icons smashing icons

In Lili Anolik's DIDION & BABITZ, the life of the party lives the life of the mind

Over on the Bad Site, author Kevin Maloney once told a story from his youthful partying days. He and his friends were at the bar, having a great time, when Maloney noticed that his friend Clark wasn’t there. Maloney¹ asked a friend where Clark was, and he said that Clark was at home, working on his art. The takeaway being that, eventually, if you’re an artist, at some point you have to leave the party and go home, to work on the art you’re always yammering on about.

I thought of this while reading Didion & Babitz, the new book from Lili Anolik. “What if you can, though?” the book asks. “What if you can go to the party and still create your art? And what if that just so happens to be the ideal conditions for creation?”

Didion & Babitz would be more accurately titled Didion < Babitz, since the central thesis of Anolik’s book is that Eve Babitz is the better writer than Joan Didion. Shocking! Controversial! Yet Anolik is the one to make it, as she’s responsible for bringing Babitz back to public awareness after decades of obscurity. Back in the 70s, Babitz was a rising star who never quite rose all the way. She published a couple of books which flew under the radar, wrote daffy pieces about her beloved hometown of Los Angeles for Rolling Stone, and generally had a good time hanging out with rock gods and movie stars. By the end of the decade, though, she tried to court the mainstream by writing a couple more commercial, conventional novels, and failed. (A lesson, there.) Didion, however, ascended to the heights of renown with The White Album, feted and praised everywhere.

Now, let me be upfront here: while I loved Didion & Babitz, I am less familiar with the subject matter than others. I know the basics about Didion, but have read only a couple of her books: The White Album, and Play It As It Lays, one of her early novels, which I loved. I haven’t read any Babitz at all; her renaissance over the last few years passed me by. Typical male! My fault, which I will rectify shortly. But I think that lack of familiarity allows me to appreciate what Anolik is doing here, which is to argue, passionately and even shamelessly, for her hero.

Let me recap as quickly as I can: Anolik discovered Babitz around 2010, became obsessed with her work, which was all out of print at the time. She actually tracked her down, in Los Angeles, and eventually wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about her—Anolik’s first byline for the mag. (Shades of Vincenzo Barney and Augusta Britt.) The profile kicked off a resurgence in Babitz’s work; New York Review Books brought her work back into print, particularly her 70s books, Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company; the books became beloved, drawing praise from Jia Tolentino and Kendall Jenner; and Anolik herself wrote a book about her, Hollywood’s Eve.

More than enough, one would think! And for a while, Anolik did think she was done with Babitz as subject matter. Then Babitz died in 2021, and then Joan Didion died a week later, and Anolik got to have a look at the papers Babitz had been storing for decades, including essays and, especially, letters that had never appeared before. That had never been sent, in many cases. Including one letter, an amazing one, addressed, simply, “Dear Joan.”

As in that Joan. Didion. Yes, Eve ran in some of the circles as Didion back in 70s LA, but the subterranean connection painted by the letter was, for Anolik, a revelation. The letter includes this astonishing paragraph:

It embarrasses me that you don't read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she's a "woman's novelist" and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art. It's the only thing that's real other than murder, I sometimes think— or death. Art's the fun part, at least for me. It's the salvation.

And with that, Anolik is off to write another book. About Babitz, yes, and about Didion, but really, about the two roles, the two sides of the coin, available to women writers in the mid-to-late 20th century–and perhaps, maybe, possibly, still today. It’s Marylin and Jackie all over again, forever and always.

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We want to smash our icons. We build them up then knock them down as if that were their true purpose. Sometimes, as with Didion, the icon herself oversees the construction. Didion was, as Anolik makes clear, a careerist par excellence, on par with Philip Roth. There’s a great, chilling anecdote where Didion sends off the manuscript for The Year of Magical Thinking, the grief memoir she wrote after the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The next morning, she calls Sonny Mehta, her editor at Knopf, a legendary figure in his own right. She asks him, fiercely and desperately, “Will it be a bestseller?”

Her career above all, even above her husband. That was Didion. And that is the part that rings a little too truly for women today, girlbosses above all, idolizing Taylor Swift and Beyonce as aspirational paragons of ambition.

Babitz was not that. She was not a careerist; she was an adventuress. Whereas Didion made deliberate reporting trips to observe the culture firsthand and gather material for her books, Babitz lived LA through and through, constantly, down to the rind. Dating rock stars; dating record executives; designing album covers; partying and sleeping around all night, then popping bennies during the day to ensconce herself before the typewriter and turn out her work.

Babitz was glamorous, yes, and beautiful, and charismatic in a way that is nearly electric. You know the type if you’ve encountered it. I encountered my own personal Eve in college, an actress who oozed sex like a plant photosynthesizing. (We never dated, of course, remaining only friends. Good thing; she would have eaten me alive. Indeed, after she gave me a racy polaroid of herself, another friend had to take it from me, as I was obsessing over it to an unhealthy degree. Like Didion, like Anolik, I am an observer, a square, watching from the sidelines. No one would ever call me a careerist, though.) Simply being in the presence of such a character is mesmerizing, electrifying.

Yet beyond the glamour, I would guess that what makes Babitz so appealing to so many young women today is that she was very much not a careerist. She was not built for chasing after public approval. Indeed, Anolik makes the point that when Babitz deliberately tried to write more conventional novels, in that buzzy Erica Jong vein, the results were dismal, commercial and critical duds. She could only be herself, pursuing his pleasures, displaying her personality for those in the know.

And to have that personality and that body of work celebrated by subsequent generations? To have your icon built not by your hands? The dream! Particularly for women who, whatever their creative pursuit, fear that they might be, only, in the end, building their brands.

Me, I’m off to read more Babitz. I’m always on the lookout for an icon to venerate, a vengeful goddess who might bestow blessed destruction upon me.

1. Kevin is great, by the way—his novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim is funny and goofy in a way fiction often isn’t, nowadays, and his story collection Horse Girl Fever drops in January.