A literary icon is revealed through her unpublished work

By Virginie Soffer Oct 14th, 2025

In 5 seconds UdeM’s Clara Champagne was the first scholar to lay eyes on Joan Didion’s unsealed archives. They show a person quite different from the American writer writer we thought we knew.

Joan Didion in Los Angeles on August 2, 1970
Photo : Kathleen Ballard, Los Angeles Times

In March 2025, the New York Public Library opened 336 boxes of American writer Joan Didion's archives to the public. The collection contained unpublished manuscripts, letters, photographs, notebooks, drafts, annotated contracts and more—a total of over 35 metres of documents tracing the life and works of the New Journalism pioneer, renowned for her distinctive voice and biting pen.

Clara Champagne, a PhD candidate in communications at Université de Montréal who is completing a dissertation on Didion under the supervision of Juliette De Maeyer, was the first researcher to see the archives. After two years on the waiting list, she took a leave of absence as deputy editor-in-chief of Nouveau Projet magazine and spent five weeks in New York poring over the material.

What Champagne found challenges Didion’s image as a bare-your-soul kind of writer. “Her ‘I’ wasn’t really her,” said Champagne. “It was a character she created through her texts.”

Behind the mask

From the beginning of her career, as a pioneer of New Journalism, Didion inserted her subjectivity into her news reports and essays. Her autobiographical books—The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights—reinforced the impression she gave of transparency, of being a woman free of artifice or embellishment.

But the archives tell a different story.

“Her family life wasn’t nearly as unconventional as she described it,” Champagne said. “She had significant health issues that she never shared. Some of her relationships ended badly. There are many corners of her life of which we would know nothing if we relied solely on what she relates in her nonfiction works.”

Didion didn’t make things up; she just left things out. “She very deliberately chose what she wanted to tell about herself,” Champagne said. “The narrator we think is the face of Joan Didion is actually a construct.”

What Joan Didion wrote in her diary on the day and day after her marriage to writer John Gregory Dunne. Her records reveal a woman with many qualities, including a discreet but sharp sense of humor.
Photo : Clara Champagne

Unsuspected rigour

While the reception of Didion’s work has been shaped by her personal writings, the documents preserved in the New York Public Library uncover a lesser-known side of the author. “We discover how thoroughly she documented things,” said Champagne. “For each published article, she accumulated pages upon pages of notes, sometimes ten times more than the final text.”

Didion’s meticulous research reflects her high journalistic standards. “We tend to associate her with the subjectivity of New Journalism, but her archives reveal that she conducted painstaking investigations,” Champagne continued. “She could describe the world accurately and rigorously, with a great deal of research behind each text. She checked, she cross-checked, she noted every detail.”

So why is it that when we think of Joan Didion, we think of a woman exposing her inner life, talking about her grief or anxiety attacks? Champagne wonders if gender dynamics are at play: “When a woman writes, we tend to read her work with the personal element in mind. Although Didion’s journalistic writing was deeply insightful and impressively rigorous, it receives less attention.”

Now, through the archives, Didion appears in a whole new light. “They show she wasn’t totally forthcoming,” Champagne concluded. “She framed her image, she controlled what she wanted to disclose to the public.”