Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik: nonfiction book review

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

Overview: Joan Didion and Eve Babitz are defining LA writers, and it turns out, they ran in similar circles and even briefly worked together. Still, Didion and Babitz painted strikingly different pictures of LA, and their careers took vastly different trajectories. While Didion only grew steadily more famous until she became a literary icon in old age, Babitz's career flamed out early and without much note before being revived many decades later, elevating her books and aura back into a Didion-level conversation. This is the story of Didion and Babitz, but if I'm being honest, this is really a book about Babitz and the author's obsession with the writer. Overall: 3

Notes: I didn't think I would have such strong feelings about a book about two people I didn't go in with many feelings about. I'd read an excerpt of Didion in a creative writing workshop in college and listened to an audiobook about her, and I picked up Babitz's books in every LA bookstore I walked into intending to read her work but didn't know much more than that she was a quintessential old-school "LA writer" (the most interesting thing I learned through this book that genuinely surprised me was that Eve Babitz's books had gone out of print until the mid-2010s; she conveniently arrived in full force on shelves again the year I moved to LA). But I wanted to chuck this book across the room on a number of occasions. I don't even know where to start with cataloging my complaints, which is not something I usually feel compelled to do. I tend to not review books I didn't enjoy, but I feel a deep need to discuss this one.

Let's start with a small quibble that is somewhat emblematic of larger problems that exist within the book. The style is so strange. I'm all for cultivating an awareness of the reader and with that, some amount of authorial voice acknowledging that there's someone pulling the strings of the book in nonfiction. But the way it's done here simply does not work. There are so many interjections of Anolik adding commentary addressed to "Reader" that are entirely unnecessary. There's a casualness in these pages that struck me as strange as well as an excessive amount of Anolik adding her interpretation of situations and stuffing words in Eve's mouth (which is one thing because she did seem to have some kind of a relationship with her for ten years at the end of her life) as well as Joan's and others who populated their lives. This went well beyond additive analysis of events or materials. The book strays too far from the facts, from the source materials, for my taste—especially from an author who is so transparently biased against half her subjects. 

The tone of the book comes off as nearly gossipy. I'm not above gossip. I'll admit to lurking on LA Influencer Snark on Reddit from time to time. Gossip has its place in society, as a quote from Eve at the start of the book astutely illuminates. But in a nonfiction book purporting to deliver information on two literary figures, to inform the public about an aspect of their lives that wasn't previously known, the tone feels almost gross. The book is largely based around the discovery, after Eve's death, of boxes of letters and papers that her mother had preserved. Anolik had already written a book on Eve without these, and it feels like the whole reason for this book's existence is that Anolik wanted another stab at writing a book about Eve with the benefit of this new, more revealing material that was more transparent about Eve's past than Eve chose to be in life. 

Part of the tone issue comes from the way that Anolik describes her relationship to and with Babitz. I am usually a big believer in fans writing about artists, but I also feel like it has to come from a certain place. When there's a writer tackling a subject with a clear fondness, a nearly familial view that balances love and admiration with an ability to fearlessly critique and be honest about the realities of a person, who knows their careers inside and out—that's interesting. I'm a big believer in being honest from a place of love. Anolik puts Eve on a pedestal. Even when admitting to some of Eve's more unfortunate choices, there's an undercurrent of justification, of the sense that Eve can do no wrong. Her description at the end of the book, how she found Eve's address, sent her mail, visited her home, and then contacted all the family members she could find when she got no response, was a bit unnerving. The fact that she ultimately did get in contact with Eve, that she played a role in reviving her career in the popular imagination, is meant to gloss over all this, but it still left a bad taste in my mouth. This approach to Eve then paired with the zeal Anolik expresses at finding Eve's journals, her unsent letters and the almost fan fiction-like pontifications on the real meanings behind Eve's private writings made me question some of the ethics at play here. Eve's papers are now in an archive in the Huntington Library. It's not an uncommon thing for writers' papers to be given to libraries or museums, even displayed, but the tone paired with the fact that Eve never guided this writer to these papers over a decade long period (and, yes, I understand that Eve was definitely not her fullest self in the time that Anolik knew her and could have potentially forgotten these boxes), makes me feel like Eve would've given them to this writer if she wanted them used in a book about her. Reading this book honestly made me thankful that neither Babitz nor Didion or many people of the people who knew them intimately are alive to read the final product. 

Further still, the treatment of Eve's materials felt strange to me. I know that quotes are sometimes altered for clarity, but there's a point where Anolik flippantly reveals in a footnote that she took an editorial pen to a quote she'd shared of Eve's earlier in the book, changing punctuation, spelling, taking out words. This felt somewhat dishonest to me. This section was accompanied by a little rant at how frustrating reading Eve's words could be from grammar and spelling mistakes to repetitive words. I, honestly, found one of the most compelling aspects of this book and the inclusion of Eve's personal, unedited papers was the realization that Eve Babitz, a now revered writer, couldn't spell. Seeing the spelling mistakes that riddled her personal work, as someone who is Dyslexic and struggled (and still struggle) with spelling and have had that used at times to discredit my ability to be a writer, was super cool and validating and endearing. One of my favorite parts of Eve's characterization was how blasé she seemed to be about her trouble spelling, unselfconscious. Everyone else could deal with it; she wasn't going to change what she had to say. This aspect that Anolik seems to find largely annoying is much more compelling than Eve's 36DDs that are brought up incessantly or her coke habit. 

