Lili Anolik’s dual biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz makes a compelling case that the literary icons weren’t just rivals, they were soul mates.
In “Didion & Babitz,” author Lili Anolik opens with some advice: “Reader, Don’t be a baby.”aficionados. While their most ardent fans — Sixties counterculture devotees and literary It-girl wannabes — know the lore, Anolik, reader, knows much more.
“It so fundamentally changed my understanding of Eve that I knew I was going to have to revise to do right by her,” Anolik says. “I thought I could do it pretty quickly, write an introduction, shove in a few letters and move on. But it was too profound. Then I realized, as I was doing this, that I was writing a shadow book on Joan and that the women could best be understood in relation to one another.
It was Didion who helped Babitz get her big break in Rolling Stone, and Didion who offered to edit Babitz’s first book “Eve’s Hollywood.”“I think that those two kinds of women are endlessly drawn to each other and then endlessly turning away,” Anolik said. “What Eve and Joan had was a friendship, but it’s not trapable in language. I hate the term ‘frenemies,’ it’s tacky. But it’s like the feelings are intimate, and there’s love, but there’s feelings of rivalry. They’re the same, but opposites.
The C-SPAN interaction was the last between the two, although when Didion traveled to Los Angeles in 2005 for the book tour for “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Babitz had blown up photos she’d taken of Didion, Dunne and their daughter Quintana decades before. She wanted to give them to Didion as a gift but when she arrived at the event, she couldn’t bring herself to go inside. “Too sad,” she’d told Anolik at the time.
When I ask Anolik if she had any reservations about revealing so much of Didion’s private life, she says, “There’s ethics in crime.”She sets up her boundaries like this: Information that may be titillating but doesn’t serve the work doesn’t make it in; if it impacts the work or the persona, it adheres to her code. “Joan wrote about herself and her husband compulsively, so they seemed like fair game to me. They wrote about their marriage.
Whether Anolik loves Didion or not, she says she admires her. “I love her commitment, and I like the qualities about her that people might put down – like her coldness and her ambition and her relentlessness? I totally love.” That’s what Didion and Babitz had in common, according to Anolik: Both women went all the way; they were fundamentally “Brides of Art.” Being great writers and artists was paramount to them, it was the crux of their souls and their commitment never faltered..
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