Going, going, gone.

My takeaway from the Joan Didion estate sale.

In the end, I did not attend the Joan Didion estate sale auction in person, though I kept toggling between my laptop and my phone to watch both prosaic and iconic Didionabilia go to the highest bidder. I went in thinking I could afford exactly nothing, and soon knew for a fact I couldn’t, not even a pair of stained suede trash cans ($5,500) or stack of empty notebooks ($11,000).

Then, there were books from her library. Not first editions, not  leather-bound, gilt-embossed volumes, but yellowing cookbooks and the dog-eared novels she re-read every year, like Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song.

The auctioneer waxed rhapsodic about a creased, grease-stained paperback edition of Joy of Cooking. “Look at that patina!”

Me, I’m just a regular person, and when I die, I’m betting my kids will keep a few of my patina-covered books while majority will wind up in a box bound for Goodwill or the nearest dumpster. That’s okay. I have ridden them hard, cracking their spines and folding over their pages. In this way, I have lived in them, made have made them mine.  

It makes me happy to think of Joan doing the same to her books. I imagine her settling into their heft, her fingers landing familiar on every page, whether a recipe or story she’d read twenty times over.

In the end, Joan Didion, who made a practice of hardwired specificity and obsession with signifiers, is finally free of specificity and signifiers. For me, an event that was marketed as all about acquisition specifically and perfectly symbolized the necessary beauty of letting go.