Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz is out November 12th via Simon & Schuster.

By now, it’s not exactly a new take that Eve Babitz and Joan Didion are two sides of the same California-centric coin. Except that the latter was always given far more credit and weight (despite her thin frame) than the former. It was in large part thanks to Lili Anolik that Babitz has experienced such a resurgence in the past decade, starting with a 2014 article that Anolik wrote for Vanity Fair called “All About Eve—And Then Some.” It didn’t feel like a coincidence that the feature dropped on Valentine’s Day, for it’s an unabashed love letter from Anolik to Babitz. As it turns out, it would be just one of a few. Which continued with the first proper biography of Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve (an obvious play on Eve’s Hollywood), released in 2019.

Considering how detailed and ambitious that project already was, one might be surprised that Anolik would want to take another deep dive into Babitz’s life and psyche with a new book called Didion & Babitz (note that Didion still somehow manages to get top billing). But how could Anolik resist when a box of previously unread and unsent letters from the back of Babitz’s closet made themselves available to her by way of Eve’s sister, Mirandi, in the wake of Eve’s death? So it is that Anolik tells us in the preface, “It was back. My love for Eve’s astonishing, reckless, wholly original personality and talent.” And even though Anolik was already promised to another project at the time (Bennington Class of ’86, which became a podcast called Once Upon a Time…At Bennington), she couldn’t ignore the gift from the literary gods that had been bestowed upon her. The chance to fully explore two women who were both each other’s counterpart and nemesis. The story she needed to tell was taking precedence over everything else, personal and professional. And even though she had already technically told Babitz’s tale twice (once in Vanity Fair, another in Hollywood’s Eve), she declares, “I’d tell Eve’s story again. Except this time I’d tell it differently. Better. Because I wouldn’t be telling just Eve’s story. I’d be telling Joan’s story, too. Joan, Eve’s opposite and double, completing and revealing Eve as Eve completed and revealed her.”

And yet, throughout Didion & Babitz, it’s difficult not to feel that Babitz is the one who holds a mirror up to Didion and her (false) persona far more. Makes her comprehend, whether she was ever fully willing to cop to it or not, that Babitz was that artist who lived her art, whereas Didion was the poseur who simply culled her stories from everyone else’s lives, never really living herself. At least not too dangerously. Particularly for the time (the 60s and early 70s) and place (Los Angeles). Even so, Didion pulled the wool over many readers’ eyes (and continues to do so to this day) with her nihilistic, sparse prose that feigns understanding—lived experience—through gravity. This in direct contrast to Babitz’s style, all open and direct, levity and light. Didion, instead, was always deliberately trying to obfuscate herself. Or rather, any part of herself that negated a carefully curated persona: the “cool customer,” as she likes to say in The Year of Magical Thinking, repeating a term one of the doctors called her after the death of her husband. And yes, Anolik is sure to mention at one point in the book that there is a story about how Didion wasn’t too distraught over Dunne’s death to call Sonny Mehta, the editor-in-chief at Knopf, to see if he thought The Year of Magical Thinking would be a bestseller…just a day after she sent him the manuscript.

In yet another instance in Didion & Babitz that underscores her unbridled careerist aims as a writer (in lieu of the la-di-da artistic ones that Babitz had), Dominick “Nick” Dunne recalled Didion making a call to her publisher about Salvador the day after his daughter, Dominique, had been strangled by her ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, and taken to the hospital, and everyone had gathered at the house to show emotional support. The phone line was meant to be left open in case any doctors or police called with an update. In other words, whatever was going on in Didion’s personal life, the professional always took precedence. Mercilessly so. And it’s no secret that that’s what it takes to be successful. Particularly as a woman in the arts.

