In “Didion & Babitz,” author Lili Anolik begins with some advice: “Reader, don’t be a baby. »

This is an apt warning to readers who might consider themselves Jeanne Didion and/or Eve Babitz aficionados. While their most ardent fans—enthusiasts of ’60s counterculture and aspiring literary It-girls (both of whom I am)—know the tradition, Anolik, the reader, knows much more.

What was really going on behind Didion’s glamorous dark shades and cool, detached customer demeanor? Why did it seem like Babitz had gone into hiding after a famous chess game photographed naked with Marcel Duchamp and only a handful of books? “Didion & Babitz,” a dual biography of the two women’s intertwined personal and professional lives, lifts the veil on the prolific Los Angeles Chroniclers. What you see in these pages – more than Didion, effortlessly chic with her cigarette always lit, and Babitz, fueled by drugs and an untamed libido – you will never miss.

“I didn’t intend to write this book,” Anolik told me during a recent Zoom call. The author published the famous “Hollywood’s Eve” in 2019, a few years before discovering a box of letters buried in the closet of Babitz’s squalid apartment. Babitz’s sister Mirandi Facetimed Anolik and told him about the boxes full of “Letters.” Many letters — to Eve, from Eve. . .” It was January 2022, the day after the author’s memorial, before Anolik got her hands on the stash, and the first thing she pulled from the pile was a scathing missive (written but not sent ) to Didion.

“It changed my understanding of Eve so much that I knew I was going to have to revise (‘Hollywood’s Eve’) to properly respect it,” says Anolik. “I thought I could do it pretty quickly, write an introduction, insert a few letters and move on. But it was too deep. Then I realized, in doing that, that I was writing a book of shadows about Joan and that the women could be better understood in relation to each other.

The letter, which spans a page and a half, conjures up the image of Babitz, shrouded in cigarette smoke and drunk with rage and cocaine, hammering away at his typewriter: “Could you write what you write if You weren’t so little, Joan? Would you have the right to do this if you weren’t so physically harmless? » Whether it was how it happened or simply a fantasy conjured up by Anolik’s gripping reporting, it’s just a snapshot of the sprawling relationship between the two.

Anolik calls it a “lovers’ quarrel.”

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At the beginning of “Didion & Babitz,” Anolik makes it clear that she has a crush on Babitz, but when I ask her if she’s “Jeanne or Eve” (this week, the question inspired a official quiz in Vogue), she says she is much closer to a Joan. “I’m really anal-retentive in my own life. I would like to be fun. I was never fun, even for five minutes.

It’s the “attraction-repulsion thing” that existed between Didion and Babitz that Anolik focuses on. They were two sides of the same coin, totally incapable of being like the other and yet (reluctantly?) appreciating these respective qualities that they would never embody.

For example, Babitz was a self-proclaimed sexually fluid groupie who had many lovers and never married. Didion was “terribly, terribly dependent” (in her words) on her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne. Didion was a keen observer, she was polite and precise. Babitz describes her in the letter as a “sharp and precise reporter” who preferred to be “with the boys who make fun of stupid women.” Babitz was slovenly and romantic, “an asshole turned artist” (again, her words). Babitz wasn’t watching the circus, she was there, swinging on a trapeze or riding an elephant. Dunne called her the “dowager groupie.”

It was Didion who helped Babitz get her big break at Rolling Stone, and Didion who offered to edit Babitz’s first book, “Eve’s Hollywood.”

It was Babitz who said nonchalantly afterwards, “I fired Joan.” »

“I think these two types of women are constantly attracted to each other and then constantly turn away,” Anolik said. “What Eve and Joan had was a friendship, but it cannot be imprisoned in language. I hate the term “enemies”, it’s corny. But it’s like the feelings are intimate, and there’s love, but there’s also feelings of rivalry. They are the same, but opposite. There is a doubling and a twinning.

SEE ALSO: Remembering Joan Didion: David Ulin, Caitlin Flanagan and others celebrate the late writer

In the book, Anolik describes an interaction between her and Babitz after Anolik wrote “Notre Dame of Los Angeles» a 2016 report on Didion for Vanity Fair. This piece also included a disclaimer: “I do not want to diminish or attack her in any way. What I want to do is straighten it out. After the story aired, Babitz called Anolik on the phone and exclaimed, “Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion.” I’m so happy that someone finally killed her and it didn’t have to be me. Anolik didn’t know what to say at that moment and quickly clarified in the text that no one could kill Didion: “She’s too good.” She also writes that despite how this conversation reads, most of Babitz’s memories of Didion were affectionate and not distressing.

