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Before Joan Didion and Eve Babitz became the 21st century displays of intellect on your nightstands, they were hanging out together in L.A. They belonged to a time when writers could be celebrities, real ones, the kind who hung out with movie stars and slept with guys in bands. In a term, they were It Girls. But Lili Anolik, author of the new nonfiction book Didion & Babitz, isn’t so fond of the modern concept of the “Literary It Girl,” a phrase that’s both delicious and vague, such that anyone and no one can really identify.
“I’m totally turned off by the term,” Anolik tells Teen Vogue over two Earl Greys and fries at The Odeon, a restaurant once featured heavily in Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, its neon sign now featured in a tattoo on Lena Dunham’s ass. Anolik has a preferred table. “It seems fake. It seems like a construct, and it seems simple-minded.”
But obviously, she can respect the idea of wanting to establish a scene. Scenes are whole worlds, but worlds need creation myths, and Anolik has made a career out of writing those creation myths. In 2021, she produced and hosted the podcast Once Upon A Time… At Bennington College, chronicling the class of 1986: Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and the eye of the storm that produced works such as American Psycho, The Secret History, and The Fortress of Solitude. In the podcast, she demonstrates how the larger mythology the three belonged to, contributed to, made each writer’s work richer, more distinct and singular. Now she’s doing it with two of the already most mythologized and glamorized American writers of the past century, Didion and Babitz. This time, the world is Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles, where Didion lived and where everyone else, Babitz included, passed through.
If you know about Eve Babitz, what you may not know is that Anolik is likely the reason why. Babitz was a Los Angeles writer and party girl largely forgotten by her time. As mentioned in Didion & Babitz, her books made small splashes when they were new, and by the time the 21st century rolled around, there was very little of Babitz on the Internet, and her books were no longer even being printed. Anolik was a devotee. So much so that she obsessively tracked down Babitz and her friends and family, promising a feature in Vanity Fair that she wasn’t even totally sure she’d be allowed to write.
“I went back to interview people who were in her life at that period, and half the people could not believe I was bothering with this person,” Anolik says. “Those people would not say that now because now she’s this thing. But they just thought she was some dumb girl in a scene with big tits and f*cked too much and had a typewriter. That was the attitude.”
After that profile ran in the March 2014 issue of Vanity Fair, Babitz blew up. All seven of her books went back into print, Anolik writes in Didion & Babitz. And then, over the course of the last decade, those books ended up on the shelves of Jia Tolentino and Kendall Jenner, magazine writers and cover girls alike. In 2019, Anolik published a book, Hollywood’s Eve, exploring her life even further. Babitz’s writing was good on its own, but she needed the creation myth for the work to make sense in a larger context. Babitz lived glamorously, and then she lived to tell a journalist the tale.
“The reason she became this cultural heroine is because of the life she lived. That was what was thrilling, and I really constructed the persona for her because I put the whole life together, which she didn’t do,” Anolik says. “It was the naked Duchamp photo. It was the letter to Joseph Heller that no one knew about. It was the incredible sex resume. It was the cocaine, the excesses, the falling apart and burning up in a fire. It’s all exciting to people, and it’s the persona and the life. Yes, Slow Days Fast Company had to be a masterpiece for it to work, but most people don’t read, and they’re still carrying her books around.”
That myth construction tees Babitz up nicely as a foil to Didion, who was savvy enough to self-mythologize in real time. The new-age idea of a literary It Girl might be a construct, but constructing images of a self for the consumption of others was something Didion herself did, and did well. “I think Joan understood branding,” Anolik says. “You’d have called it something different back then, but she understood how to construct a persona. It’s not just handsomeness or beauty, but it’s like, do you embody the time and place? It’s a kind of shrewdness where you and your work and your time and place all come together in this way that’s thrilling for people.”
