In Didion & Babitz, Joan Didion is revealed at last in an outrageously provocative dual biography, revealing the mutual attractions—and antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.
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In This Spotlight On Didion & Babitz
About Didion & Babitz
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.
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?
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 & 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.
Praise for Didion & Babitz
“What the book makes clear is that Didion & Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit”—Time
“Anolik brings her journalistic instincts and her deep passion for Didion & Babitz to create a vivid, engrossing work.”—Vogue
“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
“Anolik unearths a complicated, contentious—and scandalously overlooked—alliance between these two glamorous behemoths of Californian literature. . . . What results is a love letter in the form of this detailed biography that reads like a propulsive novel. You’ll be reaching for Didion’s and Babitz’s books to search for evidence of the messy truths revealed on these pages.”—Oprah Daily
“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
“[Anolik’s] double biography is an account of a dispute between highly creative frenemies where the wounds festered for years and no one ever worked it out on the remix.”—New York Magazine, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024
“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
“Anolik makes a convincing case for Babitz’s literary genius and sets up an interesting contrast between the two women—one loose, libidinous and joyfully debauched; the other shy, cerebral and tightly controlled . . . Anolik dishes dirt on all the major and minor players in their haute bohemian circle.”—The Associated Press
“A sparkling and ardent look at the conflicting sensibilities of two iconic Californians . . .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 mid century Los Angeles setting to life in a way that feels fresh.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Thank god for Anolik’s journalistic instinct to preserve the Didion & Babitz story in her own luminous prose, for handling the narrative with care, for making good art in our post-empire world.”—W Magazine
“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 & 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)
About Lily Anolik, Author of Didion & Babitz
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. She is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Hollywood’s Eve and Didion & Babitz. 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.
You can connect with Lili Anolik on their website, Facebook, and Instagram.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Scribner / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781668065495
Pub Date: July 22, 2025
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