This fall, Lili Anolik releases Didion and Babitz (Scribner), a non-fiction title about LA and the women who helped the world lay hold of it. It’s a book that through Anolik’s meticulous weaving of excerpts—from letters, diary entries, oral histories, novels, and hundreds of interviews—details the lives of, and relationship between, authors and artists Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Anolik’s pulling back of the curtain doesn’t diminish their glamour but instead exposes a new one—a cultural history of the artists, writers, musicians, actors, and socialites of a bygone era, its extraction catalyzed by one angry letter from Babitz to Didion: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”

Anolik swears, “I absolutely did not intend to write Didion and Babitz.” Freshly recovered following the publishing of 2019’s Hollywood’s Eve, a book about Babitz, Anolik was still working at Vanity Fair and Air Mail. She’d done a podcast, Once Upon A Time... At Bennington College, a story about the intersecting lives of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem, who all attended the school in the early to mid 80s, and was under contract to turn that podcast into a book. But after Babitz died in December 2021—six days before Didion did—Anolik heard from Mirandi, Babitz’s sister.

Mirandi had found sealed-off, untampered boxes in the back of Eve’s closet. “I was so shocked when Mirandi called me... she looked inside and it was all these letters and journals,” Anolik recalls. “[Eve] just lived in a hellhole of a shithole. I didn’t think anything was going to survive in such a putrid, putrid environment.” As readers will learn from the book, Eve was always messy, her sister having come across an Ed Ruscha drawing worth hundreds of thousands, stained with a footprint, on the dirty floor of Eve’s apartment. Her mess worsened in her old age, as Anolik later explains, due to physical impairments from a nearly fatal burn in 1997, and the development of a nerve-decaying cognitive disease. “[Eve’s] brain was crumbling from Huntington’s,” says Anolik, which made the following findings “enormously revealing,” filling in the blank spots that Eve couldn’t patch in Anolik’s time with her from 2012-2021.

A year later Anolik was at Pasadena’s Huntington Library where Babitz’s boxes and archives were being stored, there to investigate just what Mirandi had called her about. “The very first letter I pulled out was the letter to Joan,” shares Anolik of the angry, unsent letter written in 1972. She says it was Babitz’s response to “The Women’s Movement,” a piece Didion published in The New York Times. "Eve had problems with the women's movement,” explains Anolik. “She thought it had no style, for one thing. But she believed it had a point. And she was enraged with Joan for saying that it didn't, that sexism wasn't real, that it was all in women's heads, basically."

Anolik takes a deep breath, and her tone shifts a bit lower, "The boxes, which were stuffed with letters, were just this avalanche of new data. I'm reading the letters and I'm realizing that I'd understood things incorrectly–or at least incompletely–before. So, I just meant to revise Hollywood's Eve–a quick three-month job. I hate going backward, but I felt I owed it to Eve, to her legacy, to get the story right. The revision, though, turned into a whole new book. And while I was writing this new book on Eve Babitz, it dawned on me that I was also writing a shadow book on Joan Didion. I came to believe, more and more, that to understand one woman you needed to understand both women. Joan and Eve are opposites who are also doubles. And they're best approached as a pair."

So now we have it, Didion and Babitz, perhaps perfectly timed to hit the shelves while reading is cool and the “literary it girl”—a term Didion would have hated, one that Babitz wouldn’t mind, but would have a better name for—is alive and well, with books being neatly accessorized and tucked under the arms of celebrities during public sightings or styled fashion collections. See Vogue’s “Celebrity Pap Walk Reading List,” or Kaia Gerber posing with a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem for DKNY’s Fall 2024 campaign.

"I saw the 2019 photograph of Kendall Jenner in a bikini on a yacht reading Eve and my mind was blown,” smiles Anolik. “When I started chasing Eve back in 2010, my God, nobody gave a shit! Nobody knew who she was–certainly nobody under 60–and all her books were out of print. I was so lucky that Graydon Carter finally said yes to a profile on her. Now she's a cultural heroine, same as Joan."

Didion and Babitz is contextualized with stories of mid-20th century Hollywood hotspots, from Ferus Gallery and Barney’s Beanery, to the Troubadour to Ports, to Franklin Avenue and Musso & Frank. It’s in these places where Babitz’s artistry evolves, and where she finds her star-studded lovers—if you can think of an influential artist or musician from this era, Babitz likely slept with him. Or her.

Anolik introduces Didion’s seldomly reported-on young love, Noel Parmental Jr., who was influential to her early publishing and in her decision to marry writer John Dunne. Dunne, who Anolik divulges, was “instrumental” to Didion in having the career that she did, had a temper, and might not have been so straight in his sexuality. Anolik didn’t hesitate to include this detail. "Look, there are ethics in crime. I'm an obsessive researcher, so I hear a lot of damaging and or sensitive things about my subjects. I don't include any of these things unless they have to do with the writer's work or with the writer's persona,” she says. “Joan's husband, Joan's marriage–she wrote about both all the time. 'We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,' is one of her most famous lines. So including speculation on John Dunne's sexuality–a subject that came up again and again in interview after interview–seemed in-bounds to me. The Didion-Dunne marriage is one of the most famous in American literary history. And that I learned her old love, perhaps her one true love, Noel Parmentel, told her to marry Dunne when he wouldn't marry her–well, that's completely wild and completely revealing, don't you think?”

Anolik interviews everyone from Dan Wakefield and Michelle Phillips to Steve Martin, Paul Schrader, and the Ruscha brothers. In the mass of difference between Joan and Eve, she unearths an undeniable likeness between the two. In relation to men, they were both guys’ girls: Eve, the busty bombshell flirt, Joan, the respected exception to the boys club. In relation to their artistry, a consuming, fierce devotion. “Joan was a craftsman–a craftswoman–and Eve was an improviser," emphasizes Anolik. It would be Didion who advocated for Babitz; it would be Eve’s party where Joan overheard the true story that she would use as the ending of her most famous novel, Play It As It Lays. 

Anolik is doing more than just keeping Didion and Babitz alive—she’s publishing a time capsule from one of the nation’s most culturally influential times and places. She demonstrates the beauty of a frenemy, and in so doing, she queues up the tune to a familiar, eternal cosmic dance between two opposing energies. A dance that keeps the world spinning on its axis: “Joan versus Eve isn’t just Joan versus Eve,” observes Anolik. "It isn't just personal, it's universal—yin and yang, id and super-ego, Apollo and Dionysus. That's Joan and Eve!"

Photographed by Olivia Parker

Styled by Dylan Wayne

Written by Franchesca Baratta

Hair: Corey Tuttle for Exclusive Artists using Balmain Hair

Makeup: Jocelyn Biga at The Only Agency

Styling Assistant: Ella Fern

Location: The Frederick Hotel