Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

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. Inside, a lost world, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ‘n’ rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also 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 (and 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. 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.

An outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the complicated relationship between Joan Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

About the Author: Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her last book, the L.A. Times bestseller Hollywood’s Eve, was also published by Scribner. Her last podcast, Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, was produced by Cadence13. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

14 Nov 2024

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik ISBN 9781805463993