My sister is, she tells me (repeatedly), a minimalist. She would have me believe that that is a morally superior position to inhabit that the one I do, as a person with Too Much Stuff. Moving house last week, sifting through birthday cards and stationery and cosmetics and art and pans and pillows, I felt for a few days she might have been right.

But now an estate sale of the essayist and cultural commentator Joan Didion’s belongings, of her stuff, being held by Stair Galleries, gives me pause to reassess. Stuff is not just stuff. Stuff is the physical cataloguing of our lives. It is how we shape and document our realities. A dress to make life a little more beautiful, a souvenir to help preserve a special memory.

As a writer Didion has an autonomous legacy that doesn’t depend on physical artefacts, of course. But to be cynical, much of the feverish fangirl (and boy) – ing that she generated, and still does, is about image. A woman venerated for her highly specific sense of style almost as much as she was her economical, precise use of language (I will never not be startled by the fact that she, apparently, filed her 1961 Vogue essay On Self-Respect to an exact character count). We pore over the pictures of her smoking next to her Stingray Corvette and trot out her famously edited packing list. She was in a Phoebe Philo Céline advert, FFS.

Our fascination with Didion’s image isn’t necessarily shallow; image is the version of ourselves we project publicly, how we want to be seen. And we do that via stuff.

Stuff is also the tell about the unedited self. Because Didion was so cool – in the widely used, colloquial sense of the word, and in her disciplined, detached prose – she can cut an intimidating figure. Her very existence appeared to be so specific, so precise that she can read as aloof. Look don’t touch. But the auction – which includes Ed Rusha artwork, a Cartier desk clock and a Loro Piana throw, all befitting her status as an arbiter of good taste – reveals something surprising about the private, domestic Didion. The giveaway? An apron emblazoned with the slogan: ‘Maybe Broccoli Doesn’t Like You Either’.

That Didion, a sharp commentator and observer, owned something so basic, so sweetly amusing, is surprising. But should it be? The rules of true cool are impossible to follow. Besides, our idiosyncrasies humanise us. There is no logic to what makes us whole. We are all a mass of butting, bubbling contradictions. We might not always see them, in ourselves or others, but the stuff, the stuff is always a give-away.

Laura