For Joan Didion, Mementos of Her Daughter’s Childhood Became Material

An arrangement of dried flowers pressed between sheets of plastic, the name “Quintana” written in a child’s neat lettering at the top.

A yellow Post-it with a poem written in cursive: “My mom is not a sigh/She does not eat pie/Maybe she can fly.”

A pocket-size notebook of handmade paper composed as a Mother’s Day gift in which the now adult daughter, Quintana, had pasted a series of photographs she’d taken of her mother, Joan Didion, on a television screen, her own blurry toe visible in the foreground, followed by a note in green ink: “Thought you might want to see yourself again. … To, of course, the best mom ever!”

The mementos are the sort any parent would collect: amateur artwork, loosely scribbled missives and a piece of scrap paper bearing the daughter’s “autograph,” above her self-identification as an “Up and Coming Singer, Actress & Comedian.”

But Didion, who died in 2021, did not store these particular keepsakes among the family’s personal belongings; rather, she filed them as research materials for her work — together with the notes, articles and early drafts she drew on while writing “Blue Nights,” her 2011 memoir of the death of her only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at 39.

This poignant and revelatory ephemera from Quintana’s life is among the 240 linear feet of joint archives of her writer parents, Didion and John Gregory Dunne, now available for viewing at the New York Public Library. Together the research files offer physical evidence of how embedded Didion’s personal life was in her professional work — even, or perhaps especially, her most painful experiences.