They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there are worse places to start with Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz than the photos on its jacket. Two young women hold the gaze of the camera in unnervingly similar poses: facing ahead, right hand raised towards her face. The longer you look, the more these mirror images seem in opposition. Joan Didion, in a 1968 photo from the iconic series by Julian Wasser for Time magazine, is styled, guarded, brittle: a cigarette between her fingers, lips closed, shoulders raised, a little tense. Her expression is inscrutable, but there is something determined and pained about her eyes. Eve Babitz, in an undated photo booth shot, peers over her sunglasses: wide-eyed, lips parted, hair tousled, shoulders dropped. She is mysterious, too, but more playful. Photography would play a significant role in the mythmaking of both writers: a nude Babitz was infamously photographed, also by Wasser, playing chess with Marchel Duchamp; Didion’s Time shoot was the first of many to project an image of her as stylish in the flesh and on the page. And this biography is as much about the myths of Didion and Babitz as it is about their work, their lives, and their formative, fraught relationship with one another – one of grudging mentorship, literary rivalry and simmering resentment.
Eve Babitz first entered the Hollywood home of Joan Didion Dunne sometime in 1967, Babitz 24, Didion 33. “Mrs Dunn,” Eve reported a friend as saying after one party there, “thinks you are the most brilliant person in California.” Neither had published the works that would make their names, but Didion had greater literary recognition, as she would throughout their lives. Babitz spent the late Sixties and early Seventies making album covers and associating with stars of the rock-n-roll era such as Jim Morrison, who she baldly and successfully propositioned on her first meeting. Didion spent the Fifties and Sixties on the East Coast diligently winning essay contests and working her way up at Vogue magazine before marrying John Gregory Dunne and moving back west. Now, she brought Babitz into a starry circle that included Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, and a young Harrison Ford.
As they began to move in the same LA scene, the two writers (both California natives – Babitz born, bred and hopelessly in love with Hollywood; Didion, raised in Sacramento, had more of a New York sensibility) became entangled in a competition to shine brightest within it, to mine it for material, and to give it a literary voice. Didion, in her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) and collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979) would cast her withering eye over LA and find it wanting, depicting a hollow, cynical, and culturally vapid environment in cool, clear sentences. Babitz, in her more frenetic autofictional sketches Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), would, in Anolik’s reading, react against this, and celebrate the city’s idiosyncratic vibrancy in vivid, funny prose that put her at the centre of a cultural moment. Didion would help Babitz secure her first writing assignments and book deal and agreed to edit Eve’s Hollywood. When she told Babitz a draft was “sloppy,” Babitz “fired” her, souring their relationship, which grew distant and passive aggressive. When Didion died on 23 December 2021, just six days after Babitz, one viral tweet read: “I want to believe that Joan Didion lived an extra week out of spite so that she could officially outlive Eve Babitz.”
Anolik begins her biography with a thrilling discovery – a 1972 letter, unearthed posthumously, from Babitz to Didion. It’s an electrifying, angry piece of writing in which Babitz seems to be chastising Didion for not reading Virginia Woolf, but is annihilating her character as careerist, gutless, aloof and hypocritical. Didion, in Babitz’s estimation, has refused to engage sincerely with questions of art and womanhood, instead performing a cold, masculine style for the validation of male intellectuals – reducing herself to little more than a snarky journalist. Didion, Babitz writes, might find it “undignified” to write nakedly about writing and feminism as Woolf did, but women were for centuries “considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan.”
“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size. And so what you do, Joan, is live in the pioneer days, a brave survivor of the Donner Pass, putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement and acting as though Art wasn’t in the house and wishing you could go write.
“It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art. It’s the only thing that’s real other than murder, I sometimes think— or death. Art’s the fun part, at least for me.”
The letter was never sent.
Here are two writers with so much in common and yet so little, for whom the narcissism of small differences runs deep. Didion: serious, disciplined, anorexic, controlled, quiet, icy, arch, and so hungry for success she would write even at the cost of living. Babitz: fun, hedonistic, buxom, erratic, loud, warm, funny, and so hungry for experience that she would live large, even at the cost of writing. If Didion would invite you to an elite dinner party at her house, and fix you with an expectant look, Babitz would take you by the hand and drag you to her beloved restaurant, Ports, where Warren Beatty and Julie Christie would be dining on a nearby table, introduce you to her gang of Hollywood misfits, and leave you stranded at the first opportunity of seducing someone more exciting. At least, that’s how it feels in Anolik’s telling. (And Bret Easton Ellis’s, who says: “Sitting around with Joan Didion is no picnic. It’s the most awkward thing in life. Eve, though, was delightful.”) Didion is all style, Babitz is pure charm. Charm made Babitz cult; style made Didion great.