Didion’s ability to inject her own creation myth into her work is the reason she was able to sustain the status of a cultural celebrity while actively building her career. Didion had no problem writing from her life, hardly bothering to obscure the fact that her characters were based on people she knew. She was her protagonists, and their confessions were her confessions. Becoming immersed in Didion’s writing was like becoming immersed in Didion’s life. This is in opposition to Babitz, who waited most of her life before her celebrity status arrived. But that’s the thing. The thing that made Babitz so cool, so easy to be obsessed with decades later is that she wouldn’t have been able to live so freely had she been thinking of her persona.
The book implicitly poses to its reader a question: Are you Joan or are you Eve? Are you purely about art and rebellion, or are you an expert craftsman concerned with your career?
By the time Anolik met Babitz and began interviewing her, she was deteriorating from Huntington’s Disease, which impacts brain cells and leads to memory loss. We’re all our own unreliable narrators, but her reliability was fading even further. Anolik admits that there were things she got wrong the first time, timelines and such, because there was no good way to check Babitz’s stories. But then, all of a sudden, there was. After she died in 2021, her sister found boxes of letters, notes, photos, journals stashed away inside a closet, sealed and archived with the precision and hygiene of a museum collection. There it was. Babitz’s account of things when her mind still belonged to her, when she was lucid, less crushed by her circumstances. Just when Anolik thought she’d be able to check herself out of Babitz’s all-consuming world and move onto a new project, she became a character in a sequel.
Didion & Babitz, out Nov. 12, opens with one of those letters, addressed to Didion. In it, she brutally spills her thoughts about Didion and her relationship to writing, the superiority Babitz sees Didion as carrying herself with, especially in relation to other women writers. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t so physically unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and [husband] John [Gregory Dunne] have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous?”
Anolik calls it a lover’s quarrel in her book. Babitz talks to Didion in wisps of anger and resentment and desperate bids for attention. But not real bids. She’s talking to Didion in her head. She never sent this letter, or most any of the other ones Anolik found. But she did save them, and that must have counted for something.
“She wrote to people and did not send. She did not trust the recipient with this letter,” Anolik says. “They were that private, that revealing. But she didn’t throw them away. It was like she wanted somebody in the future who would have a broader perspective or somebody in the future would actually understand the import of what was actually in those letters.”
And perhaps that’s the fangirl talking — Anolik readily admits, both in the book and in real life, how deluded she might come across sometimes when guessing about the inner world of Eve Babitz, but she doesn’t care. She’s seen it on other people well enough to know that being impassioned doesn’t equate to being wrong.
Didion & Babitz shows in great detail the price these women paid to be the writers they were. For Babitz, that price is more obvious. Some of her most significant relationships were with married men. She was financially unstable. She wrote in one of her letters, “Free as a bird. A bird’s always looking for food. That’s how free as a bird I am.” She didn’t have a well-run career or any semblance of sustainability for her life. She had to wait most of her life before anyone stopped laughing at her and finally took her seriously.
For Didion, that price was less visible to the naked eye. For one, she gave up on a future with a man named Noel Parmentel, her great love in the ‘50s and ‘60s. “I mean, Noel is out of a Hemingway novel. You cannot control this guy,” Anolik says. “He’s hard drinking, he’s womanizing, he’s older, he’s a man of the world. And he won’t marry her. She has a nervous breakdown and she wrote about it in Goodbye to All That. He picks a husband for her, and he says, ‘Marry him.’ It was his sidekick, some guy he didn’t pay that much attention to. And she does it.”
Anolik has theories about Didion’s inner life, too. “I think, A) She does it as a way of being married to Noel. But B) She does it because…this is how Noel put it to me. He said, ‘I would edit Joan, John would edit every word.’ He was going to be a great editor for her. He would be totally devoted to Joan’s prose,” she says. “Joan was a superior writer to John, but John was a great editor for her. Marrying John was marrying her writing. That is how I feel. There were a lot of problems. Yes there was the thing — I don’t really believe he was straight, and I guess that could be one issue in the marriage. But he was also a heavy drinker with a very violent temper. And she’s putting up with all of this because it’s making all of her career better.”