Throughout Didion & Babitz, Joan is exposed for the cold, calculated woman she is—because she had to be if she wanted to make it as a successful writer in a man’s world and profession—while Eve is emphasized as the purest definition of an artist (which is precisely why she didn’t “hit the big time” like Joan). Someone not only creating art for art’s sake, but also living her life as though it was art. As Lana Del Rey says in her poem, “Salamander,” “My life is my poetry, my lovemaking is my legacy.” Babitz was definitely of the same belief, particularly with regard to her “lovemaking” a.k.a. sexual conquests. From Walter Hopps to Ahmet Ertegun to Jim Morrison to Steve Martin, Babitz’ list of conquests reads like a who’s who of Hollywood. But, in Eve’s case, she had an eye for who was going to be “somebody” before they became famous. Call it one of her many “artistic talents.” This in addition to being a visual artist, which Anolik believes was also a detriment to her prosperity as a writer, for it was difficult for her to lend all of her focus to just one medium when she was talented in multiple arts.

And one such art—that still remains underrated despite Charli XCX bringing it more cachet—is being a party girl/scene queen. Something that Babitz knew how to do as much as her erstwhile gay bestie, Earl McGrath, knew how to alchemize his charm and list of social contacts into being a key Hollywood player despite being famous for nothing. At least nothing related to art, other than being a hanger-on of that scene. With Didion counted among his coterie of influential friends as well.  

McGrath was among the many who frequented the parties that Didion was happy to host, but never as much of a willing participant in them as Babitz. There was always something about Didion that remained strictly ivory tower. To back her up on this, Anolik brings no less a literary titan than Tennessee Williams into it, unearthing a quote from James Grissom’s Follies of God that goes: “I love [Didion’s] work, but I am aware that she is shrewd about her effects, her twists, her fillips and her dry perceptions. While I feel that [Marguerite] Duras has actually walked through a few fires, and now writes from the perspective of a singed victim, Didion has, perhaps, witnessed a few burn victims and shudders at the vision, wonders how it might have affected her, how the clothes scented with Lanvin smelled when the petrol met the match. Duras has seen the carnage; Didion resides on a hill, in a beautiful home with a good soup on the stove and keens about the arrival of carnage: Cassandra with a good haircut and the phone number of people at Paramount.” While the comparison might have been between Didion and Duras, it might just as well have been Babitz, whose passion—sheer appetite—for life is so hearty and sensuous that it makes Didion’s writing and style come across as, well, more wooden than “deadpan.”

There’s no doubt that part of their variances in tone stemmed from Eve’s fearlessness in terms of how she chose to live. Sex, drugs, rock n’ roll—that was Eve. Yet she wasn’t a groupie, even if that’s the image she chose to project to hide herself as a true artist…lest someone accuse her of being a fraud on that front. On the subject of sex and drugs, perhaps among the most shocking revelations of Didion & Babitz (apart from John Gregory Dunne probably being gay) is Eve’s casual bragging about how she had acid-fueled sex with a then barely legal Griffin Dunne, Joan’s nephew with whom she was extremely close (all the way into her later years, as evidenced by Dunne’s documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold). It happened at a book party for Slow Days, Fast Company thrown by Charlotte Stewart. Eve recalled, “Someone brought Griffin Dunne. He was way too young. Everyone pounced on him. I got him.” It’s hard not to think of that conquest, drug-addled or not, as a pointed maneuver on Babitz’s part. A way of subliminally telling Joan, “See? There are some things I can do that you can’t. Some things that I can have that you can’t.” And, considering Didion had effectively taken away Babitz’s rightful ownership over writing about L.A., eclipsing her with her dark perspective on it, maybe this was an act of, that’s right, sex and rage on her part.

As for Joan claiming L.A. the most through the publication of Play It As It Lays, Anolik has long argued that this book was the catalyst for Babitz to write her own take on the city, starting with “The Sheik” and then Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company—all arriving after Didion had colored Los Angeles with her cynical slant. To underline their divergent views on the city, Anolik selects two opposing quotes from each writer’s respective work:

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Anas affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

From earliest childhood I have rejoiced over the Santa Ana winds. My sister and I used to run outside and dance under the stars on our cool front lawn and laugh manically and sing ‘Hitch-hike, hitch-hike, give us a ride,’ imagining we could be taken up into the sky on broomsticks.”