When they first met, Babitz referred to Didion in her letters and journals only as “Mrs Dunn” – it’s not clear if the misspelling is deliberate, but Anolik interprets it as Babitz making fun of Didion’s insistence on being called Joan Dunne – presenting herself as the little wife of a big strong man. In Eve’s Hollywood, a thinly veiled version of Didion, “Lady Dana,” is described by Babitz as “an extremely fashionable writer [with a] New Yorky quality, a kind of serious professionalism which didn’t allow for any fun. Her books were so brutally depressing that the only way you could be happy about them was to appreciate the style.” Didion was similarly scathing about Babitz: when her friend Dan Wakefield told her he’d met this terrific girl, Didion replied: “Ah, yes, Eve Babitz, the dowager groupie.”
Anolik reads Babitz’s essay “The Sheik” – which, first published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1972, became the centrepiece of Eve’s Hollywood – as a rejection of Didion’s Play It As It Lays. Anolik notes the irony that it was Didion who recommended Eve to Rolling Stone, and to the publisher Sam Lawerence, who encouraged Didion to edit Babitz’s book. As Babitz explained to a friend in a letter: “Joan Didion and her husband are editing [the book]. They are terrifyingly exacting, they nearly scared me to death a week ago telling me I was sloppy, and they were right. They are like my best self and who can live with that?” Not Babitz. “Lady Dana” and her “wrinkled brow” were too cutting. “She told me that everything needed a vast amount of work,” says the autobiographical narrator of Eve’s Hollywood. “So there I was sitting dry-eyed wondering why I should be allowed to live. [A day later I] decided I could go ahead and live and I had also decided that Lady Dana was not going to edit my book… I decided suddenly that her life was ridiculous, and her worried brow was merciless and that she, in fact, knew nothing about what I knew.”
Babitz told everyone she had fired Didion, which Anolik views as a “double homicide”: Babitz killed their working relationship and killed off her own book by alienating the person best placed to push it on the literary scene. In a 1977 letter to Joseph Heller, despairing over her next book, Slow Days, Fast Company, Babitz wrote: “What am I going to do? I am not NOT going to copy out Ernest Hemingway novels by hand to ‘learn’ how to write novels,” a dig at Didion. Slow Days, her best work – Anolik calls it a “masterpiece”– failed to take off too, and when the book after that, Sex and Rage, flopped, Babitz resented Didion for her lack of support. Writing to a friend, she put her resentment in someone else’s mouth: “Joan Didion’s secy […] told me that Joan loaned her the [Sex and Rage] galley, saying, ‘It’s good.’ (‘So why doesn’t the cunt give you a quote?’ REDACTED* wanted to know. I explained that Joan was getting real symptoms of MS […] ‘So why doesn’t she just write it anyway?’ […] ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘her hand could just scrawl that last thing as they were lowering her coffin before the lid closed.’” (Anolik feels this letter is evidence of Babitz’s pleasure in Didion’s good opinion, not her anger– but its ventriloquised abuse and fantasy of Didion on her deathbed seems full of repressed rage.)
For Anolik, the two writers were “each other’s shadow selves,” “two halves of American womanhood,” “the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin”. She goes on: “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur… Joan was what Eve both feared becoming and longed to become: a fierce professional.”
Lili Anolik has previous with Eve Babitz. She first wrote about her a decade ago, for a Vanity Fair profile that would become a biography, the exhilarating Hollywood’s Eve (2019), and sparked a resurgence in interest in Babitz’s works, which were then out of print – a few years later, New York Review Books republished her back catalogue. Anolik and Babitz became regular, if wary, associates in her final years. Didion & Babitz began life shortly after Babitz’s death in 2021, when boxes of documents were discovered, including that angry unsent message to Didion. Anolik – who has produced a gripping podcast about the writers at Bennington College in the 1980s – knows the value of literary gossip. But one can’t avoid the morbid suspicion that Anolik wishes she’d held out on writing her first book and waited for Babitz to die – making this something of a rehash. Reading her left-behind papers, Anolik knew: “It was back. My love for Eve’s astonishing, reckless, wholly original personality and talent… I’d tell Eve’s story again. Except this time, I’d tell it differently. Better.”
