In her audacious new book “Didion & Babitz,” Lili Anolik takes an intimate look at the lives and works of two literary icons who helped define the cultural landscape of late 20th-century America: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. While Didion’s incisive, restrained prose and Babitz’s sensual, freewheeling style seemingly place them at opposite ends of the writing spectrum, Anolik argues that the two shared an inextricable bond, both as chroniclers of their era and as women navigating the male-dominated worlds of journalism and publishing.
Unveiling an Enigmatic Friendship
At the heart of “Didion & Babitz” is the discovery of a cache of letters tucked away in Babitz’s closet after her death in 2021. These missives, Anolik tantalizes, promised to shed light on the little-known relationship between the two writers. Yet as the book unfolds, it becomes clear that the correspondence was largely one-sided, with Babitz penning provocative notes that Didion left unanswered. Rather than a deep friendship, what emerges is a complex dynamic of admiration, rivalry, and fleeting connection between two fiercely original voices.
Joan Didion: The Sphinx
Anolik paints Didion as an enigmatic figure, a “sphinx” whose tightly controlled public persona belied a tumultuous inner life. She delves into the author’s struggles with alcoholism and the long-whispered rumors about her husband John Gregory Dunne’s sexuality. While such revelations could easily veer into tawdry gossip, Anolik uses them to humanize Didion and to underscore the meticulous crafting behind her famously detached prose.
Didion was an artist of the unsaid, of the carefully curated silence.
Lili Anolik, “Didion & Babitz”
Eve Babitz: The Seductress
If Didion was the master of restraint, Babitz was her freewheeling foil. A “seductress” both on the page and in life, Babitz’s lush, lyrical writing celebrated the hedonistic pleasures of L.A. in the ’60s and ’70s. Anolik traces her wild ride through the worlds of art, music, and literature, from her affair with Jim Morrison to her star-making turn as the naked girl playing chess with Marcel Duchamp.
Yet beneath the glitz and glamour, Anolik uncovers a woman grappling with the double-edged sword of beauty and desire. As she aged, Babitz found herself increasingly marginalized, her once-dazzling persona eclipsed by changing times and fading looks.
A Tale of Two Californias
In many ways, the divergent arcs of Didion and Babitz’s lives mirror the seismic shifts that transformed California itself in the late 20th century. Didion’s cool, penetrating gaze dissected the dark undercurrents beneath the sunny veneer of the ’60s, foreshadowing the disillusionment and decay that would follow. Babitz, meanwhile, embodied the unabashed sensuality and reckless abandon of pre-AIDS L.A., a world of endless possibility that would soon fade into myth.
Didion’s “The White Album” and Babitz’s “Eve’s Hollywood” offer starkly contrasting visions of Los Angeles, but together they capture the city’s shimmering contradictions.
An anonymous literary critic
The Writer as Persona
One of the book’s most provocative insights is the way both Didion and Babitz consciously constructed and performed their writerly identities. Didion’s signature look—the oversized sunglasses, the tightly wrapped scarf—became inseparable from her literary persona, a sleight-of-hand that diverted attention from the woman behind the words. Babitz, too, blurred the lines between fact and fiction, crafting a larger-than-life alter ego that threatened to subsume her genuine talent.
Anolik suggests that this blurring of the personal and the literary was both a boon and a burden for the two women. It allowed them to command attention in a cultural milieu that often dismissed female voices, but it also trapped them within the confines of their own mythologies.
The Pitfalls of Literary Celebrity
Ultimately, “Didion & Babitz” is as much a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of literary celebrity as it is a celebration of two extraordinary writers. In their later years, both women struggled to escape the long shadows of their iconic younger selves—Didion as the canonized saint of New Journalism, Babitz as the “It Girl” forever suspended in time.
For Anolik, their divergent fates raise provocative questions about the price of fame, the fickleness of reputation, and the gendered burdens placed on women who dare to write their lives. As she follows the two from the heights of ’70s cool to the indignities of aging in an unforgiving industry, she crafts a poignant and nuanced portrait of literary lives both blessed and cursed by brilliance.
There is a sadness that permeates Didion and Babitz’s later years, a sense of women out of time, grasping for relevance in a world that had moved on without them.
A close source familiar with both writers
A Vivid and Necessary Portrait
While “Didion & Babitz” is not without its flaws—Anolik’s breathless prose occasionally veers into overwrought territory—it nonetheless offers a vivid and necessary portrait of two women who helped shape the course of American letters. In its pages, Didion and Babitz emerge not as dueling archetypes, but as kindred spirits: brilliant, complex, and deeply human.
For readers who admire their work, or for anyone interested in the wild ride of 20th-century literature and culture, “Didion & Babitz” is an essential read. It reminds us that behind every iconic writer is a flesh-and-blood woman fighting to be seen, heard, and understood on her own terms.
