Diary of a book addict: A certain kind of woman
This month our Diary of a book addict columnist ranges from women before their time in LA to a special compilation of poetry in Adelaide.
Thanks to a rave 2014 Vanity Fair profile and a fabulous 2019 book, Hollywood’s Eve, Lili Anolik was responsible for the late-life resurgence of cult LA writer Eve Babitz, whose lush, breezy counterculture books set in Los Angeles never quite took off in her heyday. Anolik’s gonzo journalism on Babitz made her a writer, just as Joan Didion, in 1970s LA, brought her sometime friend Babitz in into print, writing to Rolling Stone to vouch for her piece about her girlhood at Hollywood High. (The magazine published it as fiction, which Babitz accepted with a metaphorical shrug.)
The conceit of Anolik’s riveting new book, Didion & Babitz (Atlantic) stems from Anolik’s discovery of a cache of Babitz’s unsent letters after her death in December 2021 – six days before Joan Didion died. On top of the pile is a snarky missive to Didion, castigating her for not reading Virginia Woolf. One striking line reads: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan … if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The rich potential of this unseen material sparks a new project, casting Didion and Babitz as each other’s “opposite and double”.
They were opposites in temperament and appearance – Babitz sensuous and voluptuous, Didion controlled and fashionably “tiny”. Didion was “at least outwardly, every inch the all-American bourgeois girl”. Babitz was “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat from birth”: Stravinsky was her godfather and at eighteen, she was photographed naked playing chess with clothed surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp. The photographer, Julian Wasser, would take iconic photos of Joan too – crisp, cool Americana.
The two women wrote iconic books recording a time and place (1960s and 1970s LA), were deeply embedded in its cultural scene (Babitz more in art and music, Didion more in movies and publishing). And both had lashings of style. Didion fiercely supported Babitz’s literary career, arranging the publication of her debut book, Eve’s Hollywood, and even signing on to unofficially (but rigorously) co-edit it with her husband John Gregory Dunne, her own unofficial editor.
That seemingly unprecedented generosity from Joan seems to have led to the rupture of their friendship. Babitz described the Didion Dunnes as “terrifyingly exacting” and “like my best self and who can live with that?” So she “fired” them.
One of Anolik’s talents is documenting cultural scenes (as my friend Melissa Cranenburgh pointed out during the first hour we spent discussing this book – it’s that kind of book). She first employed that talent in Hollywood’s Eve, then in her terrific documentary podcast Once Upon a Time in Bennington, about the literary brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt and Jonathon Lethem at a small liberal arts college in the 1980s. (Apparently, the subject of her next book – I can’t wait.)
In Didion & Babitz, a key setting is the parties at Joan Didion’s house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood and in “crazily square” (according to Eve) Malibu. Eve was a regular guest, along with Harrison Ford (Didion’s carpenter and everyone’s pot dealer), Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and various high-level record company executives. An adjacent, sometimes intersecting scene is hosted by Didion’s Malibu neighbour Margot Kidder (aka Lois Lane), whose parties with Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg were a feature of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-‘n-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, perhaps the best “scene” book ever. (And a perfect summer read, if you haven’t read it already.) Then there’s rock venue the Troubador, where Babitz introduced Didion to her sometime-lover Jim Morrison (whose stage leathers were made by Babitz’s sister), so her mentor could interview him.
Anolik declares herself firmly Team Babitz – though she occasionally sides with Didion. For example, she writes of their rupture: “Joan is somebody I naturally root against [but] Eve repaid her by acting the ungrateful little bitch par excellence”. And while the book’s core is the relatively short time span where Didion and Babitz moved in the same circles, and the narrative circles both women’s lives, Babitz emerges as the book’s dominant subject. The sources for Babitz’s life are certainly deeper: Anolik is still good friends with Babitz’s sister and cousin, and she spoke regularly on the phone to Babitz herself for years before she died.
For Didion too, though, she has a fascinating key source: Noel Parmentel Jr, the man who broke Didion’s heart, described as “the great love of Joan’s life” by a friend of both Didion and Babitz. Anolik managed to speak to Parmentel in 2023, soon after his ninety-seventh birthday – and not long before he died, a few months ago. “He was her first mentor, her first lover, her first everything,” she writes of the man who got Didion’s first novel published (Run River, which he told Anolik was first “turned down by everybody”) – and introduced her to John Gregory Dunne, telling her she should marry him. Parmentel told Anolik: “he’d be at the breakfast table every morning, something I’d never be. And he’d edit her line by line.”
Didion and Babitz is addictively readable and studded with great quotes and anecdotes, as you can see. It contains some terrific journalism. And Anolik’s analysis of each woman’s work is often astute, always fascinating and sometimes controversial. Her origins as an impassioned reader and literary fan are evident. Didion’s classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which she admires, is “old-fashioned Gothic tricked out in New Journalism clothing”. Babitz’s best book, Slow Days, Fast Company, “attained that American ideal: Art that stays loose, maintains its cool.” She “hate[s]” Didion’s iconic grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, rejecting “its fundamental narcissism … its fundamental dishonest”. Writing about her subjects’ work, she is precise and backs up her opinions with evidence. You may not agree, but you can appreciate the argument.
