Released back in November of 2024, Lili Anolik’s ”Didion and Babitz” made its rounds on Tiktok’s popular hashtag booktok. In the author’s words, her novel sought to “elucidate the complicated alliance between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity, and that had a lasting effect on both writers, as well as on Los Angeles (LA) letters and culture in particular, American letters and culture in general.”
This biography details the complex friendship of Joan Didion — a late Californian journalist famous for documenting counterculture of the 1960s and 70s — and famous writer, artist and groupie who used to date Jim Morrisson of The Doors, Eve Babitz. Didion’s most popular works include “Play It As It Lays” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Babitz wrote semi-autobiographical fiction, such as “Eve’s Hollywood.”
Didion and Babitz met in Hollywood in the late 1960s. They both frequented the Franklin Avenue scene where Didion and her writer husband, John Greggory Dunne, used to live in LA. Didion and her husband used to host parties at their house that Babitz would attend. Didion was a critic of hedonism, whereas Babitz was a party girl — a practicing hedonist herself. Didion came from a middle-class family from Northern California, whereas Babitz came from a half-Jewish Hollywood family, who rubbed shoulders with artists and musicians. Babitz’s godfather was classical musician Igor Stravinsky.
From the beginning, the author reveals her bias in favor of Eve Babitz by sharing, “If intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babitz.” Anolik was friends with Babitz for the last couple of months of her life. In 2019, Anolik wrote “Hollywood’s Eve” in dedication to Babitz. She writes about Babitz and Didion as if she knew them. Unfortunately, her bias negatively affects the perspective of Didion. She discredits Didion’s talent because she attributes her seriousness to being a characteristic of “maleness.” It’s clear, Anolik has inherited her perspective on Didion from a jealous Babitz, who wasn’t taken seriously in the literary and arts scene due to her numerous affairs.
The book reads as gossip amongst girlfriends, not literary criticism. Anolik often addresses the reader like a friend. The book is less about the two writers’ talents and writings, but about their social circle and the men they slept with. This book is entertaining as it describes Babitz and Didion’s life through the changing culture of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Readers are taken through the art world to rock’n’roll to the film world that surrounded Babitz and Didion.
Anolik presents these writers as influential aesthetic symbols of the time: from Babitz’s famous photo of her playing chess naked with the artist Marcel Duchamp, to Julian Wasser’s photograph from 1968 of Joan Didion sitting in her Corvette Stingray smoking a cigarette. The book details Eve’s days at Barney’s — a West Hollywood bar — to the Troubadour — the heart of LA’s rock’n’roll scene. The novel further documents Didion’s move from her Franklin Avenue home to her Malibu home, where she and her husband got into the film industry, to scenes where she critiques the San Francisco hippie scene. Anolik takes interviews and old letters to tell the story of their complex relationship and their dating life.
The book lacks chapters solely about Joan Didion, in favor of highlighting Babitz. The author thinks she’s more brilliant than she actually is. She tries to paint Babitz as a more successful writer than she was regarded as in reality. Babitz’s friendship with Didion was beneficial to her because Didion helped edit her work and pulled strings for her work to get published in magazines, too. Posthumously, their feud has been extended outside of the grave by Anolik, as if Babitz still resents Didion from the grave.
In reality, Didion’s life ended better than Babitz’s. Didion lived in an upscale Manhattan apartment, versus Babitz, who lived in a rotting West Hollywood apartment. Both writers died within a week of each other. Joan Didion died from Parkinson’s Disease on Dec. 21, 2021.
Eve Babitz died on Dec. 17, 2021, after suffering from Huntington’s disease for years. While Didion made a name for herself as a famed cultural critic and journalist, Babitz ended up becoming a hermit and a conservative later on in life. Although Anolik pitted the two women as rivals, both of their works are worth reading for their respective contributions to popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s.
Verdict: Anolik’s bias makes reading “Didion and Babitz” unenjoyable, especially for readers that aren’t already fans of either woman. The book is also exceedingly long for the quality of content that it has about the two literary figures, and Anolik’s creativity seems to have run dry after publishing “Hollywood’s Eve.” All in all, the book feels like an unnecessary exercise in pitting two influential women against each other.
