battle of the literary it-girls

a review of 'didion & babitz'

Female rivalries have existed throughout history. Queen Elizabeth I vs. Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth Taylor vs. Debbie Reynolds. Tonya Harding vs. Nancy Kerrigan. Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera. Olivia Rodrigo vs. Sabrina Carpenter. In her newest non-fiction book Didion & Babitz, journalist Lili Anolik posits Joan Didion and Eve Babitz as the literary equivalent.

Though marketed as a ‘dual-biography’ exploring the complex ‘frenemy’ dynamic between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, the book reads more like a deep dive into Babitz’s life and career, with the focus occasionally drifting back over to Didion. From the start Anolik places all her cards on the table: she admits she has taken Eve’s side, a woman she loves with ‘a fan’s unreasoning abandon’. The chapters devoted to Eve are sprawling and brimming with admiration while Didion is relegated to intermittent appearances, which feel reluctantly included for the sake of giving Anolik’s second Babitz book a different angle from her first.

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik (2024)

One Didion passage begins with the author remarking that she will “check in on Joan and Dunne, see what they’re up to,”, evoking a rather cavalier tone towards someone who is supposedly one of the two main subjects of her book. In Anolik’s narrative, Didion is just a side character in the much more interesting and vibrant life of Eve Babitz.

Yet even still, the book’s conceit rests entirely on Anolik’s construction of the women as two sides of the same coin, that the ‘brilliance’ of one writer (Babitz) is the key to unlocking the mystery of the other (Didion). As Anolik states, they are “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.”

With the sharp contrast between how Anolik portrays the two, another archetype is brought to mind: the Madonna and the Whore. While Babitz is the booby, sexed-up “man’s woman”, Didion is a frail wisp who only slept with one other man before her husband, with a persona that is “part princess, part wet blanket”.

If you have any background knowledge about the author, this bias will not be surprising. Anolik has been a self-proclaimed superfan of Babitz ever since she first discovered her back in 2010, a time when Babitz oeuvre was entirely out of print. Anolik played a pivotal role in the writer’s rediscovery - her 2014 Vanity Fair piece about Babitz led to the republication of Babitz’s books.

With her sun-soaked, hedonistic tales of life in California, Eve Babitz soon became part of the ‘hot girl books’ canon, copies of her books clutched in the hands of models like Kendall Jenner, spotted on the bookshelves of famous actresses, and read on-screen by a character in the 2021 reboot of Gossip Girl.

Anolik published her first book about Babitz, Hollywood's Eve, in 2019, a book which, in the preface of Didion & Babitz, Anolik states was her attempt at “driving a stake through her [Babitz’s] heart.” Through divulging the secrets and history she’s accumulated about Babitz through their acquaintance, Anolik was attempting to cut ties, to free herself from an obsession she’s been steadily stoking since first discovering her. But by writing another book about Babitz in tandem with dragging down Joan Didion, Anolik is just placing Eve further up on the pedestal she’s created, largely antithetical to her original book’s raison d'etre.

But it’d be unfair of me to make this review entirely negative. From an entertainment standpoint, Didion & Babitz is undeniably engaging. I got through it in about 4 or 5 days. It reads like a juicy podcast or a gossip session with your friends as you report on your latest escapades.

The book is packed with rumours about Babitz and Didion, including claims that Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were both alcoholics, that Dunne was actually gay, and even that he secretly always wanted to sleep with Babitz. Through uncovering Babitz’s tumultuous love life and relationships, Anolik takes pleasure in identifying the real-life names behind the characters in Babitz’s books, an undoubtedly fun exercise for readers familiar with her work.

However, this reliance on gossip and speculation is also the book’s greatest weakness: while it forms the foundation of the book, the rest of it isn’t strong enough to keep the whole structure together. It’s a fun, gossipy read, but it falls short of its promise. What could have been a thoughtful dual-biography tracing the lives of two of America’s most significant female writers instead becomes a feverish, uneven portrait of Babitz, with Didion relegated to cameo appearances.

The book’s focus often feels flimsy, centring largely on one thing: an unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to Didion, unearthed in Babitz’s archives at the Huntington Library in California. But without that letter, it’s doubtful there would be enough material to write the book at all.