Which, I guess, brings me to my next major point about this book's failings. The title is Didion & Babitz, but a more accurate title might be Hollywood's Eve Part 2: (and have I mentioned I can't stand Joan Didion!). It seems implied that this will be the story of two writers and the places their lives surprisingly intersect. Really, it seems that Didion was only included because it was a way to pitch a fresh angle to her publisher to continue writing about Babitz. While the book starts out trying to seem somewhat even-handed in page time, it's clear from the start that Anolik's heart is with Babitz. We get a much more detailed accounting of her early life, and that remains true throughout. Didion is sprinkled in like an afterthought when her life isn't on an intersecting path with Babitz. At one point, Anolik devotes an entire chapter to creating a "montage" of the more boring decade of Eve's life, which still consists of many detailed stories, when Joan has been missing in action for an exceedingly long time. In reality, Didion and Babitz briefly ran in the same circles, Joan offered Eve a mentorship that she never seemed to offer to anyone else before or after again, and eventually, Eve fractured the relationship and "fired Joan." At which point, their stories only incidentally connected again when it was time to reminisce on the past. This fracture point is where Didion is largely dropped and we just keep following Babitz through her death (including a wild turn towards being a vocal MAGA supporter, which certainly creates a sour end note that might complicate her place among literary it-girl signal books if this was widely known).

And when Joan is brought up, it is typically with disdain. Babitz and Didion are almost always framed as being both opposites and in competition. In more charitable moments, Anolik sometimes tries to position them as two halves of a whole, but this is overridden by the number of times that Anolik mentions in both the text and footnotes that she counts it as a win every time someone suggests Babitz could be an equal to or usurp Didion's legacy in a tone that truly feels mean spirited. Anolik doesn't seem to realize that she can be a fan of Babitz and want her legacy to be properly recognized without tearing down the other prominent LA writer of the period. It's not an either/or. There can be more than one important woman writer; that should be a lesson learned from this book. It's fine to dislike Didion, but she doesn't need to be half your book that's marked as being about both Didion and Babitz then. 

But I'm still struck by the vitriol towards Joan in these pages. She's painted as cold, calculating, exacting. Willing to do whatever she needs to do to promote her writing career. She's strategic, and she's just good. Joan has a tendency to sacrifice the wants of her heart for what she sees as the greater good in the scheme of her life. She's a victim of convention. Joan Didion is one of the most beloved, well known names in literature because she did exactly what she needed to do to get there. And yet, Anolik casts this approach in an entirely negative light. As a Swiftie, it brings to mind the "snake" characterization. Where Anolik is appropriately grace giving to Babitz's less productive or great qualities that ultimately inhibited her ability to have Joan's level of career until her nearly posthumous revival that Babitz had almost nothing to do with, everything Joan does is wrong. There's a point made over and over about how thin Didion was, how frail she appeared. There's a long aside riffing on Anolik's belief that this wasn't natural but another manufactured part of Joan's brand achieved through extreme restriction. Anolik seems to look down on her for this, to paint this as a negative against Eve's voluptuous, feminine body, which is often mentioned in a positive light. There are multiple flippant quotes from Eve about trying to lose weight in pieces of letters, but Anolik doesn't provide the same shaming responses towards Eve's either active or passive interest in becoming thinner. Similarly, Anolik seems to find Joan to be a raging hypocrite for her possible drinking problem while not leveling the same amount of reproach (and sometimes glorifying) Eve's ultimately detrimental relationship with sex, drugs, and alcohol (which she did eventually join AA to address). I generally like Didion fine, perhaps I feel defensive because I can see pieces of myself in Didion and her approach to her work, but more than that, the heaps of negativity just made me feel like Didion needed some defending. She was by no means a perfect person, not by any stretch of the imagination, but neither was Eve! And Eve was given the gift of being allowed to be human. Joan was not. 

This came through most acutely in the brief summarization Joan's career from sometime in the eighties until her very well attended funeral. There is an unabashed teardown of My Year of Magical Thinking where the main critique does not seem to be with the book but with Anolik's belief that Joan couldn't have possibly been sad about her husband's death. She also pans Joan for writing about her husband and daughter's deaths as vampiric. Anolik seems to neglect to consider the possibility that Joan is a writer, and writers tend to process things by... writing. By making things, by turning over feelings into a form that's more understandable to her. Lines in this section made me question how a writer could completely lack an understanding of that possibility. This book made me want to scream over and over that Joan's success did not take anything from Eve. They clearly were working in very different lanes in the same time and place. If there was room for only one of them in the seventies, that's especially not true now. They're going to appeal to different people. Eve is for the true LA lover who wants the glitz and glamor and the charitable read of the city. Didion skews darker and sees LA differently, more like my own experience with it. All these views can and should exist on the shelf together! The naked hatred also struck me as strange considering that Joan seemed to offer Eve an important hand, good editorial advice, and a shove up the ladder when she really needed it. It was Eve who dissolved the friendship, who turned down the mentorship. 

Finally, this book is just an organizational mess. It's hard to maintain a coherent timeline in a story as expansive and winding as this one, but I struggled to orient myself in time continuously. Certain events happened multiple times over. There were moments where we jumped back where I thought we were moving forward. I feel like there had to be better organizing principles to apply to make the book more comprehensible. Given that this is Anolik's second go at telling Eve's life story, I thought this would be more seamless. 

I will give the caveat that there must be some things this book does right, even incidentally. I read it in two days. I gave an entire day, pretty much, to reading this book. This largely came from an interest in these writers and also a certain amount of rage-reading, but the book was readable. Anolik picked interesting subjects, though framed it around central ties that were deep enough to sustain a snappy essay more than an entire book. There was so much good material, and I think that's what left me wanting more from it.

As a side note, even though it will likely never be a problem in my life, this book made me think heavily about my wishes in regards to the journals that I keep.

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