Journalist Lili Anolik’s latest book is a “provocation”, a dual biography of the two friends who carved their initials on to the counterculture of 1960s and 1970s California. Joan Didion used her reporting skills to fashion herself into a serious-minded literary titan, while Eve Babitz’s novels and essay collections, compiled from the same social scenes but shaped more loosely and with greater spirit, fell into relative obscurity. That is, until Anolik tracked Babitz down in 2012, by then seriously ill and living in squalor. Anolik became obsessed, helping to restore Babitz’s reputation as a writer and chronicler of Los Angeles life, eventually writing the 2019 biography Hollywood’s Eve. “My preoccupation was unbalanced, fetishistic,” she admits here.
This time, Anolik uses Didion as the headliner, though seemingly through gritted teeth. When Babitz died, aged 78, in 2021 – just days before Didion, who was 87 – her sister Mirandi discovered boxes of papers in the back of a wardrobe. Anolik was reeled in by an excoriating but unsent letter from Babitz to Didion, which she chooses to interpret as a platonic “lovers’ quarrel”. Babitz assails her friend and occasional collaborator (Didion briefly edited Babitz’s first collection, before Babitz “fired” her) for what she perceives as Didion’s dislike of women, her contempt for art, and her deference to her husband. Anolik takes this wounded screed and runs with it, replaying Babitz’s story through its entanglements with Didion’s.
