Midsummer Book Reviews

Didion & Babitz, Standing Heavy, and Family Lexicon.

You’ve probably torn through Intermezzo by now, so we thought we’d offer some midsummer reading recommendations to get you through the sweltering days by the pool…

---

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

1967. Eve Babitz walks into Joan Didion’s house in Los Angeles. We’re on Franklin Avenue, just below the Hollywood Sign. City of angels; city of writers. Didion is reporting on hippies and acid-mashed toddlers, and is on her way to becoming one of the most celebrated literary figures of her generation. Babitz is taking band photos and making collages. She has yet to publish a story, but will soon (in Rolling Stone, after receiving support from Didion), and will follow it up with a series of proto-autofiction books with varying degrees of success. The two women circle one another in the Franklin Avenue scene, fascinated and repelled, courting and dismissing, before their paths diverge sharply. Decades later, in December of 2021, they will die within the same week.

Some girls are built differently. Different girls, and the women—and artists—they become, are the subjects of Didion & Babitz (2024), Lili Anolik’s blockbuster nonfiction book of the summer. The black and white cover says it all. Joan is on top, staring directly into the camera, tiny, poised, face bare, a cigarette tilted at a precise angle. Eve is on the bottom, hair mussed, sunglasses pulled down her nose, eyes tipped up, shirt slipping off her shoulder, voluptuous lips parted a little. Didion: the ascetic celebrity, titan of American letters, the “cool customer” New Journalist, the octogenarian Celine model. Author of The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking. Never out of print. The winner. Babitz: the “dowager groupie,” subject of the quip that “in every young man's life there is an Eve Babitz; it is usually Eve Babitz,” later to suffer a hideous burn accident and end life as a nutty recluse. Author of Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve’s Hollywood, Sex and Rage, and one random volume about Fiorucci. For years, her books are available only used and battered, through second-hand retailers, before a late-in-life flurry of rediscovery and reprinting. The underdog.