I like to think about a book as an iceberg,” Julie Golia was saying. “The published thing is just that little tip that sticks out.” This was on a Zoom call early in March to discuss the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Archive at the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue building, where Golia is associate director of the Rayner Special Collections Wing and the Charles J. Liebman Senior Curator of Manuscripts. The archive, which opens to the public on March 26, is itself a kind of iceberg: 336 boxes of notes, manuscripts, correspondence, and personal items, spanning, in Golia’s words, “literally birth to death.” Or even more than that, since among these holdings are both genealogical materials tracing Didion’s family history and a program from the author’s 2022 memorial service at Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
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