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 Didion & Babitz, she places Eve and Joan side-by-side and examines the strange relationship they had. She goes deep on their interactions and the overlaps in their social groups, resulting in a fascinating double-portrait of two of LA’s most important writers.

If you’ve heard of Eve Babitz, or if you’ve even read any of her books, that’s entirely because of Lili Anolik. Back in 2014, Anolik published a profile of Babitz in Vanity Fair, which reintroduced the world (and the publishing industry) to Eve Babitz. Quickly, books like Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977) were back in print and selling well. A star was reborn.

For the first time, Joan Didion had some competition. Here was another woman writer covering much the same beat (life in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s) but instead of being the exacting and literary silent observer, a style that Joan had patented, Eve was something of a wild child. Her writing was vivid and full of reckless energy. She went to all of the parties and her list of conquests is legendary.

Then, in the winter of 2021, Joan and Eve died within days of each other, as if one couldn’t exist on the planet without the other. Anolik, having already written the definitive biography of Eve, Hollywood’s Eve, in 2019, suddenly found herself in possession of a whole new trove of papers and letters that Eve had hidden away in a closet. One of these letters, addressed to Joan, so altered how we view their entire relationship that Anolik knew she had to write a whole new book.

We caught up with Anolik during a daze of parties a couple of days after Didion & Babitz‘s launch.

Barry Pierce: Hey Lili, how are you?
Lili Anolik: I’m good, I’m just back from Los Angeles.

BP: I saw you had a launch party at the Chateau [Marmont], I’m so incredibly jealous!
LA: It was kind of great. I don’t think I’ve ever been invited to a good party and now I’ve had two. Graydon [Carter] threw one about three weeks ago and that was pretty great and this one was just insane.

BP: Not a single publishing house in the UK would ever fork out for anything as glamorous as that.
LA: Well, everyone’s broke now.

BP: The parties are fitting because I think it can be safely said that you’ve written the chicest book of the fall, it’s been everywhere.
LA: I think I really just lucked out on that cover, you know? 

BP: I mean… [holds up a copy of the book] Everything I’ve ever wanted from a book is right there. It’s Joan, it’s Eve, they’re looking incredibly gorgeous.
LA: They originally wanted to use a different photo of Eve, one where she’s kind of raggedy looking, but I wanted to show her when she was young.

BP: I think the cover has definitely led to the book’s certain allure. And as someone who has always been more drawn to Eve than to Joan, I just loved the book. The poetic irony of them dying within days of each other, it really felt like the end of something, the end of a certain era for American letters.
LA: It was! It really was. 

BP: And, of course, Eve and Joan have always been linked, culturally, but up until reading your book, I never knew how much they were linked, literally. Joan, for example, being an early editor of Eve’s Hollywood and the discovery of these letters they wrote to each other. You and Eve had a close relationship for roughly the last decade of her life…
LA: I’m actually not comfortable saying that. We did have a relationship, we talked all the time, but I was getting posthumous Eve. She was alive but she was so altered. After she was diagnosed with Huntington’s her brain really crumbled. She would have these moments on the phone where you were totally getting the Eve of 1972 but they were, increasingly, infrequent. I knew her quite well but did I quite get her? I think I missed her.

BP: When did her downturn begin?
LA: I think it started in 2001 when she and her mother split. Her mother went into an old age home and Eve moved into a condo with the settlement she got from setting herself on fire. [In 1997, when trying to light a Tiparillo cigar whilst driving, Eve dropped the match on her skirt and, quickly, became engulfed in flames. She experienced third-degree burns on her legs and, for the rest of her life, lived as a social recluse.] She completely stops writing at that point and falls off the face of the earth. I first met her in 2012 and you could still get some good moments from her but you can really hear the decline in our conversations from then.

BP: If I’m not wrong, by 2012 Eve had fallen into near-total obscurity as a writer. All of her books were out of print. Where did you discover her?
LA: My memory is that I read a quote of hers… do you know who Joe Eszterhas is? He wrote the scripts for Basic Instant and Showgirls. He went through this period where he was writing these great schlocky memoirs and he would start all of his chapters with a quote and one of them, in my memory, was from Eve talking about sex and Los Angeles. I loved the quote so much that I googled her and all her shit was out of print, she had no online presence. But I bought a copy of Slow Days, Fast Company and I just went fucking nuts for it. I thought she was this secret Hollywood genius. I dug deeper and she had had a funny career. She was getting published by Knopf which was fancy, that’s a great publishing house. But she never really had her moment. The reviews were bad and the sales weren’t good. It’s funny because in the last couple of weeks I’ve become friends with Alexi Wasser who’s Julian Wasser’s daughter and Julian took all the famous photos of Joan and Eve. Julian was my very first interview. I met him at Mel’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard in 2012 and he just could not believe I was writing about Eve Babitz. He was like, “She’s a bimbo, why are you wasting your time?” And I would say that was the attitude of about half the people I interviewed initially. Also, nobody knew who she was. I pitched her all over town. Graydon Carter said yes after a year and that was such a lucky break. Nobody under sixty had ever heard of her.

“I bought a copy of Slow Days, Fast Company from a third-party seller on Amazon and I just went fucking nuts for it.”

