Eve Babitz
Story Stream
Didion, Babitz & the Biographer Who Missed the Point December 19, 2024
In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them,...
Eve Babitz and Joan Didion December 02, 2024
They existed as two sides of the same coin. Throughout their early careers, Eve Babitz and Joan Didion wove in and out of each other’s lives. It’s hard to suggest that they were friends, but they helped each other out. In Lili Anolik’s new book Didio...
Didion & Babitz November 18, 2024
Reading Didion & Babitz feels like entering a glamorous party with a hundred faces you’ve heard of but never met. Lili Anolik, our gracious host and author, holds our hand as she drops us in and out of conversations, passing us around like a baton. W...
Fitful Glimpses and Spurts November 13, 2024
IN APRIL, an editor at Scribner, publisher of Lili Anolik’s new book Didion & Babitz, tweeted a photo of a box of galleys with the caption, “Literary It Girls™ get ready.” Responses ranged from excitement (“Inject this straight into my veins!!!”) to ...
Why Gossip Is Fatal to Good Writing November 12, 2024
Writers are great gossips. Get one or three of us alone at a party; add a few gin or whiskey drinks. Ask a question about somebody’s professor from grad school, or about that (married) handsome writer who slept with that other (married) writer at a c...
"Didion and Babitz" by Lili Anolik November 11, 2024
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.Co...
Joan Didion & Eve Babitz: Contemporaries, Peers, Rivals November 11, 2024
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 th...
True Confessions? October 29, 2024
“You married a protector,” Griffin Dunne tells his aunt Joan in the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, and she readily agrees. But her husband, John Gregory Dunne, only looked like the alpha.“Michiko Kakutani came to Trancas to d...
The Bad Habits of Eve Babitz August 26, 2024
In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sib...