Surely, you can guess which quote belongs to whom. Didion could not have been more unlike Babitz, the gusto-filled, lust-for-life writer who isn’t frail or constantly bogged down by the weight of the world. Babitz, the “all woman” figure, clashes and contrasts against Didion, the curveless, “surfboard body” figure in every way—physically and emotionally. Indeed, the “styles” of their bodies also play into how each woman writes, with Anolik and Babitz both wondering if, at times, Didion was deliberate about remaining a wisp so that she could appear non-threatening to her male writer peers. If she wasn’t seen as “womanly,” then maybe they could forget she was a woman altogether. Conversely, Babitz was never treated with the same seriousness as Didion precisely because she was “buxom” (a word that Bret Easton Ellis also uses to describe Babitz when recalling their first encounter to Anolik—Babitz, not Didion, would provide a blurb for Less Than Zero, which flagrantly borrowed from Play It As It Lays in terms of style).

Because to have a voluptuous body as a woman is to call attention to being a woman. Something Didion never really wanted to do in her writing. Though she was happy to in her personal life when playing the fragile victim in need of a male protector…mostly, John Gregory Dunne. But before that, as Anolik is sure to point out, she was entirely reliant on Noel Parmentel (who Anolik was able to interview before his death on August 31, 2024), a quintessential cad/man about town, to fight her battles for her. Including the most important one of all: getting her first book, Run River, published. This, too, is part of how Anolik makes a strong distinction between the two women: Joan needed a man to get her foot in the door of a publishing house—especially after Run River had been rejected by roughly twenty-three publishers, including editors at her eventual home, Knopf. But Parmentel managed to push it through with Ivan Obolensky, a Russian blueblood who had started a publishing company. As such, his imprint, McDowell, Obolensky Inc., wasn’t taken seriously by “legitimate” “New York people” and publishing houses. This, in part, was what doomed Run River to obscurity at first (that, and its rather blah title).

Even so, Didion showed her gratitude for what Parmentel did by offering the dedication: “For my family and for N.” The N was for Noel, of course, but he insisted that his full name not be put in the dedication. In the end, that was just one more act of kindness he performed for Joan, wanting her to come across as a writer of her own merits, not someone whose “sort of” boyfriend had an in with an independent publisher. And, technically, Babitz owes her writing career to Parmentel as well—because, since he gave Didion hers, Didion paid it forward by giving Babitz an in at Rolling Stone. In a letter (one of many Anolik makes the reader privy to) dated July 28, 1971, Didion wrote to associate editor Grover Lewis (another soon-to-be bad romance of Babitz’s):

Dear Mr. Lewis—

            A friend of ours in Los Angeles, Eve Babitz, a few days ago showed me a piece she had written—about Hollywood High, where she had gone, but really about more than that. The piece surprised me—she is a painter, not a writer—& I liked it very much & suggested she send it to you to see if you might be interested in publishing it. So please watch for it.

So yes, no less than a recommendation from one of literature’s most formidable writers working in the business is what it took for Babitz to finally be given a chance after “The Sheik” was rejected by multiple others. The story, of course, offers a wistful and romantic portrait of L.A., even if there’s a bittersweet tragedy at the heart of it. It bears noting, too, that Didion calls Babitz out as “not a writer,” as though this little caveat is what convinced her to promote a fellow woman wielding L.A. as the primary setting of her story. As a “painter,” she couldn’t be that much of a threat to Didion’s own preeminence. And, for a while, she wasn’t. Not until Anolik launched a rediscovery and reassessment of Babitz’s work post-2014. So much so that, as Anolik points out, Bret Easton Ellis remarked in a 2020 episode of his podcast, “…there is a burgeoning school that prefers Eve Babitz to Joan Didion. I happen to have been—and still am—a massive Joan Didion fan. And I have a special place for Play It As It Lays. It’s a very powerful, dark book. Joan Didion goes into hell. But, in some ways, it’s easier to write hell than it is to write with that light, glancing, comic style [as Eve Babitz did]. I reread Slow Days, Fast Company, and, I have to say, that book is a revelation now. It’s one of the greatest books ever written about L.A., and may be the key novel of Seventies L.A.” So it is that Anolik pronounces Eve’s victory, even if only for a passing instant, over Joan with a reader and writer who was once always decidedly “Team Joan.”

