Didion & Babitz: not 'the two halves of American womanhood' – but the parallels are fascinating
I devoured Lili Anolik's Didion & Babitz and recommend you do, too ... though it's as flawed as it is marvellous.
Thanks to a rave 2014 Vanity Fair profile and a fabulous 2019 book, Hollywood’s Eve, Lili Anolik was responsible for the late-life resurgence of cult LA writer Eve Babitz, whose lush, breezy counterculture books set in Los Angeles never quite took off in her heyday. Anolik’s gonzo journalism on Babitz made her a writer, just as Joan Didion, in 1970s LA, brought her sometime friend Babitz in into print, writing to Rolling Stone to vouch for her piece about her girlhood at Hollywood High. (The magazine published it as fiction, which Babitz accepted with a metaphorical shrug.)
The conceit of Anolik’s riveting new book, Didion & Babitz (Atlantic) stems from Anolik’s discovery of a cache of Babitz’s unsent letters after her death in December 2021 – six days before Joan Didion died. On top of the pile is a snarky missive to Didion, castigating her for not reading Virginia Woolf. One striking line reads: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan … if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The rich potential of this unseen material sparks a new project, casting Didion and Babitz as each other’s “opposite and double”.
They were opposites in temperament and appearance – Babitz sensuous and voluptuous, Didion controlled and fashionably “tiny”. Didion was “at least outwardly, every inch the all-American bourgeois girl”. Babitz was “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat from birth”: Stravinsky was her godfather and at eighteen, she was photographed naked playing chess with clothed surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp. The photographer, Julian Wasser, would take iconic photos of Joan too – crisp, cool Americana.
The two women wrote iconic books recording a time and place (1960s and 1970s LA), were deeply embedded in its cultural scene (Babitz more in art and music, Didion more in movies and publishing). And both had lashings of style. Didion fiercely supported Babitz’s literary career, arranging the publication of her debut book, Eve’s Hollywood, and even signing on to unofficially (but rigorously) co-edit it with her husband John Gregory Dunne, her own unofficial editor.
That seemingly unprecedented generosity from Joan seems to have led to the rupture of their friendship. Babitz described the Didion Dunnes as “terrifyingly exacting” and “like my best self and who can live with that?” So she “fired” them.
One of Anolik’s talents is documenting cultural scenes (as my friend Melissa Cranenburgh pointed out during the first hour we spent discussing this book – it’s that kind of book). She first employed that talent in Hollywood’s Eve, then in her terrific documentary podcast Once Upon a Time in Bennington, about the literary brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt and Jonathon Lethem at a small liberal arts college in the 1980s. (Apparently, the subject of her next book – I can’t wait.)
In Didion & Babitz, a key setting is the parties at Joan Didion’s house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood and in “crazily square” (according to Eve) Malibu. Eve was a regular guest, along with Harrison Ford (Didion’s carpenter and everyone’s pot dealer), Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and various high-level record company executives.
An adjacent, sometimes intersecting scene is hosted by Didion’s Malibu neighbour Margot Kidder (aka Lois Lane), whose parties with Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg were a feature of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, perhaps the best “scene” book ever. (And a perfect summer read, if you haven’t read it already.) Then there’s rock venue the Troubador, where Babitz introduced Didion to her sometime-lover Jim Morrison (whose stage leathers were made by Babitz’s sister), so her mentor could interview him.
Anolik declares herself firmly Team Babitz – though she occasionally sides with Didion. For example, she writes of their rupture: “Joan is somebody I naturally root against [but] Eve repaid her by acting the ungrateful little bitch par excellence”. And while the book’s core is the relatively short time span where Didion and Babitz moved in the same circles, and the narrative circles both women’s lives, Babitz emerges as the book’s dominant subject. The sources for Babitz’s life are certainly deeper: Anolik is still good friends with Babitz’s sister and cousin, and she spoke regularly on the phone to Babitz herself for years before she died.
For Didion too, though, she has a fascinating key source: Noel Parmentel Jr, the man who broke Didion’s heart, described as “the great love of Joan’s life” by a friend of both Didion and Babitz. Anolik managed to speak to Parmentel in 2023, soon after his ninety-seventh birthday – and not long before he died, a few months ago. “He was her first mentor, her first lover, her first everything,” she writes of the man who got Didion’s first novel published (Run River, which he told Anolik was first “turned down by everybody”) – and introduced her to John Gregory Dunne, telling her she should marry him. Parmentel told Anolik: “he’d be at the breakfast table every morning, something I’d never be. And he’d edit her line by line.”
Didion and Babitz is addictively readable and studded with great quotes and anecdotes, as you can see. It contains some terrific journalism. And Anolik’s analysis of each woman’s work is often astute, always fascinating and sometimes controversial. Her origins as an impassioned reader and literary fan are evident. Didion’s classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which she admires, is “old-fashioned Gothic tricked out in New Journalism clothing”. Babitz’s best book, Slow Days, Fast Company, “attained that American ideal: Art that stays loose, maintains its cool.” She “hate[s]” Didion’s iconic grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, rejecting “its fundamental narcissism … its fundamental dishonest”. Writing about her subjects’ work, she is precise and backs up her opinions with evidence. You may not agree, but you can appreciate the argument.
Unfortunately, this falls away when it comes to her central premise. She makes some gargantuan claims that feel unsubstantiated. “Joan and Eve are the two halves of American womanhood.” That seems to leave out most women. “Joan Didion without Eve Babitz is like the sun without the moon.” Really? “Each was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. A soul mate.” This seems frankly preposterous: the relationship Anolik draws is significant, and deep where it comes to the pair’s artistic egos (particularly Babitz’s), but doesn’t seem especially intimate on a personal level. And I don’t think Babitz has gotten close enough to Didion to make that kind of judgment.
But don’t let this – or the confiding, companionable tone that can veer on breathless – stop you from reading this flawed but wonderful book. (Just bring your critical faculties.)
Are there striking parallels and contrasts between these two stylish, intelligent, talented writers – both at their best in their nonfiction – that illuminate something about being a certain kind of woman in a certain era? Absolutely.
This is an edited extract from this month’s Diary of a Book Addict column, published in InDaily. You can read the rest of the column here.
It covers Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message (Hamish Hamilton); Words to Sing the World Alive, a First Nations anthology edited by Jasmin McGaughey and The Poet’s Voice (UQP); and Oh, How we Laughed, curated by Jace Reh and Theo Brown (Buon-Cattivi Press) an anthology of queer, disabled South Australian voices.