In May 2000, Didion appeared on C-SPAN’s “In Depth.” a segment that included a lengthy interview followed by a question-and-answer session with the caller. Babitz called the show just to say hello and that it was great to see Didion on the air. The interaction is brief, and yet they both laugh as if no time has passed. “She loved him. She did it,” Anolik insists. “It’s like the anger is coming out in these strange, pointed comments. It was so inconsistent with who she was, because she was so emotionally direct. But she was always strange about Joan.

“And no one was a greater help to Eve than Jeanne. Joan had it published. And then Joan agreed to put on “Eve’s Hollywood.” It’s a huge, huge thing. And Joan wasn’t generous in that way. So it’s really striking that she was willing to do this for Eve, and Eve fired her from her job. So we can’t say that Joan was anything other than really good to her.

The C-SPAN interaction was the last between the two, although when Didion visited Los Angeles in 2005 for the “Year of Magical Thinking” book tour, Babitz had enlarged the photos she had taken of Didion, Dunne and their daughter. Quintana decades ago. She wanted to give them to Didion, but when she arrived at the event, she couldn’t bring herself to enter. “So sad,” she told Anolik at the time.

Anolik is the first to admit that she loves Babitz “too much.” But that doesn’t stop him from exposing Babitz’s dirty laundry and holding her responsible for the less savory bits without ever outright condemning her. “I feel like true love has, in a way, a cold eye, you have to be able to really see what the person is,” Anolik tells me. “If you lie to yourself and make the person into something they’re not, that doesn’t seem like a true form of love to me.”

As for whether Anolik was able to give Didion the same treatment: “I don’t know if I can be fair to Joan. I mean, I don’t know if I can be fair to Eve. I’m just a little person. I have my prejudices.

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Throughout her career, Didion wrote repeatedly about her personal life, but there’s a reason the literary legend is considered so elusive: she wanted to control the narrative. In “Didion & Babitz,” that control is passed on to a group of characters, members of the literary scene of the ’60s and ’70s, and even her former boyfriends. The tea they spill suggests that Didion was not as self-taught as she might have appeared. Her marriage is under the microscope, and Anolik’s reporting suggests that a former pal of Didion’s was the basis for many of her novels’ later characters.

When I ask Anolik if she had any reservations about revealing so much about Didion’s private life, she replies: “There is an ethics to crime. »

It sets its limits like this: information that may be exciting but does not serve the work does not reach it; if it impacts work or personality, it adheres to his code. “Joan wrote compulsively about herself and her husband, so they seemed like fair game to me. They wrote about their marriage. You know, “We’re here on this island of Hawaii instead of filing for divorce.” » They wrote about themselves all the time.

Anolik also spoke about Quintana’s alcoholism and his death at age 39. Didion attempts to untangle her grief in her 2011 memoir “Blue Nights,” a sequel to her 2005 memoir, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which she wrote after Dunne’s death.

“I talked about alcoholism, but that’s because Joan wrote a book about Quintana’s death,” Anolik continues. “I actually learned a lot about Quintana and I didn’t put anything in the book, because, in my opinion, Quintana was a simple citizen who didn’t expose herself like that. His privacy must be respected.

Whether Anolik likes Didion or not, she says she admires her. “I like her commitment and I like the qualities about her that people might look down on – like her coldness, her ambition and her relentlessness? I totally love it. This is what Didion and Babitz had in common, according to Anolik: both women went all the way; they were basically “wives of art.” Being great writers and artists was paramount to them, it was the core of their soul and their commitment never wavered.

In 2021, Babitz died first. Complications of Huntington’s disease. Six days later, Didion is dead. Complications of Parkinson’s disease. Anolik is referring to a viral tweet from podcaster Maris Kreizman, who joked that she wanted to believe Didion waited a week out of spite so she could survive Babitz.

Anolik argues that Didion wasn’t trying to outdo Babitz.

“Joan was trying to reach out to Eve instead.”