Didion and Babitz
Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik, published by Simon and Schuster on July 22, 2025, is a dual biography that explores the intricate relationship between two iconic literary figures, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. This 352-page book delves into their mutual attractions and antagonisms, revealing the complexities of their friendship and rivalry against the backdrop of 1960s and 70s Hollywood. Anolik employs Babitz’s letters and observations to provide insights into Didion’s enigmatic persona, shedding light on her life and work.
Readers will find a vivid portrayal of the cultural milieu that shaped both writers, including their connections with artists, musicians, and the vibrant social scene of the time. The narrative captures the essence of their lives, from Didion’s elusive nature to Babitz’s fiery spirit, illustrating how their paths intertwined and diverged. This edition offers a detailed examination of their legacies within the realms of arts, literature, and pop culture, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of these influential figures.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more!
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.
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972
Eve 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.
7406 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.
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.
With 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).
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