Cold, reserved, hidden behind her huge sunglasses. These are often the first things that come to mind when we think about Joan Didionan immense American writer, to whom we owe major works including The Year of Magical Thinking Or Bad players. His pen is also in his image: both distant and incisive, cold and surgical. By her peers, the author was perceived, until her death in December 2021, as an opaque and elusive character.
This year, the author and journalist Lili Anolik proposes to (re)discover Joan Didion through the prism of her friendship with another American writer: Eve Babitz. The two women in fact maintained an intense correspondence, marking a stormy relationship, spread over many years. In Didion and Babitzavailable from November 12, 2024, she deciphers the smallest details.
Joan Didion with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, in Malibu, California, 1976.© John Bryson/Getty Images
The intellectual and the bimbo
When we asked Joan Didion who were her literary monuments, she rarely mentioned women. Sometimes she admitted a certain kinship with the sisters Brontëbut preferred to remember that it was while reading Ernest Hemingway that she had learned to write. In the same way, the idea of being seen as a woman writer horrified her to the highest degree. In the eyes of society, she lived a very respectable existence, from her studies at Berkeley to her work for Voguethe publication of her first novel and her marriage to the writer John Gregory Dunne. There is therefore something surprising in the admiration she harbored for Eve Babitzwho liked to name Marilyn Monroe as her greatest inspiration, and who was, at the time, seen more as a groupie than a writer in her own right. Few then took seriously this young socialite devoured by an insatiable desire to party and multiply famous conquests. Yet, Didion immediately saw his talent, and never tried to deny it.
Almost ten years separate the two women. When their paths cross for the first time, Joan Didion is almost 33 years old – Babitz, 24. However, their correspondence testifies to the support that the first was for the second, mixed with a certain resentment. In Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LAa biography devoted to Babitz and published in 2019, the journalist Lili Anolik is the first to explore the link between the two authors, pointing out that Didion was the first to consider Babitzin particular by recommending it to Grover Lewiseditor-in-chief of the magazine Rolling Stone, which published the trendiest writers of the moment at the time. So it seems The Sheik, the author’s very first article. When the two women met for the first time, in 1967, Didion is an author who looks forward to the future, whose first book, Run, River, published in 1963, it already promises to flirt with the heights of glory and recognition of its peers. Yet, Run, River failed to captivate the public, or even the critics, in fact. This is his next book, the collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, which supports its membership in the new journalism movement, and attracts the attention of a critic of the New York Times. That was all it took for it to click. A click that was long overdue Babitzwhose work was always underappreciated, until his death in 2021.
After the disappearance ofEve Babitz, it is a world that opens up, discovered among its intact boxes. Numerous letters reveal his correspondence with numerous figures in the American intelligentsia of the time, including Joan Didion. Indeed, during this period, egocentric rockstars, Hollywood starlets and depressed writers all found themselves at 7406 Franklin Avenue, where Didion with her husband. This house was thus the scene of the complicated relationship between the two women, both ambiguous, nourished by a sincere friendship but poisoned by a certain rivalry. We meet the two women at numerous receptions, until their bond, which appeared so tenacious, breaks. According to some, Didion got tired of the enfant terrible that was Babitz. The latter specifies that she is the one who fired her elder. The truth undoubtedly lies at the crossroads of these stories. In a letter dated 1972, which was probably never sent, it is for example Babitz who attacks Didion and laments that he cannot convince her to read the writings of Virginia Woolf. She writes this murderous sentence in particular: “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so little, Joan?”, suggesting that her sister owes her success to her small size, which does not worry the men she meets.
Joan Didion – Bad Players
Californian rivalries
Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021 in Los Angeles, from Huntington’s disease. Joan Didion follows her a few days later, on December 23, at her home in Manhattan, at the age of 87. Enough to fuel the beliefs according to which the bond which united the two women was much stronger than appearances might lead us to believe – particularly in their writings. Didion And Babitz are in fact two authors who have offered unique perspectives on Los Angeles, from its wildest excesses to its most razor-sharp everyday life. There where Babitz proposed an idealized and fanciful version, sublimated by his free spirit, Didion has always been committed to delivering a truth, its truth, however dark it may have been. Thus, she became a cultural icon, and profoundly changed the perception of Los Angeles in the minds of Americans in the 1960s and 1970s – a city as the pop culture capital of the world, a film factory, a music factory , a dream factory which, for Didiondraw more from the side of the chimera, where Babitz was a quintessential factory girl, a pure product of Los Angeles. We could thus read The Sheikhis first article, as a defense of his beloved city, after Didion painted a terrible fresco of it in Bad players.
Eve Babitz – Eve in Hollywood
During all those years, Eve Babitz and Joan Didion were they not, ultimately, two sides of the same coin? Two it girls literary figures with curious and eccentric visions. In the acknowledgments of his book Eve in Hollywood (1974), Babitz thanks “The Didion-Dunnes, for having to be what I’m not”. An admission of respect for the one who published her first book, written as a mystery, a declaration with a hidden meaning – the confirmation that she defines herself in everything that Didion is not, either one of the greatest American pens, as famous, in the 1970s, as a Hunter S.Thompson. Eve Babitz had to wait until she died for her writings to arouse unprecedented attention, particularly among a new generation of readers.
