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.
She makes no secret of who she prefers. Didion is portrayed as ice-cold, ruthless and parasitic, as unromantic as she is ambitious. This will not come as a surprise to many Didion readers. Her work is all of the above, without apology, and when read in its full context, even her most quotable of quotes – the infamous “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – cautions against believing a word she or any other writer commits to the page. The attempts to depose Queen Joan come to a head with Anolik agitating for Babitz’s claim to the throne, looking forward to the day when she is recognised as California’s greatest chronicler.
It is hard not to admire the gumption. Anolik swings big, offering Didion and Babitz up as “two halves of American womanhood”. The former is careerist, desexualised, one of the boys; the latter sexual, reckless and sensitive. I remain sceptical about this two-halves theory. Babitz is a character with flashes of literary flair, and Anolik adds yet more layers to her fascinating life, putting flesh on the bones of her earlier portraits. Certainly, she reserves all of her empathy for Babitz, who was unkindly nicknamed “the dowager groupie” by John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband. Her attempts and failures to be taken seriously as an artist in her own right, first by the art world and then by the literary scene, would be entirely tragic were it not for the posthumous resurgence of interest in her work.
When it comes to Didion, though, the book is more salacious and less certain of itself. Anolik created the podcast Once Upon a Time … at Bennington College, which dug into the university years of Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. Ellis and Lethem agreed to take part, but the famously private Tartt took umbrage at its speculation about her romantic and sexual history. This led to debates about what was and was not fair game in the world of literary gossip, and the use of fiction as a biographical tool. Anolik was clearly unmoved, as in this book she offers up theories about marriages of convenience, hidden sexual preferences, rivalries, domestic violence and addiction, wrapped up with qualifiers such as “my guess is”, “maybe I’m overthinking”, etc. This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it’s been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne’s notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings, but it is, perhaps, more provocative than entirely convincing.
• Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik is published by W&N (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
