Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions — and mutual antagonisms — of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?
—Eve Babitz in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world.
This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood. 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ’n’ rollers, and drug trash.
An encounter between two female writers
7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their union as tortured as it was enduring.
7406 Franklin Avenue was the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity.
The Joan Didion mystery
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.
Babitz as the key to Didion
With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters — letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don’t read them so much as breathe them — as the key to unlocking Didion.
This work is not only a literary discovery, but also an invitation to understand the complexity of two legends that shaped the culture of their time.
About the Author
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her last book, the L.A. Times bestseller Hollywood’s Eve, was also published by Scribner. Her last podcast, Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, was produced by Cadence13. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.