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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Lois Beckett in Los Angeles

Eve Babitz and Joan Didion may be dead. But their feud isn’t

Black and white photo strip of a woman.
Eve Babitz was a Hollywood it girl of the 60s and 70s, and the author of several witty, freewheeling chronicles of her LA life. Photograph: The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

Joan Didion, the original girlboss of American letters, keeps inspiring new takedowns. Critiquing Didion’s racism, the writer Myriam Gurba compared her to an onion: “She’s very white, very crisp, and she makes people cry.” An anonymous woman in a Los Angeles bar called Didion “that lady from Sacramento”. (Didion might have fooled the New York Times, but Angelenos know she wasn’t from Los Angeles.)

Eve Babitz’s recent takedown of Didion might be the most extraordinary, though, because it has been issued from beyond the grave.

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