BP: And it really was the piece you wrote back then that dragged her out of obscurity. Now, you can find Eve’s books in most bookshops, even here in London when you mention Eve Babitz, people know who you’re talking about. 
LA: Somehow the world was ready for her this time around. And I try to piece it together in my mind, why did this work? The Vanity Fair profile comes out after I chase her for years, then all her shit gets reprinted, you see Kendall Jenner reading her on a yacht. If there’s anything I did that was helpful to Eve, it was helping her put her life in order. She had this chaotic life, I don’t think she ever formed a persona for herself. Joan was so shrewd about that. If you look at why Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s personas worked so well it’s because they seemed to be so emblematic of their books, of their characters, and their age. Joan was so good about that too, about how she was photographed, and Eve just didn’t bother with any of that. When I did the piece, she still had the marbles to put together the arc of her life, so I was able to put together her narrative.

“In every way, Eve and Joan were doubles and opposites. They were at the same parties, Joan is observing, Eve is participating…”

BP: What has always drawn me to Eve is this idea that she was in the right place at the right time, she knew the right people, was at the right parties and documented it all. She is the cultural chronicler of 60s LA.
LA: In every way, Eve and Joan were doubles and opposites. They were at the same parties, Joan is observing, Eve is participating, right? In my brain, you need both. But being on the scene and getting into it in any deep way, that’s its own talent. I always think there are certain people… I’m trying to get something going with Courtney Love right now and I noticed that in her early days when she’s almost like a street urchin, she has no money and no connections, she’ll move from city to city but she’ll always get to the centre of what’s hot. I asked her how she did this and her secret was that she would go to whatever the cool record store was and she’d always ask for this famous bootleg album, Exile on Main St. by Pussy Galore, and then the clerks would immediately know that she knew what was what and she became immediately plugged in. But doing all that really takes a certain kind of person, right?

BP: I need to start doing this.
LA: If only there were still good scenes to crash! [Laughs]

BP: What has your relationship been to Joan? Unlike Eve, Joan has always been in print and has always been a bestseller.
LA: Look, if you’re female and you work in non-fiction, there’s no ignoring Joan. And literary LA, that’s my beat, that’s what I write about, so she’s just such a towering figure. You can’t see the sun, you can’t see the sky. That’s how big little Joan is. Temperamentally, I don’t match up well with her. I think her sensibility is just not what I gravitate toward. But I know she’s great, you know what I mean? I know she’s the real thing. And Eve really benefits from Joan because I think there’s just a need for an un-Joan, like an anti-Joan. If Eve didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her just to balance out the universe.

BP: And the thing is, there were many other women writers based in LA at the time. But Joan has become this industry of one. She is the LA writer.
LA: And she has tonnes and tonnes of imitators. The funny thing is that I gravitate so strongly to Bret Easton Ellis, and Bret is totally the child of Didion. Like, I always think of Less Than Zero as a young adult version of Play It As It Lays. But, then again, look at the back cover of the first edition of Less Than Zero and who blurbs it? Eve! I remember asking him why he didn’t ask Joan for a blurb because he knew her daughter, they were at Bennington together, they were friends. He was like, “Are you kidding? I didn’t even want her to see it. I ripped off so much of her book!”.
Growing up my favourite writer was Pauline Kael, she was the movie critic for the New Yorker. She and Joan were at odds in a great way. But even though Joan was more frightened of Pauline because she actually takes swings at Pauline in print, somehow they aren’t the match-up that she and Eve are. It must be because, like… Eve’s fucking Jim Morrison and that’s Joan’s crush, though Joan wasn’t a fuck-y type person. But she writes that very memorable scene about Jim Morrison and the recording session that doesn’t work out in The White Album, and it was Eve who got her in there! They’re just all over each other.

“Eve really benefits from Joan because I think there’s just a need for an un-Joan, like an anti-Joan. If Eve didn’t exist, we’d have to invent her just to balance out the universe.”

BP: What I really loved reading about was the technical side of Joan, finding out how she actually wrote.
LA: It’s totally fascinating. And not just how she wrote but how she manoeuvred her career. Because, in some ways, finding out how she wrote isn’t that surprising, she was just very obsessive, but just knowing how to make the persona work. Getting John [Gregory Dunne, Joan’s husband] to do the talking for her so she became, almost, an oracular figure.

BP: I like how much you reference Joan’s persona because of course it’s a persona. People get so weird when you point out her obvious persona.
LA: Don’t be fucking ridiculous and don’t be so naive! The way she tells her story… I saw this with Donna [Tartt] when I was doing Once Upon a Time at Bennington College [Anolik’s podcast about Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt when they were students together at Bennington College], they don’t want to spoil the myth. They’re myth-makers about themselves. Beginning in this industry is not easy for anybody. You need mentor figures, you need lucky breaks. But Joan completely wrote out so many early influential figures from her life. Like Dan Wakefield, who was the critic who wrote the rave review of Slouching Towards Bethlehem in the New York Times which changed the trajectory of Joan’s career, he was very close friends with Joan! He used to stay at Joan’s house all the time. But she never once mentioned that the review was written by one of her best friends.

BP: Did you find any newfound appreciation for Joan after writing the book?
LA: There’s a toughness and a shrewdness to her that I admire. I think her standards were incredibly high. And, yeah, I totally admire her. I do. She has that Warhol thing for me. She’s a morbid little character. She’s not sexy in the way Eve is, but there’s a kind of a sexiness to her morbidity.

Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is out now via Atlantic Books.