The way the book lays it out, if you want to be remembered as a great writer, you can’t just be talented, you can’t just be driven, you can’t just be cool. You also have to be that committed.
In that way, the book feels like an instruction manual for anyone who, after all the caution signs and barking dogs, still dares to want that for themselves. But I’m not so sure it’s that straightforward. I ask Anolik what she thinks about the modern day scenes, at least the modern attempts at establishing a scene, whatever that means. If what happened on Franklin Avenue could ever happen now. If the Internet gets in the way of this idea of authenticity, a word which might as well be its own piece of theatre at this point anyway.
“Everyone wants to make fetch happen,” Anolik suggests as a theory.
“Things need privacy to kind of become themselves. You need time and privacy, and it feels like things get plucked out before they’re ready, and they don’t have a physical incarnation,” she says. “It’s like, [people in scenes] find each other and they f*ck each other and they fight with each other and they influence each other and they help each other and they hurt each other. They’re all over each other, and it has a real physicality.”
She shares a story about the iconic musician Courtney Love, how she traveled from city to city without money or connections and always figured out how to find the nexus of what’s cool: “I asked her how she did it. ‘How did you know, when you were in Minneapolis, how did you find the center?’ And what she would do is she would go to a cool record store, it was really easy to figure out what that was, she would find a cute clerk, and she would ask them if they carried Exile on Main St. Not by the Stones, but by Pussy Galore. And it was this bootleg, and half myth.” Asking the question was demonstrating to a stranger that she knew what was up, and if that stranger was cool enough to read her cue, then she was in.
She shares another one about how Didion got the ending for Play It As It Lays at a dinner party at Babitz’s house. Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas was recounting a story of a friend’s suicide. “Joan Didion calls her the next day, she says, ‘Do you mind if I use that in the novel I’m working on?’ Like it required physical presence, you know? You needed that.”
But at the same time, Anolik knows that people are people, so people are wily no matter where or when they exist. Dimes Square in New York City is the thing artsy people want to talk about these days, whether it’s a real thing or not, whether it’s flimsy or has legs. Where the literature is, where the music is. Whether it’s easy to see through it, or if it’s totally misunderstood and therefore totally onto something. Its right-wing problem. Jack Antonoff caused a local stir when he accused it of phoniness in an interview with The Face magazine in the fall of last year.
We have a tendency nowadays to name aspects of culture as they’re happening, maybe prematurely, maybe as a way to get ahead of a curve, to establish oneself as knowing, as on the inside, like Courtney Love in a record store. We’re so incredibly watched, so we’re always playing to an audience, inventing in-groups to belong to, giving ourselves titles — activist, thinker, It Girl. Maybe we’re too aware of how we’re seen to replicate what happened in Los Angeles in the 60’s and 70’s. So instead, we’re naming a class, a club, a block in Manhattan’s Chinatown, so that we have a real life place to go to now that the Internet totally sucks. And maybe it’s contrived, and maybe it’s cheating for the camera.
But so what? Joan Didion was also aware of who was doing the observing, because she always was.
At the beginning of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion wrote, “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
It’s the kind of idea that I imagine has given generations of writers permission to make intrusions of their own, and I tell Anolik that. I ask her if she ever felt that negotiation on whether or not to include a less-than-effusive detail about her subjects, both hidden and private as they were. I don’t even finish my sentence before she says, so sweetly I should add, no. That as long as it’s in service of the project or the literary persona she’s creating, she has to put it in.
“There’s a coldness, if you’re gonna do this right, that you have to have. You have to have a cold eye on the subject.”
And then, “Also I never pick a subject that I don’t love.”
I get the sense she means it. She’s not trying to expose as much as flatter them, show them off. “Like saying, ‘I noticed this about you,’” I offer, like a question.
“I noticed this about you!” she agrees. “It’s part of what makes you you. Even the ugly things. Like when I’m saying that about Joan and Eve paying the ultimate price. In a human sense, they make decisions that you would disapprove of. But it was in service of the art, and I love that about them.”
