
Didion and Babitz
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Narrated by:
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Lili Anolik
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Emma Roberts
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By:
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Lili Anolik
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more!
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and 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. 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.
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.
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. And “what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit” (Time).
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 Lili Anolik (P)2024 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Fascinating and escapist listen
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Who knew
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Two Lonely Heroines
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Overall, it's a blast to listen to. Great details of California, celebrity culture, and the ravages of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It races along, toggling between the lives of these two very different--yet linked--women and writers. Yes, there's more about Babitz than there is about Didion, but I finished the book feeling I'd learned more about the real Joan Didion than I'd learned from reading more "scholarly" examinations. Just go with it.
Here and elsewhere, Anolik seems to be harkening back to the good old days when literary figures made themselves relevant by producing good work and then showing up on TV talk shows (drunk, frequently) and trashing their contemporaries. Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Jacqueline Susann, and so on. We should all be grateful.
Honestly, a super enjoyable read/listen.
Great Gossipy Fun!
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Fascinating
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I loved all the Hollywood references
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I’m still Team Joan
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It plays a little less like your traditional audiobook, more elevated, similar to a podcast at times. The author (Lili Anolik) reading her own words, and Emma Roberts voicing Eve’s letters—takes you there.
Enjoy!
Thrilling
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Lots of conclusions the author came to were quite a logical stretch
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a peek into two very private writers
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