Anolik reassures us early on that “There are no sections in Didion & Babitz that are rewritten versions of sections in Hollywood’s Eve, except for this one,” but this isn’t really true: inevitably, observations, quotes, interpretations of material, are recycled from the last book, sometimes near-verbatim (Eve’s Hollywood is described in both books as not “soft or flabby, but rather baby-fat voluptuous, the extra weight appealing, giving you something to grab on to, to squeeze, to pinch.”) sometimes refined (Hollywood’s Eve: “‘Is that the blue you’re using?’ is, clearly, for Eve, shorthand for a type of remark that sounds benign but is not. Odourless, tasteless, lethal, it’s a kind of rhetorical arsenic.” Didion & Babitz: “‘Is that the blue you’re using?’ he asked, a question as tasteless and odourless as arsenic – and as lethal.”) or repurposed (Hollywood’s Eve: “While Edie [Sedgewick] and Eve both fucked stars, Edie was a star-fucker; Eve was not.” Didion & Babitz: “It’s the difference between being a starfucker, which Joan and Dunne emphatically were… and one who fucks stars [Babitz].”) Often, she repeats an insight to substantiate it with new material – angry unsent letters; the rediscovered message Babitz wrote, aged 18, to Joseph Heller, describing herself as “gorgeous” with “an over-developed chest”; a short story about her relationship with Jim Morrison addressed to Didion. (This also results in one of the most entertaining openings to a footnote I’ve come across: “In Hollywood’s Eve, I mentioned the fist-fucking but declined to identify the fist-fucker…”)
And, liberated from the living Babitz, Anolik is free to be more honest: about Babitz’s declining mental state, her late-in-life Republicanism, her final delusion that she and Donald Trump were having an affair. The word “Huntington’s” does not appear in the first book, but in this one, Anolik acknowledges that during the writing of that work, Babitz was affected by the disease so profoundly that, since 2001, she “existed in a kind of posthumous state”. Even the smell that emitted from Babitz’s filthy apartment is worse: before it was “cloyingly sweet,” now it is “black, foul, choking.”
Anolik admits she returned to Babitz for Babitz’s sake, not Didion’s. “I won’t even try to pretend to be a disinterested party here. I’ve picked my side: Eve’s.” Didion gets less airtime, and Anolik is far harder on her: suspicious of her “sly careerism”, dismissive of Play it As it Lays as “intellectualized trash” and unfair on Didion’s revered memoir of her husband’s death, which she condemns as morally repugnant: “When I said earlier that she’d crawl over corpses to get to where she had to go, I was, it turns out, speaking literally. The Year of Magical Thinking is her crawling over the corpse of Dunne.”
She misunderstands the Didion mythology, claiming her readers “go teary-eyed” at her bereavements, and gloss over “her hard-driving perfectionism,” “ambition” and “the coldness at her core.” Actually, Didion’s perfectionism, ambition and coldness are the qualities Didion fans sanctify most. Anolik admits her own bias: “Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona – part princess, part wet blanket – tough going.” There is not much textual analysis here – Anolik’s readings of both writer’s works are breezy and opinionated, more to do with their sensibilities than the workings of their prose, or the fundamental qualities of their styles. It’s a notable avoidance. Anolik has chosen her fighter but won’t push her into the ring. It’s as if she is saying: if Didion is the better writer, well, that must be a mere technicality.
Yet a fairer, more judicious, more rigorous biography would be less engrossing. Anolik is never dull, and her book is propulsive, if a bit bonkers: littered with unnecessary, juicy tangents and playful asides (“Reader: don’t be a baby”, “We’ve arrived at the moment in the Joan-Eve story where things get – and please excuse me while I blow the dust off this antique buzzword – Freudian.”) In her preface, she sets out lofty goals (“Elucidate the formation and development of the artistic consciousness, the female artistic consciousness specifically. Elucidate an era: Seventies LA”) that she doesn’t meet. But who cares when we’re having so much fun?
Didion & Babitz
Lili Anolik
Atlantic Books, 352pp, £20
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[See also: The triumph of Paddington Inc]
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