I read Lili Anolik's Didion & Babitz book—here's everything you need to know

A tale of two writers

I’ll admit: prior to reading Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz, I didn’t know anything about the aforementioned Babitz at all. Didion? Oh, I knew her. I’d read Slouching Towards Bethlehem like any other (white) aspirational female writer worth her salt, and her Spartan packing list—“2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards, 1 pullover [….] cigarettes, bourbon…”—remained pinned on my mental mood board. Babitz on the other hand… well, that one needed a quick Google search, which is perhaps the exact reason Anolik wrote this book to begin with.

For those currently opening Google searches of their own, a quick explainer. Joan Didion: famous writer and journalist, often attributed for helping to usher in the era of New Journalism circa the ‘60s and ‘70s. Known for her writings and reflections on topics like California, L.A., and the gruesome death of the American ideal circa the Manson murders. Notable works: Play It As It Lays, The Year of Magical Thinking, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album (all commonly seen in the hand of that girl you’re about to hit on at the wine bar). Eve Babitz: also a writer on the L.A. scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s (in fact, in the same scene as Joan, but we’ll get to that in a second), as well as an artist who designed album covers. Also wrote about California and L.A., but primarily the party scenes—which she often starred as a central figure of. Notable works: Slow Days, Fast Company, Black Swans, and Sex and Rage (also all commonly seen in the hand of that girl you’re about to hit on at the wine bar).

If you’re opening this book expecting to get Eve Babitz and Joan Didion in equal measure as the title and overall framing seems to imply, then close it right now because that’s not what this is. This is Anolik’s 300-some page call to action about how we should all care more about Eve Babitz. It’s her thesis, her magnum opus after years of writing about and interviewing Eve. But, whether she intended it or not, it also reads as her reprimand to anyone who worshipped at the altar of Joan Didion instead of Eve Babitz. It’s Anolik’s crusade on Eve’s behalf, though I highly doubt if Eve herself cared for such a crusade.

So where does Anolik fit into this whole narrative? Well, Anolik’s obsessed with Eve—a love she literally smacks you in the face with on the first page. “My book on Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, came out in 2019,” she writes in the preface of Didion and Babitz. “Writing it was my way of driving a stake through her heart. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. It was that I loved her too much.” Anolik collected hours and hours of interviews with Eve and the people around her while working on Hollywood’s Eve and writing the 2014 Vanity Fair feature on Eve that preceded it. As such, Anolik developed an intimate relationship with Eve and those closest to her. Anolik maintained that intimate relationship until Eve’s death on December 17, 2021—auspiciously just days before Joan Didion’s death on December 23, 2021. That relationship is also what afforded Anolik access to a box of Eve’s unsent letters, which includes one pivotal, scathing letter addressed to Joan (yes, that one) that Anolik purports as the “key to unlocking Didion” and is essentially the whole reason this book even exists.

Though the salacious “unlocking” she teases is actually really boring. Joan and Eve were basically creative frenemies. They ran in the same circles, with Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne often playing host to Eve and much of the ‘70s L.A. glitterati at their home on 7406 Franklin Avenue. Eve and Joan became friends, and Eve even leaned on Joan to help edit her first book. Eventually, the relationship soured into a sort of competition (albeit pretty one-sided), and the two drifted apart—Joan on a wave of apathy, and Eve on her own wave of apathy that was sometimes tossed with currents of simmering resentment. Some of that resentment was reflected in that unsent letter, thus apparently giving Anolik enough perceived ammunition and gas to write a whole book on the intricacies of the Didion-Babitz relations.

Don’t get me wrong: the book’s enjoyable, but not because of Anolik’s writing. In fact, I oftentimes found myself rolling my eyes at Anolik’s narration—riddled with its frequent condescending addresses to her “dear readers,” her hero worship of Eve, her circular storytelling, her propensity to aside that “in order to understand the key idea I’m about to tell you, we must first spend three pages talking about this other point,” and constant not-so-brief meditations on points of tepid exposition. Rather, Anolilk’s subjects carry the weight of the book for her. Eve and Joan were cool girls who did cool things and led cool lives. Reading about that is fun. The redemptive quality of the book exists not through Anolik’s own skill at weaving a narrative, but only because the lives Joan Didion and Eve Babitz lived are compelling.

This leads me to the second reason the book is entertaining but not necessarily good. In this book, you hear from a lot of people who knew Joan and Eve. But the two people you don’t hear from (or at least don’t from much) are Joan and Eve. They actually feel woefully absent despite the fact that the whole book’s about them. Anolik never got the chance to interview Joan before Joan died, so she leans mostly on interviews and soundbites Joan gave publically over the years to inject the literary titan’s voice into the book. On the other hand, Anolik got open-season access to Eve for quite a few years. In those few years, though, it seems Eve only occasionally mentioned Joan’s place in her life. Granted there were enough snide remarks for Anolik to ascertain something happened between the two to curdle their friendship, but it doesn’t seem like Eve ever made any direct comments about the nature of her relationship with Joan to Anolik.

This leaves us with only a few passing mentions and an unsent letter as evidence provided by Eve herself to support the story Anolik’s telling about her and Joan. The rest of the evidence we get from sources who knew Joan and Eve, and can talk to their relationship. What you end up getting is a bunch of people talking about Joan and Eve—many of whom are men—but hardly hear anything straight from the horse’s mouth (or mouths). So yeah, of course, the book’s fun and entertaining. It’s basically gossip immortalized in a book.

The most pivotal part of this book to me is the last few chapters, mostly because I wonder if it’s the one Anolik hopes you forget. The secrets she’s saved until the very end so you, dear reader (lol see?), don’t slam the book shut. Anolik uses the space to summarize the legacies of these two writers—Joan’s hulking figure, and Eve’s whisper of a flame. In fact, it seems as though Eve’s legacy exists mostly thanks to Anolik. Joan, on the other hand, was someone so focused on success, Anolik purports “she’d crawl over corpses to get where she had to go.” Reading the last page of this book, I can’t help but wonder if Anolik sort of did the same.

Anolik mentions throughout the book the squalor and deterioration Eve and her Huntington-ravaged mind died in, but she reserves revealing just how much she’d deteriorated until the very end. She lived in filth. She began to think she was having an affair with Donald Trump. She rarely went outside. She obsessively bought everything off the Home Shopping Network, until her sister disposed of her T.V. It’s enough to shift your perspective on everything you’ve just read. Slowly you realize Anolik herself is perhaps just as complicit in the very thing she accuses Joan of: crawling across corpses to get where she needs to go. In this case, the corpse is the very one Anolik also lovingly caresses: Eve herself. It seems Anolik looked around that squalid Los Angeles apartment Eve wasted away in and thought: no, Eve deserved to die in a sprawling home on the Upper East Side too, just like Joan. And so she crawled across the same corpse she worshipped to rewrite and reimagine that ending.

I’m glad the book introduced me to Eve Babitz, and Anolik has certainly succeeded in raising more interest for the writer. But at minimum, this book is a continuation of Anolik’s work from Hollywood’s Eve—an addendum she wishes she could add, yet instead convinced her publisher to turn into a book of its own. There’s an undercurrent of desperation throughout Didion and Babitz. Like Anolik’s gripping your hand in one of her palms, clammy with desperate excitement, imploring you with crazed eyes and fiercely beseeching: Wait, just hear me out! And you, dear reader, are but a mere prisoner to the tirade, desperately trying to pull your fingers away from that vice-like grip.