The legacies of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz: Lili Anolik’s new book on 2 authors who left a lasting impact on fashion, literature and Los Angeles’ cultural landscape

Jan 28 , 2025

Young Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. Photos: The Huntington Library*, Handout

Highlighting their unique styles and influences, the book lays bare their starkly contrasting personas and yet similarly enduring impact

Even without all the prepublication buzz, Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion & Babitz, was always going to have immediate resonance.

How could it not, when Joan Didion has long been the ultimate for both aspiring serious writers and the set you might call the literary “It” girls? Not that you can’t be both serious and an “It” girl.

Or an “It” girl who’s finally taken seriously.

Both things are true of Didion and Eve Babitz. As the book details, the two women were linked in ways not especially known before. For example, who knew that Didion once edited one of Babitz’s books and that Babitz reportedly “fired” her? Arguably very few.

The cover of Lily Anolik’s book, Didion and Babitz. Photo: Handout

Though, as Anolik sets out, the two women were less twin flames – both writing about Los Angeles and its people and happenings from different vantage points – than “shadow selves”.

You could think of it too as a rumination on style. Of how to use it, or why it matters.

There’s the Joan Didion-ness of it all. With her spare prose and that photo in front of the Corvette, her much-Instagrammed packing list (mohair throw, typewriter, two skirts) and the Juergen Teller-lensed campaign for Phoebe Philo’s Céline. Of course Philo, high priestess of fashion for thinking women, is a Didion fan.

As Anolik says, style is something Didion paid great attention to. It’s part of her work, and the mythology of Joan Didion.

Joan Didion with her husband John Gregory Dunne and daughter Quintana. Photo: Handout

“I always felt that Joan Didion took care to present as a ‘Joan Didion character’,” says Anolik. “If you read the description of Maria Wyeth in Play It as It Lays, you’re reading a description of Joan Didion. (Maria doesn’t just have Joan’s Corvette, Maria has Joan’s migraines!) It was all, I think, deliberate, because she understood that to become a big writer in the manner of her hero, Ernest Hemingway, everything had to be of a piece: the style of her books and her personal style had to match.