Joan Didion
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Joan Didion, Movie Critic March 10, 2025
Writing a book about Joan Didion is a good way to discover that many people love her but far fewer people have read much of her work. In the five years since I started working on my book We Tell Ourselves Stories, I’ve surprised a lot of her admirers...
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...
Stories to Live By November 05, 2024
Just in the last few days, I started seeing a rash of articles and Substack posts with very similar titles: “Kamala Harris Will Win on Tuesday, and It Won’t Be Close” or “Donald Trump WILL Be Defeated on Election Day.” Of course, polling at the time ...
Joan Didion Remains as Elusive as Ever October 29, 2024
It’s still bright afternoon when the writer Lili Anolik slips into the dim recesses of the Odeon restaurant. Here, at New York’s timeless destination for downtown cool, she prefers to sit in the same place every time, a small booth by the host’s stan...
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...
So You Want to Be Joan Didion . . . October 23, 2024
To a certain set of young women Joan Didion is something of an intellectual godmother. These women (they are almost always women) are attracted to her knife-like prose and her cool “disassembling of overprecious myth,” as the New Yorker staff writer ...
Joseph Epstein, Yet Again October 21, 2024
Recently, in an idle moment, I stumbled on a superb piece by Joseph Epstein, “Joan Didion From the Couch,” which reminded me of how the engineering of reputations in the literary world often betrays not only what ought to be our appraisal of objectiv...
Another Long, Hot Summer August 12, 2024
All I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.— Joan Didion, “The White Album”The latest picture: euphoric Democrats flipping ove...
Joan Didion’s Insufferable Disciples August 01, 2024
Joan Didion’s enduring popularity among today’s young readers is a somewhat mysterious phenomenon. So many visibly progressive, literary types seem to uncritically worship her. Really? I always think to myself, concerned that I’ve misheard them. Joan...
The Last Days of Joan Didion July 23, 2024
On a cold Friday morning in February 2022, Cory Leadbeater took his final walk with Joan Didion. It was down Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she and he had walked “thousands of times”, an odd-couple pairing well known to the near...
What I Learned From Living With Joan Didion June 13, 2024
In the fall of 2013, my days and nights were wonderful and simple. I would wake in the morning to find Joan standing at the table, reading the paper, and as I edged into the kitchen, she would head to the stove to make me a one-egg omelet while I mad...
