On Revisiting Joan Didion and Meeting Eve Babitz

I’ve been — not once — affectionately mocked for my (over)use of the expression ‘larger-than-life’. My stylistic proclivities aside (I do like the idiom), the truth is that my chosen subjects genuinely ticked all the ‘larger-than-life’ boxes. One example is Joan Didion. While I did not use the expression in my piece, the below sentence appears: ‘Filtering the information for this story was overwhelming. And not (just) because I struggle with brevity.’ Oh, the beautiful feeling of quoting yourself!

As 2024 was the year in which Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik was published — bringing Joan’s face everywhere, from my local Waterstones to Instagram and the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines — and I finished the year listening to The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell, I decided to write a complementary sequel to Let Me Tell You What Joan Didion Meant. It ended up being two book reviews.

The World According to Joan Didion

Published in September 2023, The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell is one of those books that — as The New York Times puts it — try to bring light and make sense of Joan Didion’s elusiveness. The book is an almost eulogistic — if a bit disjointed — biography (for the lack of a better word) of the writer. Evelyn McDonnell is a writer, an academic and a feminist. According to Wikipedia, she teaches journalism and new media at Loyola Marymount University. However, although diligently documented, this book is not journalistic. It is rather uneven, does not follow a chronological line, and the events feel arbitrarily selected. To its credit, The World According to Joan Didion does not claim to be something or somehow else. The book is dotted with personal, witty comments — that’s how I learnt that the author’s favourite building is the Empire State Building and that she ‘has the tattoo to prove it.’ In a nutshell, a fun read (or listen), but if you expect an exhaustive biography (the size of the book should be a first hint), look elsewhere. Today, one month after finishing the book, I remember: Didion’s absolute, extreme fear of snakes (we share that one, so I am being a bit of a fan girl now), the even more extreme ophidiophobia of John Gregory Dunne, her refusal to read Virginia Woolf (some fangirlism here too, as I had a very complicated relationship with Ms Dalloway), Didion’s relationship with Noel Parmentel Jr., her fondness for pressed flowers and a paragraph saying that Didion was attracted to gloomy subjects, and to exemplify her interests in cannibalism, Jim Morrison and Dick Cheney are listed. Please bear in mind that someone with a less bizarrely selective memory would probably make much more out of the book. None of this was really new information (maybe the pressed flowers and the author’s tattoo) — snakes are everywhere in Didion’s books, Parmentel and Woolf are mentioned in various articles about the writer, and whenever I think about her gloominess, I remember the beginning of Notes on South. Not even her darkest work (and I am not hinting at Dick Cheney here), Notes on South starts with the surrealist death of an unknown woman and continues with an even more surrealist dialogue about the impossibility of changing the weather.

Eve Babitz

On the split-screen cover of Didion and Babitz is the same picture of Joan, taken by Julian Wasser in 1968, that I used for Let Me Tell You. A young Joan Didion at home, holding a cigarette and looking straight into the camera. Her hair is middle parted, and she wears a simple top, a beaded (?) necklace, and what seems to be a patterned skirt. She does not smile. The cover’s bottom half shows a young, all-sex appeal woman with a long 70s fringe glancing above her sunglasses: Eve Babitz.

I must admit I did not know anything about Eve Babitz before 2024, despite seeing her time and again in that famous picture by Julian Wasser in which she is naked, playing chess with a very focused Marcel Duchamp. In reality, Eve Babitz was by all accounts a trailblazing writer, a collage artist whose works remind of those of Joseph Cornell (she created album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield) and the woman in The Doors’ LA Woman. She was also an ex of Jim Morrison’s and a notorious party girl. Eve Babitz met Joan Didion in the early 70s through Earl McGrath, a good friend of both of them. Michelle Phillips was also in the circle of the Didion-Dunnes. A mama from The Mamas and the Papas, Phillips’ account of how her friend Tamar Hodel (check this one out; it is a rabbit hole worth going down on) overdosed on sleeping pills in an attempt to commit suicide birthed the scene of BZ’s suicide in Didion’s Play it as it Lays. To drop another name: Harrison Ford, before he became Han Solo, was the carpenter of the Didion-Dunnes. The story goes that Babitz was watching Star Wars, and when Han Solo appeared on the screen, her reaction was, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’

A convergence point of the two women I am more interested in is Georgia O’Keeffe. Both women were infatuated with the artist; Joan Didion wrote Georgia O’Keeffe, originally published in The New York Review of Books and later included in her essay collection The White Album (1979), and Eve Babitz wrote in LA Woman: ‘I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period.’

Joan Didion recommended Eve Babitz’s piece, The Sheik, to Rolling Stone magazine. Soon after, Babitz came to literary fame as a Los Angeles chronicler and slid into forgetfulness at the end of the 70s.

