‘Didion & Babitz’ is not a biography

Remember 2022’s “Blonde” and the controversy it stirred up? The film, based on a 2000 Pulitzer Prize finalist book of the same name by Joyce Carol Oats, is a fictionalized retelling of the life of famous actress and icon Marylin Monroe, one that focuses on the darkest themes of her life: addiction, assault and the tragedy of celebrity. 

At the time, many criticized the work as an inaccurate portrait of the woman. Even those who understand its fictitiousness, they claim, will walk away with an implicit and false understanding of the real Norma Jeane Mortenson. Others, however, have praised the necessity of this imaginative adaptation. Elaine Showalter’s New Yorker piece defending the work comments that, “Oates plays with, rearranges, and invents the details of Monroe’s life in order to achieve a deeper poetic and spiritual truth.” Creating a character to impart the literary themes you want to write about makes sense, Showalter claims; as long as we understand that it’s not real, there’s more artistic worth in that endeavor than harm. 

Regardless, however, of one’s personal opinion on the act of writing something like “Blonde,” which acknowledges its status as a work of fiction, imagine what it would be like for an author to create such a work, then turn around and pass it off as completely true.    

It is here that we come to Lili Anolik’s “Didion & Babitz.” The book is ostensibly a nonfiction work concerning itself with the parallel relationship between Los Angeles-based 1960s writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, predicated on a letter from Babitz to Didion found in Babitz’s apartment after her death. Anolik previously wrote a biography of the late Babitz titled “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.,” for which she conducted years of interviews with Babitz and her family. Five years later, Anolik has returned, ready to uncover all of Babitz’s secrets hidden within the materials that she left behind.

At least, that’s what’s on the book jacket. In reality, “Didion & Babitz” is something else: a mash of personal essay, literary criticism and cultural commentary that errs on the nonsensical. All of this is in service of justifying the title — connecting Didion to Babitz, and Babitz to Didion. To construct a book like this, Anolik must do one of two things: either present the real-world relationship between Babitz and Didion via interviews and letters, or analyze the literary writings of the two, contrasting the women’s perceptions of their circumstances. There are elements of both approaches in “Didion & Babitz.” Both land unconvincingly, however, for the sole reason that Anolik has virtually no evidence behind her claims.

A good place to start is the letter — the one that’s mentioned on both the book jacket and in the preface, not to mention referenced many times throughout the book, as the leading proof that the two women had a secret, career-defining feud. In it, Babitz accosts Didion, asking, “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The letter is framed as confirmation that the two women were antagonistic to one another concerning their respective crafts, an argument that Anolik furthers by constantly comparing their opposite approaches to writing, Los Angeles and life itself. It is the cornerstone of what the entire work is purportedly about. 

But, it turns out, this isn’t strictly true. About halfway through the book, we’re told that actually the letter was never sent to Didion, which is why Anolik was able to find it in Babitz’s apartment at all. Looked at generously, this is a cheap and inconsequential rug pull — after all, it still proves that this is what Babitz was thinking about Didion at the time she wrote it. When considered more critically, however, it’s one example in a long line of journalistic falsities and misrepresentations that characterize the book. It’s not just that Anolik massages the truth to create a compelling narrative — to an extent, most nonfiction needs to do this in order to tell a coherent story — it’s that she continually interjects her subjects’ perspectives with her own “hunches” about the situation and what really must have been going on. It’s an exhausting endeavor that leaves the reader frustrated and questioning whether or not anything in the book is “real” at all. 

The structure of the book is one issue that furthers this impression. Despite the novel being titled “Didion & Babitz,” the work mainly focuses on Babitz, with brief interjections of Didion’s life presented only through Babitz’s perspective. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but it often fails in practice. In reality, Didion and Babitz didn’t interact all that much. They were friendly with each other for a period of about seven years, mainly due to running in the same Los Angeles circles. Eventually, Didion pushed for one of Babitz’s books to be published, going so far as to edit it with her husband. Babitz didn’t like the feedback that the pair gave her and then “fired” them. Much later, Babitz was involved in a devastating car fire that left her in severe pain for much of her remaining life; Didion and her husband sent Babitz a note expressing how sorry they were. Finally, Babitz called into a radio show interview with Didion. Didion laughed uncomfortably at the strangeness of reconnecting with Babitz in such a public forum, and the radio host moved on to another caller. That’s about it.

