Reader Score
61%
61% of readers
recommend this book
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this "vivid, engrossing" (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions--and antagonisms--of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.
Could you write what you write if you weren't so tiny, Joan? --Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972
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. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers, and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was 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 (among 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.
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She's remained opaque, elusive. Until now.
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. And "what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit" (Time).
"Gossipy, shocking, intimate, very funny and always smart [...] a reminder that even literary biographies can be thrilling." --The Herald
"A stimulating, provoking read . . . a fascinating slice of history. . . . Reading often feels like eavesdropping on a freewheeling, no-holds-barred gossip session . . . this is a truly exhilarating double biography." --Independent
"Red-hot and propulsive." --Spectator
"Fun, gossipy." --Irish Independent
"Didion and Babitz looks at the complicated relationship between late literary icons Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. . . . What the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit." --TIME
"High-octane . . . propulsive. Nearly every page has a revelation that fans of either or both women will relish. It's gossip, but it's literary." --Elle Australia
"Lili Anolik's dual biography reveals the writers' vicious battle to be the true voice of 1970s California. Anolik is never dull, and her book is propulsive." --New Statesman
"Compelling . . . truly the culmination of Anolik's already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion." --Esquire
"A sparkling and ardent look at the conflicting sensibilities of two iconic Californians . . . Like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, or the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Didion and Babitz are similar in circumstance yet opposed in style. Their rivalry feels fated. A person can and probably should admire both, but her heart can belong to only one. . . . It is both enormously informative and openly prurient, deliciously greedy for the details of Babitz's and Didion's private lives. At times, it is even gossipy. I mean this, of course, as a compliment. Didion & Babitz is one of my favorite books of the year, and Babitz, an avid champion of gossip, would no doubt have approved of its tenor . . . as much a memoir of infatuation as a literary study." --Washington Post
"Fun . . . [Anolik] is a thorough reporter with an ear for humorous detail (apparently Didion's husband, John Dunne, called Babitz 'the dowager groupie'). She manages to bring her midcentury Los Angeles setting to life in a way that feels fresh." --The New York Times Book Review
"Addictively intriguing . . . Anolik brilliantly uses these two legendary writers and their complicated lives to tell a story not only of what it means to capture a scene and stand in the center of a cultural moment, but also the arduous road of a female writer yearning to be taken seriously." --Interview Magazine
"Anolik is a galvanizing, exacting, mordantly funny, and lionhearted writer, directly addressing the reader and sharing the evolution of her arresting analysis, a heady mix of biography, reporting, social critique, psychology, and literary criticism based on hundreds of interviews. . . . [Didion and Babitz] died within a week of each other, and their legacies will be forever shaped by Anolik's double portrait forged in inquisitiveness, empathy, intellectual firepower, and love." --Booklist (starred review)
"This book is a perfect gift for one's creative friends, professional frenemies, LA enthusiasts, and ex-boyfriends. . . . A must-read for anyone who worries about being too self-centered and mercenary in their work life. It says, 'Don't worry, you could be so, so, so much worse.'" --Vulture
"As Lili Anolik argues in this joint biography, Didion & Babitz represent more than what it means to be a woman who writes: They're two halves of American womanhood. It's a big swing, but one that Anolik knocks out of the park, showing readers how Didion was the sun to Babitz's moon, the superego to her id." --Bustle
"Dazzling and provocative . . . I found myself cheering on Anolik's decision to make one more foray into Babitz's glittering, free-falling, unencumbered yet troubled world. Would I want my daughter to follow Babitz's path or Didion's, if given the choice? Probably not Babitz's. But what a ride." --Leigh Haber, The Los Angeles Times
"Didion & Babitz takes off the kid gloves in [a] revelatory look at two writers who became foes . . . With an abundance of pop-psych insight and who's-who detail, Didion & Babitz captures the scene its two namesakes shared nearly as vividly as they did." --The San Francisco Chronicle