Didion and Babitz
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4.7 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more!
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ‘n’ rollers, and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity.
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.
With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don’t read them so much as breathe them—as the key to unlocking Didion. And “what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit” (Time).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This is a strange little book that you won’t want to put down. Between them, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz helped define the vibe of Los Angeles in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but from two contrasting perspectives. Babitz, a native of the city’s art scene, loved her hometown’s glitz and strangeness, happily centering herself (and her busy sex life) in every story. Sacramento-raised Didion viewed LA with suspicion and horror and was a cipher both on and off the page. Well, Babitz biographer Lili Anolik is unabashedly Team Eve, and in Didion and Babitz, she makes a highly opinionated case for why Babitz comes out better in her figurative smackdown between two women writers who didn’t actually have much in common. There are parts that will remind you of a junior-high slam book, as Anolik writes frequently about reading often-scathing letters Eve never sent to Joan during and after their brief friendship. All of this is luridly, cattily fascinating—and often quite funny. Didion and Babitz is more literary gossip than literary biography, and we loved every page of it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Anolik follows up Hollywood's Eve, her 2019 biography of writer Eve Babitz (1943–2021), with a revealing investigation of Babitz's complicated relationship with Joan Didion (1934–2021). Tracing how Didion served as Babitz's mentor, ersatz mother, and nemesis over the course of their lives, Anolik recounts how the two met in June 1967 after Babitz fell in with the Hollywood crowd that congregated at Didion's house parties. Didion took a liking to Babitz's genre-straddling pieces and used her clout to secure Babitz's first byline, an essay about the death of her high school classmate published in Rolling Stone's fiction section in 1971. Drawing on previously unreported correspondence, Anolik reveals that Didion edited the manuscript for Babitz's first book, Eve's Hollywood, but their relationship soured as Didion's sometimes harsh criticism left Babitz so indignant she eventually fired Didion. Anolik traces their divergent paths over the ensuing decades, describing how Babitz's star burned brightly before flaming out while Didion methodically built a reputation as the consummate writer. Though Anolik admits her bias for Babitz ("Joan is somebody I naturally root against"), she provides astute character portraits of both writers, suggesting that though Didion was disciplined and spare where Babitz was sensual and lush, the two shared a single-minded commitment to their artistry. It's a crackling dual biography of two of L.A.'s brightest literary lights.
Customer Reviews
A masterpiece
Lily Anolik has provided the missing pieces to the puzzle, in ‘Didion and Babitz’ you are getting the untold stories of both Eve and Joan, as told by each other, through the gifted prose of a writer clearly a child of their influence. I read every page of this book with curiosity and wonder, as if I was going through the archives myself. This book is a necessary viewfinder for accurately digesting these two iconic writers. I’m already re-reading it!