Joan Didion, Eve Babitz, and the Biographer Who Missed the Point

The new book was occasioned by Anolik discovering, among Babitz’s posthumous papers, an angry unsent 1972 letter from Babitz to Didion, prompted by Didion’s infamous essay on the women’s movement (“To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them…”). Accusing Didion of failing to understand herself, the female condition, or her own marriage, Babitz indicts Joan’s refusal to read Virginia Woolf, and her habit of preferring to be with the boys while reaping the privileges of being small and conventionally feminine. The balance of power between Didion and her less-successful husband, John Gregory Dunne, would have collapsed long ago, fulminates Babitz, if he didn’t regard her as a child, making her fame easier for him to take.

Didion’s feminism essay is indeed politically obtuse (with a few punchy lines), but she didn’t put much faith in social progress generally. She did, however, despite her feminist failings, mentor and promote Babitz, leading to writing gigs at Rolling Stone and contacts with book editors. She even attempted, along with Dunne, the labor-intensive task of editing Babitz’s unwieldy Eve’s Hollywood manuscript, until Babitz got defensive and announced scornfully around town that she’d “fired” Didion, going on to parody her in the book as “Lady Dana Wreaths,” a fashionable writer with a ridiculous life who’d tried to edit Babitz, but whose own books were “brutally depressing.”

To Anolik, the unsent letter is “a lovers’ quarrel”—“recriminations and resentments hurled like thunderbolts, the flashes of rage, despair, impatience, contempt.” But they weren’t lovers: It’s only the structure of Anolik’s book that requires forcing them into a dyad. It’s also not evident that the volatile Babitz’s feelings about the taciturn Didion were particularly reciprocated—Didion wasn’t writing Babitz angry unsent letters, or dedicating books to her (Eve’s Hollywood includes a dedication to the Didion-Dunnes), or basing characters on her. Nevertheless, we’re told their relationship was “as profound and rare as true love, as profound and rare as true hate.” If this seems overblown, well yes, it is—to such an extent that Anolik, who positions herself as the third lover in the story (“a Peeping Tom peering through the keyhole”), becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator of it.