Joan Didion and Eve Babitz: Contemporaries, Peers, Rivals — and Soul Mates?

“Didion & Babitz” presents Joan Didion (left) and Eve Babitz as “two halves of American womanhood.” DIDION & BABITZ , by Lili Anolik The writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were both ambitious California natives, moved in similar circles in Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s and died within days of each other, in December 2021. In “Didion & Babitz,” the journalist Lili Anolik casts them as opposite sides of the same coin: “two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned — the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.” For all they had in common, the book never quite paints them as the “secret twins” and “soul mates” the author would like us to think they are. In one of many direct asides to the reader, Anolik states her attempt to “see” both women “plainly”; but if Anolik knows Babitz thoroughly, and personally — from researching her 2019 book “ Hollywood’s Eve ” — Didion remains a slippery figure. In fact, the author dubiously claims that the only way to see Didion is through the “glass” of Babitz. About the latter, the author is unafraid of sounding like a besotted teenager: “If intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babitz.” The “bohemian” to Didion’s “bourgeois,” Anolik’s Babitz was a “man’s woman” who had an “instinctive ease” with the opposite sex, posing nude at a chess board across from Marcel Duchamp for the photographer Julian Wasser, who also took what is perhaps the most famous photo of Didion, standing in front of her Corvette Stingray smoking a cigarette. Anolik freely admits her bias against Didion, whose “persona” was “part princess, part wet blanket” and who “wanted two incongruous things: the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.” Soon after Babitz died, Anolik went to her archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. Expecting boxes of unpaid bills and takeout menus (“Eve, after all, was the slob of the world”), she instead found a 1972 letter addressed […]

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