After Eve Babitz—the late Los Angeles hedonist, visual artist, and author of 1977’s Slow Days, Fast Company—moved into an assisted living facility in 2021, a box of drafts, diary entries, and, perhaps most enthralling, unsent letters was found sitting in her closet. Sitting atop the stack, untouched for decades amidst the mess of her decaying home, was a scathing letter Babitz had written but never sent to literary titan Joan Didion, which included the now-internet-famous line: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”
Cutting and candid, Babitz’s letters form the bedrock of Didion & Babitz, a new book by Vanity Fair contributing editor Lili Anolik that explores the fraught frenemyship between the two writers. Anolik found the letters amidst the “filth and chaos” that Babitz was living in towards the end of her life and used them as a jumping-off point to “elucidate the complicated alliance between Didion and Babitz, a friendship that went bad and that had a lasting effect on both writers,” she writes.
And Anolik is better suited than anyone for the task. With her 2014 retrospective article “All About Eve—and Then Some,” she reintroduced Babitz’s long-ignored oeuvre and transgressive creative life to the world, sparking renewed interest in her work. In 2019, she authored Hollywood’s Eve, a biography expanding on her decades-worth of interviews with Babitz, preserving the artist’s radical existence on the page. (A master at literary gossip, she also created the cult-favorite podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, in which she digs into the messy, private dramas of writers like Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at the school in the 1980s).
With Didion & Babitz, however, Anolik hopes to “obliterate” Hollywood’s Eve, she tells W. Working with an alchemy of reprinted letters, hundreds of interviews, and close-readings of both women’s work, Anolik weaves a tapestry of Babitz and Didion’s shared history. Though she originally intended to simply update Hollywood’s Eve to include the newly discovered documents, Anolik says she soon realized she’d created an entirely new work about Didion and Babitz’s relationship, like the nonfiction version of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. “It’s a love story. It’s a hate story. Real intimacy is always like that,” she tells W. Didion & Babitz also untangles contentious pieces of Didion’s elusive past, and Anolik warns Didion superfans from the start: “Reader: don’t be a baby.”
The book begins with Anolik’s backstory on Babitz, then shifts to Didion, making up for her lack of relationship with the latter by speaking to interlocutors like her nephew Griffin Dunne, writer Susanna Moore, and the late Dan Wakefield. Anolik then combines Babitz and Didion’s respective timelines when they finally intersect: in 1967, at the Hollywood home of Didion and her husband John Dunne, a dinner party-slash-salon scene frequented by Babitz and other soon-to-be-stars (Harrison Ford, at one point, was Didion’s carpenter), and much mytholigized by Didion herself in works like Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
On growing up as an Angeleno, Babitz wrote in her short story “The Sheik”: “Lying on your stomach in the hot sand…I don’t think there were any of us who seriously thought life could be any better.” Didion portrayed a diametric version of L.A., and California at large: “The apparent ease of California life is an illusion,” she wrote in the essay “Holy Water” from 1979’s The White Album. For Didion, L.A. is an apocalyptic landscape with delusions of grandeur, vanity, and loss masquerading as glamor. For Babitz, it’s heaven on earth. It’s home. In fact, Babitz accused Didion of selling out L.A. to appease the New York literary crowd, who regarded L.A. as a deadened place, inferior to the East Coast in its ability to pulse with culture and artistic life.
What Babitz also claimed Didion bartered for the favor of elites? Women. “You prefer to be with the boys, snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose,” Babitz wrote in an unsent letter, which Anolik proposes was in response to a piece Didion published in The New York Times bashing “The Women’s Movement” in 1972. “Joan, Eve believed, was safeguarding herself from the male chauvinist pigs by, in effect, becoming a male chauvinist pig,” Anolik writes. The irony, though? “Joan, double-crosser of women […] was offering [Eve], a woman, protection and support.”
After all, it was because of a recommendation letter from Didion that Babitz published her very first short story, in Rolling Stone. Didion also helped Babitz get a deal for her 1974 book Eve’s Hollywood, which, Anolik discovered in her research, Didion also helped Babitz edit. (“You might have to be a writer to understand how big a favor this is,” Anolik notes.) In short: “Eve had a benefactor, and that benefactor’s name was Joan Didion.” What then, exactly, soured their relationship? Didion’s editing style, possibly. Babitz’s prose clashed with Didion’s, in every way her opposite.
Didion is a “masculine kind of good,” writes Anolik, her sentences “cold and clear and clean as spring water.” Babitz’s drafts, however, were written off-the-cuff, her prose breathtaking, but often full of grammatical errors. For a while, Babitz “tried to follow Joan’s example, buckling down and working on her book dutifully,” Anolik writes. But the writing didn’t translate. Didion called Babitz’s work “sloppy.” Babitz called Didion’s edits “terrifyingly exacting,” so she fired Didion as an editor and went back to her old habits, completing the book as she saw fit.
Anolik relates the writers’ differences in style to their physical likeness, their bodies. Babitz’s body was the antithesis of Didion’s: “an explosion of voluptuous flesh, and helplessly carnal,” writes Anolik. (Think of that famed Julian Wasser photo: a naked Babitz playing Marcel Duchamp in chess.) Conversely, diminutive in size through food restriction, “there was an overwrought quality to [Joan’s] thinness, almost a hysteria. She had no flesh, allowed herself no flesh,” Anolik writes.
And Didion’s sentences were just as slim. “Disorder or excess in the work wasn’t to be tolerated,” Anolik adds. Why? It “might lead to a softening of potency; a plumpening of will. To, in short, feminization.” To, in short, being like Babitz, a sensualist who invented her own writing style, which she called “spurts.” As Simone de Beauvoir states, though: “novelty disturbs and repels.” Didion’s modus operandi was to remain normative, so that she might appear unthreatening in a male-dominated literary world. Babitz’s work (and body) burst with life, with flaws, and Didion didn’t always get it.
Another tentpole of Didion & Babitz? The Didion-Dunne marriage machine, subjected to much cultural narrativizing as a great writerly love affair. “Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you […] as a child so it’s all right that you are famous?” wrote Babitz in an unsent letter, referring to Dunne’s violent raging and alcoholism. Anolik argues that Dunne’s anger stemmed from an inferiority complex about Didion’s success. Also possible? He struggled with sexuality. Anolik claims Dunne was rumored to be gay, and that Didion only married him at the behest of the late journalist, Noel Parmentel Jr., her real soulmate, whom she revered.
When she first moved to New York, Didion wanted to marry Parmentel desperately. (“Joan was like a Southern girl about being married,” he told Anolik.) But he wasn’t interested in commitment, so he advised her to marry Dunne, his literary hanger-on, then helped jumpstart her publishing career, telling Anolik, rather infuriatingly: “I invented Joan Didion.” Meanwhile, Babitz literally aspired to spinsterdom, entertaining many famous, powerful lovers along the way, discarding institutional legitimacy. (Dunne and Didion often called Babitz “the dowager groupie.”)
Ultimately, Didion & Babitz illustrates a twinning. Attracted and repelled by each other, there is a fascination and repulsion electrifying Babitz and Didion’s every interaction—even correspondences never sent. “By saving [unsent letters], we are in some sense ‘sending’ it after all,” writes journalist Janet Malcolm. That is to say, it becomes a diary entry, thrust into the void, into the future. Thank god for posterity. Thank god for Anolik’s journalistic instinct to preserve the Didion & Babitz story in her own luminous prose, for handling the narrative with care, for making good art in our post-empire world. As Babitz writes, art is “the only thing that’s real other than murder […] or death.” In fact: “It’s the salvation.”
