Were Joan Didion and Eve Babitz really two sides of the same coin?

After I first cracked open Lili Anolik’s dazzling and provocative “Didion & Babitz,” I used to be doubtful. The opening pages have a breathy, adulatory high quality that made me suppose “fangirl.” And for about 60 pages, as Anolik recollects her first encounter with Eve Babitz’s work — a random quote that despatched her down the Google rabbit gap — and reprises what captivated her, I remained skeptical. May Anolik add something significant to the oeuvre she’d already produced, together with the stunning 2014 Vanity Fair piece during which she outs Babitz as her newfound idol, a secret genius whose obscure literary output deserved a renaissance? Anolik adopted that in 2019 with a passionate immersion into Babitz’s life and persona, the guide “Hollywood’s Eve,” which celebrates and psychoanalyzes Babitz as a cultural icon who hasn’t gotten her due.

I’d been amongst those that’d flocked to reissues of Babitz’s “Gradual Days, Quick Firm” and “Intercourse and Rage,” among the many out-of-print titles that have been revived following the Vainness Honest article. I used to be riveted by her semiautobiographical, fictive chronicles of the glamorous and seedy post-’60s Hollywood scene during which she was a key, however unsung, participant.

Babitz’s prose stood in stark distinction to that of her good friend and modern Joan Didion. Didion’s is cool and analytical, just like the picture she rigorously cultivated, turning a skeptic’s gaze on California tradition. Babitz’s literary fashion, however, reads as uninhibited, exuberant, decadent. For all its sensuousness, although, there’s an harmless, unstudied high quality, and for Babitz, L.A. is an irresistible mecca with its ruthless transactions over magnificence and energy and its intoxicating bougainvillea. Babitz had skilled New York Metropolis and knew that East Coast artists and intellectuals seemed down their noses at Tinseltown, however she was Hollywood’s most ardent defender and keen participant. She threw herself into the fray with abandon, posing nude for a photograph with Marcel Duchamp; taking lovers by the rating, amongst them Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford and Steve Martin (who gave her a Volkswagen) — all on the cusp of fame. She dabbled in artwork, creating album covers for the likes of Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt.

Born in 1943 and coming of age simply because the sexual revolution was unfolding, and earlier than AIDS put the brakes on it, Babitz reveled in her plentiful sensuality. Enamored of the artists flocking to Hollywood, “intercourse was how she confirmed her appreciation.” She was “astonishing, reckless, a completely unique character” aided in her seductions by being a “concupiscent creature.” Her magnificence, in addition to her preoccupation with males and medicines, usually led her hazy profession aspirations astray.

As soon as Anolik accomplished “Hollywood’s Eve,” she hoped the guide would function a sort of “auto-exorcism” closing the chapter on her decades-long obsession with an L.A. icon. However Didion, ever a strong affect, introduced Anolik again.

In 2021, Anolik obtained a name from Babitz’s sister, Mirandi. Eve, now in her 70s, had lengthy been affected by the consequences of third-degree burns (the results of a hearth attributable to lighting a Tiparillo cigar whereas carrying a gauzy skirt!), in addition to the onset of Huntington’s illness. She and her sister had made the tough resolution to maneuver Eve into assisted dwelling. Whereas clearing out Eve’s filthy, cluttered condo, Mirandi got here throughout a field crammed with letters Eve had written and obtained. She invited Anolik to pore by them together with her on the Huntington Library, which acquired Eve’s archives. Anolik hopped a airplane from New York to California the subsequent morning.

The primary merchandise Anolik retrieved from the field erased any likelihood she would relegate Babitz to the again shelf. It was a compelling letter from Babitz to her friend-turned-frenemy Joan Didion, who had helped Eve set up connections in guide publishing and edited her first guide. Within the intervening years, whereas Didion choreographed a superb profession, Babitz circled fame however couldn’t shut the deal. The letter’s topic was ostensibly Didion’s contempt for Virginia Woolf and the objectives of the ladies’s motion, however in its “subtly vicious” digs at Didion’s extra medical strategy to writing, it got here throughout to Anolik as “the best way you speak to somebody who’s burrowed deep underneath your pores and skin, whose pores and skin you’re making an attempt to burrow deep underneath.” Anolik writes that studying it was like “listening to a dialog I wasn’t supposed to listen to, and my eyes listened ravenously.” With lots of of extra items of correspondence now at her disposal — involving Joseph Heller, Jim Morrison, Didion and others — a brand new window into Babitz’s world had opened.

Within the literary area, Didion took the lead, outperforming the good friend she helped get printed. Alongside together with her astonishing prowess, Didion was all the things Babitz wasn’t: disciplined, calculating, protecting of her expertise and of whom she allowed to safeguard it. Anolik tries to make the case that Babitz and Didion — who died a couple of week aside in 2021 — are yin and yang, two sides to the identical coin, thus the thesis for her riveting guide. My takeaway, although, is that Anolik stays in thrall to Babitz. The correspondence and contacts she’s accessed — which do comprise irresistible nuggets, resembling claims that Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, might have most well-liked males, or that Didion’s one real love was somebody apart from her partner — are bit gamers within the bigger manufacturing: Babitz refuses to go away the stage. Didion would be the extra esteemed determine, however she’s not the one who captures our imaginations in Anolik’s telling.

And I can’t blame Anolik for as soon as extra shining the highlight on Babitz. Her heroine is endlessly fascinating — admirable, self-destructive, loving, irritating, ingenious, her shiny gentle largely extinguished by “overindulgence, profligacy and promiscuity, reckless and spectacular consumption” — to not point out a hereditary illness, the shortage of a killer profession intuition, and a beneficiant spirit that led to many disappointments. On this character research, Didion is extra of an afterthought.

As I turned the pages of “Didion & Babitz,” I discovered myself cheering on Anolik’s resolution to make another foray into Babitz’s glittering, free-falling, unencumbered but troubled world. Would I would like my daughter to comply with Babitz’s path or Didion’s, if given the selection? In all probability not Babitz’s. However what a trip.

Leigh Haber is a author, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Guide Membership and books editor for O, the Oprah Journal.