Didion and Babitz

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper's Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more! n Joan Didion is revealed at last in this vivid, engrossing (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography that reads like a propulsive novel (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions--and antagonisms--of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz. n nCould you write what you write if you weren't so tiny, Joan? --Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972 n nEve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. n n7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers, and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking--and thus the true making--of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. n nDidion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She's remained opaque, elusive. Until now. n nWith deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz's brilliance of observation, Babitz's incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz's diary-like letters--letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don't read them so much as breathe them--as the key to unlocking Didion. And what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit (Time).n