The arresting cover images – cool, calm and collected Joan Didion, cigarette in hand, and a dishevelled Eve Babitz peering over sunglasses – hint at what’s to come in journalist Lili Anolik’s riveting exploration of the intersecting lives of Didion and Babitz.
Anolik states up front that her book attempts to ‘elucidate the complicated alliance’ between writers Didion and Babitz, and the effects of their strained relationship on each woman personally as well as on the wider literary scene.
Anolik draws on multiple sources including face-to-face interviews, phone conversations, images and a significant collection of Babitz’s personal papers discovered after her death in 2021. She recounts the highs and lows of the lives of Didion and Babitz, including events, choices, and turning points that either stifled or stimulated their creativity and output.
Much of the book chronicles life in the fast lane in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in both Los Angeles and New York, where Didion and Babitz moved in interesting circles. In the late ’60s and early ’70s they were both part of the same crowd, first meeting each other in 1967. Life in Los Angeles was ‘glamour, flash, extravagance’ with its mix of film stars (and wannabes), musicians and writers hanging out in a region that Eve perceived as a ‘gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio’ rather than a city. New York was, at times, a ‘forest in a fairytale—grotesque and disjointed, glinting with menace…’ Yet each city offered different opportunities.
Many familiar names feature in the anecdotes peppered throughout the book, including Harrison Ford (pre-stardom, a carpenter and pot dealer who kept his dope in a bass fiddle case), Roman Polanski, Neil Young, Janis Joplin, Linda Ronstadt, Mick Jagger, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jane Fonda (and the list goes on). Parties were frequent and wild, with catfights and conflicts not uncommon. Drugs – including cocaine – were plentiful. Both women lost friends, family and acquaintances to overdoses, alcoholism, and murder; personal losses included the unexpected deaths of Didion’s husband and daughter. Anolik explains how such deaths affected Didion and Babitz in different ways. Babitz, for example, was motivated by one death to write The Sheik, a ‘sad, tender, wistful, and passionately contradictory … rhapsody on regret, decay, decline, ruin…’ Babitz’s piece was published due to Didion’s connections at Rolling Stone. Much later, Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking in response to her own grief, a book that Anolik vehemently dislikes and believes to be narcissistic and fundamentally dishonest.
People appear and reappear throughout the book over time, some with intentions that are questionable or unclear. Babitz’s acquaintances, for example, included:
…the hardest of the hard: promoters and producers and managers and flacks and other quasi-gangsters who made their livings sucking on fame’s teat.
Babitz had multiple partners. Anolik observes that some were ‘arrangements’ rather than relationships, and many were casual and fleeting. Babitz grasped life with both hands:
Eve had always been about overindulgence – profligacy and promiscuity, reckless and spectacular consumption… [a self-described] “daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor … keeping joints rolled and lit…”
Babitz’s writing often featured barely disguised characters based on people she knew, as well as verbatim conversations. This lead to accusations of disloyalty and betrayal, fractured friendships, and threats of lawsuits.
Anolik perceived Didion as both powerful and fragile, a mysterious woman living in a symbiotic relationship with her partner (and fellow writer) John Dunne until his premature death.
It was Dunne who made it possible for Joan to be Joan. Didion, says Anolik, is someone who she ‘roots against’:
I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona – part princess, part wet blanket – tough going…
Even so, Anolik admires and appreciates Didion’s accomplishments – her brilliant writing, her ambition, even her ability to throw fabulous parties. (I’m left contemplating why Didion’s name comes first on the title of the book, when so much of the book focuses on Babitz, who Anolik was intensely fascinated by, and loved.)
This is a long book, with multiple characters and settings. At times I found it hard to keep track of who was who (and who was with who), despite Anolik’s attention to detail. Footnotes provide additional context. Anolik is careful not to provoke lawsuits herself – a name in one quote has been redacted and the initials identifying a key player in another quote have been bleeped out.
The images in the book include small black and white photos and several sketches, including a drawing of Babitz by artists Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. There’s a famous photo of a naked Babitz sitting opposite a much older Duchamp, ostensibly playing chess.
Anolik carried out exhaustive research as well as substantial analysis of Didion’s and Babitz’s lives. She is a clear and confident writer, not afraid to offer her interpretation of events or to share her intuitions. At one point she urges us, as readers, to make our own decisions about which version of the truth should be believed. Anolik’s reviews of Didion’s and Babitz’s works are considered and thoughtful. She takes into account the wider social, cultural (and sometimes political) influences upon their writing. (A ‘totally stoned’ Eve joined California Governor Jerry Brown on the campaign trail as he ran for president in 1976.)
Central to the book is the story of how the lives of Didion and Babitz overlapped, the friends and opportunities they had in common, and key turning points. Babitz’s letters, which Anolik describes as ‘lasting literary works’, fill in many gaps. Some letters were multiple pages long, with postscripts. Babitz covered intense and varied topics, sometimes reflecting on her circumstances and comparing herself unfavourably to other authors. Anolik includes examples of, and excerpts from, the letters.
Anolik describes how – in the late 70s – Didion’s star was rising higher and brighter than ever, while Babitz’s fame and output were diminishing, her personality dulled by cocaine and her finances and health declining too. And yet by the end of the book both women are considered legends – interest in Babitz’s writing spurred by reprints of her early books, and by what she represented, such as ‘free and original thinking … joy … sex-and-drug saturated bad behavior redeemed through obsessive hard work’.
Anolik concludes by suggesting that Didion and Babitz, when viewed from a certain angle, can be seen as a ‘single woman split in two’, for reasons she outlines. She observes that by the end of their disparate lives the two women ‘couldn’t be further apart, yet [paradoxically] have ended up in the same place’. Both women died in December 2021 due to medical complications – Babitz from Huntington’s disease, and Joan from Parkinson’s disease. Each woman, suggests Anolik, ‘was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. To a soul mate.’
I reached the end of the book and returned straight to the beginning chapters, which now made a whole lot more sense. This is a book that warrants a second reading to gain a deeper understanding of how and why the lives of these two literary legends unfolded as they did.
Reviewer: Anne Kerslake Hendricks
Atlantic Books