After the failure of Run River, ergo Didion’s attempt at being a respected fiction writer, she found fortune in a new form—New Journalism—whereas Babitz, creating her own new form which she bills in a letter to Joseph Heller as “spurts,” did not. Sure, some of the books she released were received with “warmth,” but they were never regarded all that highly, nor were they heralded as “masterworks” in a new genre the way Didion’s work was. So it is that Babitz started to play to the gallery (something David Bowie sagely cautioned against) with Sex and Rage in 1979 and L.A. Woman in 1982. And in doing so, Anolik posits that she lost her way as a writer. Without the confidence she exuded in her own new style, both novels were unanimously panned, especially by the hoity-toity New York critics. Didion’s ascent, meanwhile, only continued into the 90s and 2000s, with the abovementioned The Year of Magical Thinking becoming the bestseller she had hoped for.

And yet, in many ways, Babitz has had the last laugh. Case in point, Anolik recalling how writer-editor Gerry Howard introduced her for a reading of Hollywood’s Eve by noting in his speech that Babitz is “one of late-twentieth-century L.A.’s greatest living chroniclers, starting to eclipse even the mighty Joan Didion.” And she did all of this, as Anolik also points out, just by “barely [leaving] the one-bedroom apartment that smelled like pee-you, that smelled like shit, that smelled like insanity.” All while Didion was running around oh so “coolly” to secure her status with the Establishment. To boot, Babitz never abandoned her native state the way Didion chose to, returning to New York after making that big to-do about leaving it for good in “Goodbye to All That.”

But Anolik sees now that “the competition was ongoing, the stakes of the competition not just raised but changed. For years it seemed as though Eve had been left behind by Joan. Now it seemed as though Eve had, perhaps, been waiting in front for Joan the whole time.” Naturally, because we live in an era where it is no longer “polite” to pit women against each other or acknowledge that women do still feel inherently competitive with one another (particularly as this world provides so few spaces for more than one woman in any given field to “take up”), Anolik is careful to suggest that, all along, the competition was collaborative. Thus, she adds, “What if the competition was actually a cooperation, Joan and Eve writing L.A. together? Yes, their sensibilities were polarized, their styles clashing. Their intentions, though, were identical: to make literature that exploited what was novel and exposed what was familiar in a city, a society and an epoch under convulsive pressure.” In short, they are not, as it appears on the surface, each other’s opposites, but rather, each other’s doubles. Ingmar Bergman’s Persona incarnate.

Like a yin yang, the two ostensibly opposing forces make up the same larger picture. Incidentally, the cover of Didion & Babitz couldn’t have opted for two more disparate photos of each woman…by design of course. The intent is to make us see one woman—put together, poised, impenetrable—and another—fun-loving, sloppy, open to all life had to offer (whether good or bad)—as yin and yang. Counterparts. Each unable to exist without the other. The summation of the “Madonna-whore complex” that men still so often enjoy wielding in their assessments of the “two kinds of women.” Or, as Anolik phrases it, “Joan and Eve are the two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned—the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.” What’s more, “They’d had an identical choice—the life or the work—and they chose opposite.” But each woman’s choice has nonetheless led to an indelible account of a time and place that was, for the most part, left solely for men to document.