About the Book
A TOP 12 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK IN THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES
THE BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK FOR NOVEMBER 2024
'This book is magic. It's all I ever needed' LENA DUNHAM
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, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies.
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. Franklin Avenue was also 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.
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.
Table of Contents:
1: Eve Bah-bitz with the Great Big Tits 2: Social Masterpieces 3: Joan Didion's (True) Origin Story 4: Joan Didion's (True) Origin Story, Continued 5: Fuckable 6: Double Trouble 7: Out of the Blue 8: An Epistolary Interlude 9: By the Sea 10: Still by the Sea 11: I'll See You on Johnny Carson 12: Female Male Chauvinist Pigs 13: Unsent Letters 14: Back to the Sea 15: In Every Young Man's Life . . . 16: The Queen of Ports 17: Eve's Hymen, Resewn 18: Joan, 1977 19: Spurts 20: So Mad, SO MAD 21: Squalid Overboogie 22: Beyond Squalid Overboogie 23: The End 24: Montage 25: Fire 26: A Friend from Hollywood 27: Eve's Life After Death
About the Author :
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her last book was the Los Angeles Times bestseller Hollywood's Eve. She is the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
Review :
Lili Anolik takes us under the hood, not just of literary history but of what makes a woman palatable for public consumption. The greatest female writer to take on the female writer, Lili never falters. Sentence by sentence, page by page, she does Joan and Eve proud and explains the truth about why women who speak their truth will always be societal dynamite. The book is magic. It's all I ever needed
A truly exhilarating double biography that makes us question the myths that have sprung up around both women
A gossipy, shocking, intimate, very funny and always smart take on the two writers...Fascinating, funny and ferocious at times, it's a reminder that even literary biographies can be thrilling
Theirs was an almost Shakespearean relationship, full of longing, jealousy and thorny ambivalence...immaculately researched and laced with gold
[Anolik's] research and sources are unparalleled; she interviews so many people on the scene, including Babitz herself, that most of this book is direct speech: cool people, talking at you...[a] fun, brilliant book
[A] riveting account of two complex, elusive and humorous writers..."I can't stand meetings. I'd much rather figure things out from gossip," said Babitz. If that comment raises an approving nod, I'm sure you'll enjoy this fascinating slice of history
It is hard not to admire the gumption...This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it's been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne's notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings
Absorbing...the best chapters read like glittering high school gossip, offering up Didion's most-coveted secrets
A captivating look into the way two very brilliant, very different writers maneuvered around one another, and the starry, messy world they inhabited. Someone get Ryan Murphy a copy, we smell a new season of Feud
As Lili Anolik argues in this joint biography, Didion and Babitz represent more than what it means to be a woman who writes: They're two halves of American womanhood. It's a big swing, but one that Anolik knocks out of the park, showing readers how Didion was the sun to Babitz's moon, the superego to her id
So, are you a Joan or are you an Eve? That's the question everyone will be asking each other this fall
A love letter in the form of this detailed biography that reads like a propulsive novel
Anolik gets the best of both writers, and the best of both worlds - this is assured, controlled and cool - and yet lush, tender and heady. It's already one of my favourite books about writers and writing, art, Hollywood mythology and how icons are created. It explains exactly why the world loves Joan Didion - and exactly why the world should fall in love with Eve Babitz
Anolik is a galvanizing, exacting, mordantly funny and lionhearted writer...[Didion's and Babitz's] legacies will be forever shaped by Anolik's double portrait forged in inquisitiveness, empathy, intellectual firepower and love
A crackling dual biography of two of L.A.'s brightest literary lights
I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve's singular irresistible glitz
What Hollywood's Eve has going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz
There's no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused and abused everyone. And then there's Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening - and seductive - as its subject'
The Eve Babitz book I've been waiting for. What emerges isn't just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous
Read Lili Anolik's book in the same spirit you'd read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the writing. Both are extraordinary
Takes two literary darlings who assembled an armour of mythology to protect themselves - Didion through work, Babitz through reputation - and sets out a convincing thesis that they had more in common than either would have cared to admit
