It may be an empty apartment, but its stories could easily fill the pages of a book.
The Upper East Side home of the late writer Joan Didion — who died in December 2021 at the age of 87 — has listed for $7.5 million, according to the property snoops at Curbed.
Didion, whose wide body of work included her sorrowful “Blue Nights” memoir — a title released in 2011 that recounts the death of her 39-year-old daughter Quintana Roo Dunne in 2005 — passed away inside this four-bedroom co-op due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. Beyond her daughter, Didion was predeceased by her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in this unit in December 2003 at the age of 71 of a heart attack — a tragedy that opens her 2005 memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
The listing of this unit comes on the heels of Didion’s estate auction last year, in which a buyer snapped up one of her dictionaries for $11,000 — and another bought a pair of her Céline sunglasses for a cool $27,000. (The sale, according to Curbed, netted more than $2 million.)
The home is at 30 E. 71st St., with listing images showing handsome herringbone floors, bookshelves and moldings painted in a pale blue tone, a step-down library that stands next to the living room — plus a kitchen with chef’s grade appliances, as Didion was known to cook often. Elsewhere, there are beamed ceilings, wide hallways and oversize windows. The unit also has 4.5 bathrooms.
The listing, represented by Serena Boardman of Sotheby’s International Realty, additionally details a woodburning fireplace, a wet bar and a master bedroom whose windows look to city views.
Didion and Dunne, Curbed notes, purchased this home in 1988. Didion herself served on the co-op board and it’s this perch that the couple called their primary residence.
