foot into an I. Magnin store. Not that she could have stepped into so much as a Sears by that time, being under armed guard pretty much 24/7, but that’s beside the point.

June 2nd, 1999:

Dear Diary,

I’ve been hearing a lot about Y2K lately. But I have fallen behind a pair of my own sunglasses and am trapped underneath the nosebridge, so there is not very much I can do about it from here.

June 22nd, 1999:

Dear Diary,

I am going out on assignment!!! This is so exciting!!! Packing list:

Do not forget to pack things in a suitcase.

July 1st, 1999:

Dear Diary,

I think placing things in order can really shape chaos into meaning. Don’t you?? I also think that tension is really uneasy. There’s something almost uncomfortable about it. How I wish I could eat a very small steak, incredibly neatly, followed by a glass of strong iced tea. With no sugar. I think iced tea with no sugar can really place a lot of things in order.

July 13th, 1999:

Woman.com

July 29th, 1999:

Dear Diary,

I wish I knew a good place to get napkins. But the person who possesses an ideal relationship to home furnishings — sensible, trim, upright, possessed of rather than by style — is the person who is not myself.

August 3rd, 1999:

Dear Diary,

To spend time in the backyard is to acquire a certain affinity for the porch…To look down upon the kitchen from the landing on the stairs is to see a place so particular, and yet so variable, that once seen it remains forever imprinted upon the mind…And yet like all of the rooms in the house, it is only when we look at it that it becomes the kitchen.

August 11th, 1999:

Diary (for I have become convinced that “Dear” is vulgar — if you truly are dear to me, then saying so is unecessary, while if you are not, then saying so is hideous),

More than anything else, I believe that we learn to write by typing. I am trapped under an orange peel as I write this.