In 2014, Lili Anolik wrote a piece for Vanity Fair about Eve Babitz titled All About Eve-And Then Some. The piece was followed by a 2019 book, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA. Anolik insists that it should not be called a biography — linear, organised, and official by nature — all of which Babitz, and by extension, a book about her, were not and could not be. Whether it was biographic or not, it was what resurrected Babitz’s literary fame. All of a sudden, she was everywhere, from billboards to Kendall Jenner’s Instagram.

For this piece, against Lili Anolik’s recommendation, I read Sex and Rage, which the author of Didion and Babitz describes in this interview as ‘a failure of a book and a bad novel’. It was, indeed, a mistake: a roman-à-clef, Sex and Rage does have both elements that the title is promising, but it is mundane, an account of events from which Jacaranda (Babitz’s alter ego) emerges as shallow (not in a good, Hollywoodesque way), and borderline silly. A flat character. This is probably intentional — it seems that Eve Babitz was a serious, hard-working artist hidden behind the mask of a self-proclaimed groupie. She died of Huntington’s disease on the 17th of December, 2021, just a few days ahead of Joan Didion. She was seventy-eight.

Picking Sides: Didion and Babitz or to Which Their Bias

In 2024, Didion and Babitz was published. A double-biography (again, for the lack of a better word), the book promises to map the relationship between the two writers. If Didion and Babitz had pores, it would’ve transpired infatuation with Eve Babitz through all of them: ‘If intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babitz,’ Anolik writes. While Anolik recognises her biases, being open about whose corner she is in, the book still wants to sell you an image of fairness. Despite the disclaimer asking the reader not to be a baby and ‘soft in the head’ when it comes to Didion, the book is not equidistant. Now, here I need to acknowledge my predispositions too: being as fascinated with Didion as Anolik is with Eve, I’ll probably always side with her. The triggering point of the book was Eve’s sister, Mirandi, calling Anolik after Babitz’s death, telling her that they found boxes full of letters, photos and scrapbooks in the back of a closet in the writer’s squalid flat. One of the letters was addressed to Joan Didion and never posted. It contained the — now famous — question, ‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?’ From there, Anolik broods on how Didion used her small, unthreatening frame to make it acceptable to write like a man while still being a woman, in an exercise of machismo and internalised misogyny, two aspects upsetting Babitz (who herself rejected in harsh terms the feminist movement) as much as Joan’s refusal to read Virginia Woolf. One of the quotes with which the book debuts, by Didion, underlines her anti-feminism — ‘Nobody forces women to buy the package.’ The other quote belongs to Eve Babitz, and it is about gossip, so maybe we should not be so upset about the gossipy tone of the book. Anolik also talks about Didion’s ambition and discipline, describing her as an eye-on-the-prize predator, the super-ego to the Babitz-id. The writer further explains that those are qualities that she admires, and she refuses to present an idealised image of a saint-like Didion. I believe that Didion, who said that a writer would invariably sell someone out, was rather transparent about who she was and wasn’t. Furthermore, I do not mind the naked truth (dotted with a healthy — and by that, I mean sanitary, not large — amount of gossip). However, some of the assumptions about Didion feel just straight-up cruel shots in the dark: calling the Didion-Dunne’s marriage a ‘convenience’, based almost solely on Joan’s relationship with Noel Parmentel, Didion’s presumptuously alcoholism, and digging up old speculations about John Gregory Dunne being gay (or infatuated with Babitz). In what feels like a reparation attempt, the book ends by talking about the friendship between Didion and Babitz (there is not much evidence that friendship is not too big of a word). Anolik also writes that the relationship ended because Eve treated Joan horribly: when she could not take Didion’s editing of Eve’s Hollywood, she told her so and proudly declared: ‘I fired Joan’. She then created, in Eve’s Hollywood, a Lady Dana Wreaths, ‘an extremely fashionable writer’, whose editorial suggestions were answered with: ‘I decided suddenly that her life was ridiculous and her worried brow was merciless and that she, in fact, knew nothing about what I knew.’ ‘No prizes for guessing who the real Lady Dana is’, Anolik concludes. There is not much evidence of Didion being affected by the incident, other than someone quipping after Babitz’s death: ‘I want to believe that Joan Didion lived an extra week out of spite so that she could officially outlive Eve Babitz.’

To Read:

Anything by Joan Didion. If you need a roadmap, start with this article

More about Julian Wasser

Eve Babitz’s Slow Days Fast Company (her best book, according to Lili Anolik), Eve’s Hollywood (the picture on the book’s cover was taken by Annie Leibovitz), I Used to Be Charming, Fiorucci, the Book (yes, about the fashion brand). This is my reading list for the next months as well.

This The Paris Review article about Slow Days, Fast Company

To Watch:

This conversation with Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the author of Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe and of Rebels in Paradise

To Listen:

The sky’s the limit, but if you would like to start somewhere, I would recommend these two playlists: Eve Babitz Summer and If Joan Didion Were a Playlist.