Unfortunately, this falls away when it comes to her central premise. She makes some gargantuan claims that feel unsubstantiated. “Joan and Eve are the two halves of American womanhood.” That seems to leave out most women. “Joan Didion without Eve Babitz is like the sun without the moon.” Really? “Each was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. A soul mate.” This seems frankly preposterous: the relationship Anolik draws is significant, and deep where it comes to the pair’s artistic egos (particularly Babitz’s), but doesn’t seem especially intimate on a personal level. And I don’t think Babitz has gotten close enough to Didion to make that kind of judgment.
But don’t let this – or the confiding, companionable tone that can veer on breathless – stop you from reading this flawed but wonderful book. (Just bring your critical faculties.)
Are there striking parallels and contrasts between these two stylish, intelligent, talented writers – both at their best in their nonfiction – that illuminate something about being a certain kind of woman in a certain era? Absolutely.
Another flawed but worthwhile book I read this month was Black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message (Hamish Hamilton), a book about three journeys that investigate the way stories shape us – and raise questions about the responsibilities of a writer. The book has made the news for its third essay, which constitutes half the book, centred on his ten-day trip to the West Bank and Israel in 2023, months before the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the beginning of Israel’s retaliatory war on Gaza, which has reportedly killed 43,391 Palestinians and 1,706 Israelis, as of early this month.
Coates is best known for his impressive Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparation”, and his 2015 memoir Between the World and Me, about the realities of being Black in America, told in the form of a letter to his son. Having spent much of his career at a notably pro-Israel magazine (The Atlantic), he is shocked at what he sees on his trip, and goes home determined to shout about it.
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I was interested in what he brings to the topic in terms of his perspective as a Black American: he compares the segregated system he witnesses to the American South’s Jim Crow rules of the 1960s, and to apartheid in South Africa. “For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere,” he writes, pointing to “the law itself” as well as the draconian permit system and segregated roads and access. This world, “under American patronage”, he writes (referencing his country’s relationship with Israel) resembles the one his parents were born into.
While this is interesting and noteworthy, I was disappointed to find that this book didn’t really teach me anything I haven’t learned from others books – like Jewish American Israeli citizen’s Nathan Thrall’s extraordinary, deeply reported and researched book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, which tells what it’s like to be a Palestinian through one fatal bus accident and the people involved in it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, as Coates is new to the subject, and spent just ten days in the region (though he did consult heavily with US Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi). Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine was one of five books recently given to 227 Australian MPs and senators as part of a campaign to encourage wider reading on the origins of the Middle East conflict, endorsed by the Jewish Council of Australia and the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network. I have it on my shelf and hope to read it over my summer break.
Back to Coates … this book is, well, fine. But it feels undercooked. The first two essays in the collection suffer this too. In one, we travel with Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa, to Dakar, Senegal: a storied origin point for Black America, as a departure place for slave ships. There are some interesting facts and reflections on culture, history and identity, but it’s more thin travelogue and musings than reporting, and I was often frustrated by having to google to discover context, when journalism (which this purports to be – it’s framed as an address to his writing students) should, as he writes himself, clarify. (“’Genius’ may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.”)
In the other, we follow Coates to South Carolina, where teaching one of his books has been banned because it made some students feel “uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian”. Its subject, systemic racism, was apparently “illegal”. We meet the teacher fighting the ban and attend a school meeting, surprisingly packed with supporters, where the ban is discussed. But the focus of the essay feels too firmly on Coates himself and his books. I wanted to know more about the wider context: what are some of the other banned books? Who was this teacher and this community, outside their engagement with the book and the ban? Again, there are some fascinating facts (Jesse James wore a Klu Klux Klan mask on his first train robbery) and insightful observations. (“The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.”)
But Coates suspects, near the end of his Dakar trip, that his absorption in his own thoughts and reveries might be “deeply incurious”. And that’s my main frustration with this very interior book.
Words to Sing the World Alive, edited by Jasmin McGaughey and The Poet’s Voice (UQP), is a gorgeous little hardcover celebrating Australian First Nations languages, bringing together forty First Nations writers and thinkers to share a word or phrase in their language that is significant to them. The collective result is deeply moving, with a recurring thread – unsurprisingly – that emphasises the deep links between language and identity, and how the language we use to describe and articulate the world shapes us. The collection appropriately opens with Aunty Rose Elu’s word – Kurusipagiz, a Saibai language word – meaning you are listening, or have listened.
Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money reflects on learning Wiradjuri as “finding my way back to myself through this sun-warmed language”. Wiradjuri novelist Anita Heiss was fifty, and the first in her family when she began to learn her language. She describes the work of learning, but also the “empowerment” of it. A breakthrough came with accepting it would be a long journey, and “To stop doubting, to stop expecting myself to learn and know everything immediately.” Barkindji man Paul Collis writes that “speaking in language can produce different ways of thinking and meaning”. Charmaine Papertalk Green says her favourite Yamaji phrases offer “a memory bridge” and “bring sense and meaning to our reality.”
This beautiful, meditative book can be read from front to back, or browsed and dipped in and out of. If you are started to think about the holiday season, it could make a perfect gift.
Finally, I’d like to leave you with a note about a new South Australian anthology that similarly calls for readers to listen. Oh, How we Laughed, curated by Jace Reh and Theo Brown, brings together artwork, poetry and prose from queer, disabled South Australians.
Published by one of our intrepid small publishers, Buon-Cattivi Press (run by author Alex Dunkin), it was recently launched at Feast Festival. I’m looking forward to reading it!
Jo Case is deputy editor, Books & Ideas, at The Conversation and a former publisher at Wakefield Press and former bookseller at Imprints Booksellers.