Welcomed Into Joan Didion’s Home, if Not Her Inner Circle

THE UPTOWN LOCAL: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir, by Cory Leadbeater

One of Joan Didion’s greatest talents was a bit of sorcery: She somehow became an icon of vulnerable self-revelation without being all that revealing. Her later memoirs, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights,” are full of the vulnerability that age can afford. But her early work, in the collections “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” led her fans to believe she was just like them, that she could understand them. “A lot of people read these pieces,” she recalled in 2011. “People would come to me for, like, advice, and I hated it.”

So you might read “Goodbye to All That,” her 1967 essay about loving and leaving New York, and feel like you’re getting to know the author as a young woman. But there are smoothed-over spots throughout, lots of people with blank faces. In the period it covers, she published a novel, had a long relationship with a well-known writer and then married another. Yet the details are hazy and half-hidden.

Such elision left fans voracious for more about Didion — consider the exorbitant prices fetched at her 2022 estate auction. Among the people who actually knew her, Cory Leadbeater seems particularly well poised to actually fill in some of the gaps.

While Leadbeater was an M.F.A. candidate at Columbia, the poet James Fenton suggested a job opportunity: A “well-known writer” needed help with “all kinds of things,” a job that would “require tact and would be difficult.” It turned out the writer was Didion, who was in her late 70s and living alone on the Upper East Side. Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter had passed away several years earlier.

Leadbeater got the job, moved into Didion’s apartment and became both her assistant and her companion — arranging her meals, buying her favored type of tissues, conversing, keeping her company during hospital stays and absorbing her milieu. Strangers would ask if he was her son. He remained by her side for nine years, until she died. Now he’s written about it, vulnerably but a little vaguely.