With these facts in place, a reader might suspect that “Didion & Babitz” would fill up the rest of its 340 pages with Babitz’s true thoughts on Didion as expressed through her writings or interviews. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that Anolik addresses only when it benefits the narrative argument she aims to construct: By the time Anolik was able to interview her, Babitz’s mental health was in disarray. Opening the book, Anolik notes that when they met in 2012: 

Entering the apartment was difficult, near impossible …  This sounds like a polite way of calling her nuts, and she was nuts. (Huntington’s disease had been eating away at her brain for well over a decade.) … what I saw was full-scale filth: trash piled on every surface, crammed into every crevice, so that it seemed to be growing from the floor, the furniture, the walls.

While Anolik claims that she had moments of lucidity, there were also times that she made little sense, often confusing events — even, at one point during the first administration of President Donald Trump, “(beginning) to believe that she and Trump were having an affair.” Babitz being unwell, of course, does not mean that her perspective should be discounted — this is the story of her own life, after all. But it does put into question some of the words Anolik uses to justify her claims about Didion, Los Angeles and even Babitz’s own life.

When Anolik asks Babitz if Lady Dana, a character in her book “Eve’s Hollywood,” is based on Joan Didion, Babitz says, “‘You know, I can’t remember, I was on so many drugs … .” Anolik claims that during her interviews, she learned “how to speak Eve,” interpreting Babitz’s vague comments into real observations. After reading a book full of those observations, however, I’m not convinced that Anolik’s “interpretations” don’t solely serve her own narrative goals.

So without solid evidence, verbal or written, of Didion and Babitz’s relationship, what does Anolik have to go off of? Largely, the answer is speculation and gossip. Anolik’s approach to writing seems to be taking the real-world events of these women’s lives and analyzing them as if they were characters in a novel. Take the opening chapters, which are rewritten from Anolik’s past biography of Babitz. There are definite flaws, like its over-the-top prose and obnoxious author inserts — after a while, Anolik’s constant use of addressing the reader as “Reader” feels less like a cute gimmick and more like a crutch. However, as a result of being rooted in mainly the perspective of Eve’s sister Mirandi Babitz, its insights feel grounded and real, like we’re getting a narrativized yet somewhat accurate portrait of this artist as a young woman. Mirandi’s description of how fascinated Eve was with Los Angeles, even in high school, feels like revelatory context for any of her contemporary fans. As soon as we break away from Mirandi, however, something shifts. Anolik begins to write about Babitz’s perspective as if she knows exactly what Babitz was thinking when she began her life in the art scene of Los Angeles. Take how she narrates Babitz’s thoughts as she arrived at the party where she’d be photographed nude by celebrated artist Julian Wasser:

How Hollywood, too. What could be more hopeful-ingénue than baring all? It was practically a local rite of passage, the de rigueur desperate act of the camera-ready cutie when the world was howling at the door. Even for Marilyn. Especially for Marilyn. (Admitting she was the golden girl and wet dream in Golden Dreams calendar did as much for Marilyn’s career as any movie.) Except Eve wouldn’t be baring all to make money. She’d be doing it to make mischief.

It is absolutely fine to make an argument about someone in a biography; claiming that someone did something for a certain reason, even if there isn’t a document explicitly affirming so, is perfectly acceptable. But when an author makes an argument without any real grounds, backed up only by their own sense of the situation, we err too close to the realm of fanfiction than reality. It’s as if Anolik is attempting to fictionalize Babitz, turning a real woman’s life into a thematically convenient series of thoughts and feelings.

It would another thing, too, if these passages occurred as isolated incidents to give the book some narrative flair, but as the book progresses, it becomes more speculation than actual fact. This is all the more problematic because the story thread of Babitz’s life only gets weaker once the book moves past her childhood. Progression of time is marked by what man Babitz is with at any given time and what social circles she runs with. Because of this, until she begins to write her first book, the narrative can become repetitive at times.

This is the point in which “Didion & Babitz” begins to introduce Didion, her biography noticeably shorter than Babitz’s. In these sections, Anolik’s “speculation” becomes even more questionable. You could make the argument that Babitz’s internal thoughts might have been at one point told to Anolik, or even that Anolik knew Babitz so well that she had a good guess of what Babitz was thinking during these moments. It’s very hard to argue the same defense for how Anolik writes about Didion. 

In her first chapter written specifically about Didion — “Joan Didion’s (True) Origin Story” — Anolik salaciously discusses Didion’s first love, Noel Parmentel Jr., who she was with before marrying her husband John Dunne. The chapter’s goal is to establish that Didion wasn’t what she “said she was” — that is, someone who had “done it on her own” — and instead that Parmentel was the true source of her early artistic success. She claims that: 

Parmentel, not Dunne, had been Didion’s true husband. That he was the first man she’d given herself to sexually made him, by her logic — the logic of the unconscious, of dreams, and therefore irrefutable — her true husband.

