When Joan and Eve were pals: ‘Didion & Babitz’ explores the unlikely bond between two seminal L.A. writers

On the Shelf 'Didion & Babitz' By Lili Anolik Scribner: $30, 352 pages If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Lili Anolik, author of “Didion & Babitz.” After reading the letters, Anolik ditched her plans to revise “Hollywood’s Eve,” pivoting instead to write “Didion & Babitz,” an essential chronicle of a literary friendship. Babitz’s life is the source code for her best books, 1974’s “Eve’s Hollywood” and 1977’s “Slow Days, Fast Company”; her stories are ecstatically, deliriously alive, charged with sexual energy and deadly wit. Babitz’s letters reveal a complex touch-and-go friendship between the two: Didion jump-started Babitz’s literary career by writing a letter of recommendation to Rolling Stone then-editor Grover Lewis, who published Babitz’s story “The Sheik.” Another letter reveals that Didion edited “Eve’s Hollywood,” something that Babitz, in her countless conversations with Anolik for her 2019 biography, had never mentioned. Eve bristled at Joan’s ambition but, of course, she absolutely wanted that kind of career.” Babitz, by Anolik’s estimation, had one great book in her: “Slow Days, Fast Company,” a collection of stories that touch on her romantic relationships with Ruscha’s brother, Paul, and Rolling Stone’s Lewis, as well as “the politesse of threesomes, sleeping on the roof of the patio of the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel and what to wear when taking cocaine on acid,” among other things.