Didion & Babitz

(Hardback, Main)

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Description

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. Inside, a lost world, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. 7406 Franklin Avenue, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs. Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It was also 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 (and 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. 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.

Reviews

Lili Anolik takes us under the hood, not just of literary history but of what makes a woman palatable for public consumption. The greatest female writer to take on the female writer, Lili never falters. Sentence by sentence, page by page, she does Joan and Eve proud and explains the truth about why women who speak their truth will always be societal dynamite. The book is magic. It's all I ever needed -- Lena Dunham
A captivating look into the way two very brilliant, very different writers maneuvered around one another, and the starry, messy world they inhabited. Someone get Ryan Murphy a copy, we smell a new season of Feud * Town & Country, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024 *
As Lili Anolik argues in this joint biography, Didion and 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 *
So, are you a Joan or are you an Eve That's the question everyone will be asking each other this fall * Literary Hub *
A love letter in the form of this detailed biography that reads like a propulsive novel * Oprah Daily *
Anolik gets the best of both writers, and the best of both worlds - this is assured, controlled and cool - and yet lush, tender and heady. It's already one of my favourite books about writers and writing, art, Hollywood mythology and how icons are created. It explains exactly why the world loves Joan Didion - and exactly why the world should fall in love with Eve Babitz -- Daisy Buchanan
A crackling dual biography of two of L.A.'s brightest literary lights * Publishers Weekly *
I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve's singular irresistible glitz -- Jia Tolentino on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE
What Hollywood's Eve has going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz * New York Times on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE *
There's no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused and abused everyone. And then there's Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening - and seductive - as its subject' -- Peter Biskind, author of EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS, on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE
The Eve Babitz book I've been waiting for. What emerges isn't just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous -- Stephanie Danler, author of SWEETBITTER, on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE
Read Lili Anolik's book in the same spirit you'd read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the writing. Both are extraordinary -- Jonathan Lethem on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE

Author Bio

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her last book, the L.A. Times bestseller Hollywood's Eve, was also published by Scribner. Her last podcast, Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College, was produced by Cadence13. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.