The fact that this man — not her own talent — was the reason for her rise to prominence is not something that Didion claims; it’s something that Anolik wants you to believe. 

Another example: Anolik claims that Dunne was actually gay. She quotes Tracy Daugherty’s 2015 biography of Didion, which includes an interview with artist Don Bachardy, who claims that Dunne “seemed queer.” Daugherty states that he believes, based on his research, that this claim wasn’t true, and that Bachardy likely believed this due to Dunne’s class background. Anolik, on the other hand, chooses to ignore this explanation. Her evidence consists of pressing Susanne Moore, one of Babitz’s friends, on whether or not Dunne might be gay, to which Moore replied, “There were people who believed that he was.” The explanation is flimsy, but it must be there, because it allows her to prop Didion — sexless, married to a gay man — as Eve’s opposite — a prominent sex-haver, free and unmarried. Once again, the narrative is more important than the truth. 

From this point onward, the book reveals itself as what it really is: a constructed fiction, much like “Blonde.” Chapters focus on Babitz’s relationship with men, her audaciousness and her bold, brash moves in the art world, paired with Didion’s contrasting meekness and supplication to the male gaze. As Babitz’s work moves into obscurity, and Didion’s into national reverence, Anolik blames it on Didion’s cold, calculating ambition. This brings us to the book’s biggest issue. Anolik — but seemingly not Babitz — really, really dislikes Didion. Anolik addresses this directly multiple times in the book. In her note to the reader, Anolik warns that:

People are inclined to get a little soft in the head where Joan Didion is concerned … This book, though, will resist the urge to sentimentalize because this book believes that to sentimentalize is to patronize … Reader: don’t be a baby.

Later in the book, she more directly states her own bias, writing that “Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it …”

None of this would be a problem if Anolik genuinely was upholding her end of the bargain — presenting us with what Babitz thought of Didion. But she isn’t. She’s presenting what she thinks of Joan Didion, then letting her own opinions outweigh that of the woman she claims to represent.  

The most striking instance of this is how Anolik treats Didion’s writing of “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights,” books about the death of Didion’s husband and daughter, respectively. Anolik states that these books were full of “fundamental narcissism” and a “contrived act, as well, requiring calculation, detachment, exploitativeness … a career move and a public-relations gambit.” But what does Babitz, the subject of the book, actually think about the matter? She says she didn’t go to “The Year of Magical Thinking” book tour, due to it being “‘too sad.’” Immediately after, with vitriol, Anolik states, “There was no such thing as too sad for Joan.”

This would all be different if it felt that Anolik was stating opinions about Didion based on anything other than a desire to establish a contrast between these two women. At one point, she goes so far as to read negatively into Didion’s weight, stating that: 

Joan was, as a person, diminutive … There was an overwrought quality to her thinness, almost a hysteria … and her sentences were every bit as taut, every bit as spare, as her figure … In contrast, Eve, as a person, was totally at one with what her senses wanted.

Babitz, unlike Anolik, seems to have admired Didion. She had issues with jealousy, sure — a negative Vanity Fair article written about Didion by Anolik prompted Babitz to say, “‘Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion. I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me” — but she also respected her talent immensely. At another point, she states that, “‘I loved Joan, too.’”

But that’s not the story that “Didion & Babitz” wants to tell. This is not about Babitz and Didion, writers who worked together for a brief time with contrasting views on 1960s Los Angeles. Instead, it is a warped portrayal of angels and monsters, people who symbolize the best and worst of artists. That’s what this book is most lacking: Didion and Babitz’s actual prose, their own words and stories. The most enjoyable part of this book was the epigraph, which includes a quote from both Didion and Babitz, contrasting their styles and perspectives on women’s behaviors. 

That’s why it was so disturbing to come across a footnote near the middle of the text, where Anolik writes: 

Reading Eve’s letters … is a semi-excruciating experience. I get a headache after a while because I so badly want to take a red pen to them, strike the repetitions and surpluses, correct the spelling and punctuation. In fact, I often did take a red pen. For example, the quote I used to open Part One, the quote about gossip, was edited.

It’s the confirmation of a reader’s worst fears. Anolik, with her journalistic power, has not written a book about Babitz and her relationship with Didion. She has instead become Babitz, swallowing her up without any warning. After closing a book with an acknowledgments section thanking over a hundred people for interviews, it’s shocking to think that many will come away with only one thought: Was any of that even true?

Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.

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