$26k for Joan Didion’s old books? Why are the rich obsessed with dead authors’ stuff? | Rachel Connolly

The writer was no stranger to self-mythologising. But the prices fetched at her estate sale were more about glamour seeking substance

Joan Didion is a figure mythologised in near-messianic terms. Her intelligence, originality, craft, humour, candour and style formed a singular, fascinating essence. That essence is what gives value to the items auctioned in her estate sale this week. The sale, at Stair Galleries in New York, offered (very wealthy) members of the public the opportunity to buy her sunglasses (a Celine tortoiseshell pair sold for $27,000), blank notebooks ($9,000), several typewriters (one sold for $6,000), hurricane lamps (a group sold for just over $4,000), her writing desk ($60,000), a stack of her favourite books ($26,000) and various paintings.

What each item of the sale offered most of all, though, was a sense of proximity to a beloved but elusive figure, who, despite her liberal use of personal anecdotes and disclosures, always maintained a sense of distance in her writing. A woman described by her friend the writer Susanna Moore, as both enchanting and reproachful".

Rachel Connolly is a London-based journalist from Belfast