Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik review –the seductress and the sphinx

This account of the purported bond between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two fascinating chroniclers of late 20th-century America, is titillating but diminishes both writers

Reading Didion & Babitz is a bit like being held hostage. At the outset, I very much wanted what it appears to offer: an account of a friendship between two uncommonly fascinating American writers, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by the discovery of a cache of letters found hidden at the back of the latter’s wardrobe after her death, aged 78, from Huntington’s disease in 2021. I guess you could say I was tied to my chair.

After a while, though, it came to me that these women had not, after all, engaged in much of a correspondence; the letter offered as bait at the start of Lili Anolik’s book, in which Babitz says mean things to Didion (“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?”), had, it turned out, never been posted. At which point, my disappointment was severe. I wanted to bust right out of the airless room in which I’d been kept for 190-odd pages, listening to Anolik’s annoying, digressive, smart-alecky prose – a style known to me as High 21st-Century Frantic American. Quickly, someone, open a window! Let me out of here.