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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 conference. Lord help the authors whose group texts get subpoenaed and then printed for the world to see.

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two monolithic California writers who died within days of each other in December 2021, were prolific generators and subjects of literary gossip. Didion, the essayist who anatomized and often eviscerated the ’60s, was successful and venerated for most of her career; Babitz, who captured everything sordid and beautiful about Los Angeles, had a more troubled life and career, followed by a late surge of popularity as a misunderstood genius.

Opposites at first glance, they were also connected in many ways. Both were bolstered and weighed down in equal parts by their status as persona, image, idea. The photographer Julian Wasser turned both into literal icons—Didion leaning on her Daytona-yellow 1969 Corvette Stingray, Babitz playing chess in the nude with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp. Decades later, both women’s books are the sort that people post on Instagram and TikTok to prove something ineffable and particular about themselves.

Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion and Babitz, a dishy gloss on the pair, purports to be interested in pushing past persona and performance to find the truth, the humans underneath. It opens with a quote from Babitz, who wrote that gossip has “always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick,” and yet “how are people like me—women they’re called—supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room?” Anolik, like Babitz, is out to redeem the disreputable practice.

She doesn’t come to the story in a disinterested way. While working on a biography of Babitz, Anolik became close with the writer, and she remains in touch with Babitz’s sister and friends. There’s something endearing about the power of Anolik’s love for the author, but something dispiritingly deflating about this latest homage to her. Babitz’s work, for all its frisson and humor, also feels particular, alive. Anolik, by contrast, gets trapped on the flat surfaces. As much as the book seems earnestly set on redefining both of these women, the truth it captures more than any other is how quickly wit can slip into caricature, fun and fizzy gossip into cruelty.

The catalyst for the book, the reason for its existence, is this: Babitz was infamously messy. Lovers complained of cat hair in their meals; trash, tissues, and rotting food littered her floor. Anolik recalls the smell being so intense that she would have to leave and walk around the block when she visited. After Babitz was moved into an assisted-living facility, her sister, Mirandi, was left to manage the cleanup. On New Year’s Day 2021, Mirandi FaceTimed Anolik to report a surprising discovery in the back of a closet: a box that held more insight into Babitz’s relationships than either of them had known. Anolik was able to dive in after Babitz’s death. The anecdote itself feels like the perfect material for a book: Shouldn’t we all be rummaging around in the messy closets of the mysterious dead, looking for one last remnant that might reveal a hidden truth?

Within the box were letters, including a single one from Babitz to Didion, which Babitz almost certainly never sent. As was already publicly known, Didion had helped Babitz get her first story published in Rolling Stone magazine and worked with her on her first book, Eve’s Hollywood. That is, until, as Babitz told friends, I fired her. In the acknowledgements, Babitz thanked Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, “for having to be everything I’m not.”

[Read: The “L.A. woman” reveals herself]

The letter is a more detailed snapshot of the women’s relationship. It begins: “Dear Joan.” (“That Joan, the Joan,” Anolik comments—one of many interjections.) “Just think Joan,” writes Babitz, “if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons … could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The letter is deeply charming and also a little bit combative. It’s impossible to read it and not want to know more about how and when and why these women overlapped.

At first, Didion and Babitz suggests loose connections. Like Eve (and most other writers), Joan had a rocky beginning; 12 publishers rejected her first novel. The one who finally said yes did so, in part, because of the help of an older man, Noel Parmentel Jr., with whom Joan was in love—only to be spurned. Also like Eve, Joan had her heart broken. But then Joan got married early. Eve never did. Parmentel told Anolik he’d advised Didion to marry Dunne and thereby “invented Joan Didion.”

Soon enough, Eve and Joan’s timelines converged. Didion and Dunne moved out to Hollywood; Babitz started coming to their house on Franklin Avenue. Yet just as she begins to show how their lives intersected, Anolik starts to lean into all that divides them. For instance, she muses on the rock legend they had in common (one as subject, the other as lover): “The difference between their perceptions of [Jim] Morrison is the difference, I think, between their roles on the scene: Joan an observer of it; Eve a participant in it. Or perhaps it’s the difference between being a starfucker, which Joan and Dunne emphatically were … and one who fucks stars.”

From here, the binaries metastasize: Didion was volatilely thin; Babitz loved to eat (one chapter is titled “Eve Bah-bitz with the Great Big Tits”). Didion cooked and cleaned; had the kid, the house, and the husband. Babitz never did. Didion knew how to play the career game; Babitz mostly either failed at it or had no interest. At the same time, Anolik’s tone, especially with regard to Didion, begins to shift. She asks, “Was the moment Eve realized she’d lost to Joan the same moment she realized that she and Joan had been in a competition all along?”

As Anolik progresses through the thickets of their lives, she treats Babitz to warm stories and close readings (if sometimes dismissively) but begins to take hits at Didion (often parenthetically). She side-eyes a friend of Didion’s giving her a rave in The New York Times: “Confirmation of Joan and Dunne’s sly careerism.” When the couple moved to a cliff-top home in bourgeois-bohemian Malibu, they “abided by mainstream values,” much to the ire of Babitz. Of that shot in front of the Corvette, Anolik says (in parentheses): “How could Joan be sexual?” More often than not, Didion is collateral damage in the war to lionize Babitz, her self-sabotaging, sexy alleged frenemy.

