Secret twins? A casually brutal biography of Joan Didion and ‘soul mate’ Eve Babitz blurs ethical boundaries, but exhilarates
- Written by Astrid Edwards, PhD Candidate and literary critic, The University of Melbourne
Lili Anolik admits her first book on Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, was a way of “driving a stake” through her subject’s heart, hoping to end her self-confessed “unbalanced, fetishistic” obsession with the bohemian LA writer.
Anolik had been in Babitz’s “thrall” for nine years, since she fell hard for her 1974 book Slow Days, Fast Company. Hollywood’s Eve, along with Anolik’s Vanity Fair articles, have been the impetus driving Babitz’s work back to centre stage, resurrecting Babitz as a cultural icon.
Anolik’s obsession did not end with her book, nor with Babitz’s slow passing in December 2021, after living with Huntington’s disease. In January of that year, she received a call from Babitz’s sister Mirandi, saying she had found sealed boxes of photographs and letters buried in the “full-scale filth” of Babitz’s apartment.
Almost exactly a year later, after Babitz’s funeral, Anolik accompanied Mirandi to the library where the boxes were held. There she discovered, among other things, letters to Joan Didion.
Intimacies, controversies and disagreements
Babitz and Didion were close in the 1960s and 1970s. So close that Didion (and her husband, John Gregory Dunne) edited Eve’s Hollywood – an unprecedented occurrence, as Didion did not edit works written by anyone but her husband.
Babitz was there for Didion’s legendary parties at her Franklin Avenue home in Hollywood, then at her equally famous beach house in Malibu. Those bohemian days are central to this work, of course, brought to life through Anolik’s deliberately casual, yet brutal writing style.
It’s generally reckoned that the Sixties didn’t begin in this country until November 22, 1963, when an assassin took out JFK with a magic bullet. For Los Angeles, however, the beginning came sooner, on August 4, 1962, when Marilyn Monroe took out herself with a Nembutal.
Eve Babitz pierced the mystique swirling around Joan Didion.
Bob Weidner/Allen & Unwin
Anolik mines this treasure trove of writings – journals, letters (both sent and unsent), manuscripts – and excavates intimate details of the private lives of these women not yet on the public record. The clarity with which Babitz pierces the mystique swirling around Didion is remarkable, and is showcased no better than when Babitz writes a letter to Didion taking her to task for her failure to read Virginia Woolf.
Referring to Didion’s New York Times article, published on 30 July 1972, it reads:
The thing beyond what your article on the women’s movement was about was what A Room of One’s Own is about […] for a long, long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan […] Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? […] It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf.
Cover photograph by Julian Wasser, who captured iconic photographs of both Didion and Babitz.
This work, Didion & Babitz, could not exist without the storied public writings of both writers, especially their rival 1979 works, The White Album (Didion) and Sex and Rage (Babitz). Anolik uses these cornerstones of 20th-century writing to draw out the intimacies of the writers’ day-to-day lives, piercing the veil of their public personas to reveal the controversies and disagreements and motivations driving their art.
While officially biography, the work also reads as a memoir of Anolik’s relationship with Babitz, as well as Anolik’s intellectual relationship with the published works of these seminal writers.
‘Bear with me, Reader’
Anolik consistently breaks the fourth wall, directly addressing the reader. She writes, “Now, bear with me, Reader, because I’m about to make an intuitive leap and might land way wide of the mark.”
While some readers might find this jarring, the style honours the deliberate rule-breaking of her subjects. These authorial intrusions serve two purposes: to link different sections of the work together, as might happen in a wide-ranging conversation, and to psychoanalyse her subjects.
Here’s one example of Anolik inserting herself into the text and directly telling the reader her thoughts on Didion’s work:
A side note: The one unequivocally admiring piece on a woman that Joan wrote was her Georgia O'Keefe profile. And the reason she was so wild for O'Keefe was precisely because of O'Keefe’s grim-faced and forbidding qualities […] Here’s how you know it was the ultimate compliment for Joan: she paid it to herself […] It was how she saw herself. How she wanted to be seen.
Cover photograph by Julian Wasser.
Anolik repeatedly psychoanalyses photographs of the women, especially those you are likely to find on a tote bag: 20-year-old Babitz playing chess naked with surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp; Didion staring through the camera, cigarette in hand. Both were taken by the same photographer, Julian Wasser, and both women used Wasser’s visual genius to create the image of themselves they wanted the world to see.
This psychoanalysis extends to both women’s addictions and weight. Eve’s drug use and alcoholism were always public, but Anolik suggests Didion was also an alcoholic (along with her husband and daughter, Quintana). Anolik also compares and contrasts their weight – Eve’s voluptuousness against Didion’s slight frame – and this is used as a metaphor for their writing.
Eve, an untaught and uncontrollable artistic savant; Didion, a fiercely controlled professional and perfectionist. She also implies Didion had an eating disorder. On her weight, Anolik writes,
that was a matter of genetics and body type, of course. But also, I suspect, choice. There was an overwrought quality to her thinness, almost a hysteria.
There is a blurring of ethics on Anolik’s part here – how much of this is speculation, and how much based on evidence?
Writing LA together
And while Didion (even here) takes centre stage, as the first mentioned in the title, this is a work devoted to Eve Babitz. Anolik forces the reader to consider whether it was Babitz, not Didion, who was the 20th century’s greatest chronicler, with “Joan and Eve writing LA together”.
After all, their intentions were identical, she argues: “to make literature that exploited what was novel and exposed what was familiar in a city, a society, and an epoch under convulsive pressure”.
This is a work about two women – Didion and Babitz – whose lives and careers overlapped. Babitz passed first, on 17 December 2021, aged 78. She was followed by Didion days later, on 23 December 2021, aged 87.
Didion & Babitz is an exhilarating read, bringing both Eve and Joan to life for the reader. Anolik, though a journalist by trade, makes no attempt to report impartially here, admitting her “love for Eve’s astonishing, reckless, wholly original personality and talent”.
If it were possible to imagine the responses of the women themselves to this work, one suspects Babitz would be thrilled, Didion livid. Still, for the lovers of Didion out there, there are glimmers of a Joan not yet revealed in print. As Anolik writes, “each was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. To a soul mate”.
Authors: Astrid Edwards, PhD Candidate and literary critic, The University of Melbourne
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