Every time Anolik noses her way toward parallels between Didion and Babitz, she veers away, doubling down instead on the split between them.

One major missed opportunity traces back to that unsent letter. It was a response to Didion’s openly expressed disdain for the women’s movement. Anolik acknowledges Babitz’s own ambivalence—“Feminism offended her sense of style: it had no style.” Both women attempted to gain and keep power in a male-dominated field, and yet neither was quick to ally herself with any ideologically self-defined group. Both used their strengths, performed their public personas—Joan with her steely reserve, Eve with her froth and sex—to attain whatever status they could in a literary world built mostly to slap them down. But Anolik does not linger on these complications, nor on how necessary it might have felt to each woman to be perceived on her own terms.

When it comes to Didion, Anolik’s gossip is tinged with judgment. She writes that “there were people who believed” that Dunne was bisexual; that he spent a year living in Las Vegas without Didion, leaving her alone with their young daughter, Quintana (this is well-trod territory that Dunne wrote a book about); that Dunne once grew so angry that Didion begged a friend not to leave her alone with him. And yet, Anolik writes, “by the eighties, Joan would be telling the New York Times that she and Dunne were ‘terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.’” Anolik calls this “a statement that warms the heart. Or chills the blood.” Or, just maybe, both sentiments, many others, can be true at the same time.

Babitz also dated many complicated men, but those relationships are described in less reductive ways: Some were married, some she took money from. She and the prominent magazine journalist Dan Wakefield dated for a year, but he claimed to have been certain he wouldn’t survive a second. “My God, the decadence!” is how he described the relationship to Anolik years later. Babitz gets to be knotted, yearning, complicated—as well she should. Didion stays a “cool customer”—as she called herself with notable irony in a memoir—and not much else.

One of the dangers of anecdotes, the raw material of gossip, is how easily stories can be weaponized. Almost always in Didion and Babitz, the Babitz tales grow and richen, and Didion tidbits are dropped as damning evidence.

Following Anolik’s lead, I’d like to present one of her passed-along anecdotes as evidence of something else: the all-too-common impulse to pit one woman against another, and, in doing so, to reduce her to her least attractive parts. While writing the book, Anolik received a short email from the writer David Thomson, a friend of the Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta. He told her that Didion had called Mehta the day after she’d sent him the manuscript of The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about her husband’s death and her daughter’s grave illness, and asked, “Will it be a best seller?”

[Read: Joan Didion’s magic trick]

Anolik’s interpretation: “Thomson’s story shows what Didion was willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything). When I said earlier that she’d crawl over corpses to get where she had to go, I was, it turns out, speaking literally. The Year of Magical Thinking is her crawling over the corpse of Dunne, crying all the while, but still crawling, still getting where she had to go.” Later, Anolik writes of the best seller in question: “I reject its fundamental narcissism. (It purports to be about Dunne, is really about Joan.) I reject, too, its fundamental dishonesty. (I believe Joan feels grief at Dunne’s passing, but not only grief. To be alone was for her, I suspect, a kind of fulfillment.”

My turn: No one literally climbed over a corpse. Nor did anyone do it figuratively. To believe that presupposes not only that literary ambition forestalls any other desires, but that Didion’s single question in the course of a professional conversation expresses her complete feelings about her work. This is the fundamentally reductive power of gossip. What if, instead, Anolik had asked other people about this time? What if, instead, she’d considered how and why work might have felt like mercy, a suture in that wound of a year?

I felt squirrely, queasy, writing this essay. I kept thinking: What has the world done to us, and particularly to women, to make us so quick to make such blanket statements, to make us think that only a single type of woman writer might have a right to make it out intact? But then, of course, I knew.

Like most writers, and most women I know, I love gossip. Sometimes, when I’m out with friends, I lose hold of myself. My words flatten. It feels intoxicating—and later it feels sickening. Gossip is narrow-minded, sloppy; it reifies the teller’s already established sense of what the world is; it gives us power and control; it makes us feel safe in a culture that often makes us feel the opposite. Almost all of the best writing follows an antithetical impulse: to let go of that control, to find and put down stakes in spaces of not knowing, to reach inside those hidden boxes and get as close to the chaos as we can bear.

Babitz didn’t just fuck the star; she wrote about him too. Anolik admires her article about Jim Morrison: “What gives that piece its peculiar power is that you can see Eve changing her mind about Morrison on the page. The tenderness she feels for him sneaks up on you as you read it, as I suspect it did on her as she wrote it.” This is the feeling I waited for in this book, but Anolik never lets either woman surprise her. She pulled that letter out of that sealed box only to stuff these brilliant women, especially Didion, back into the places they already occupied.

Didion said all writing is by nature an act of bullying: “It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way.” The job is then to mitigate the bullying, to turn the language in as many different directions—middle, under, over, opposite—as a writer can. There are enough gestures in Didion and Babitz to suggest that its more savage slights weren’t quite intentional. When we start talking and talking, our words can feel accidental, out of our control. But it’s necessary to name the ways that language can harm, distort, debase—and then try and try again toward something more.

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