I Like the Coldness

Madeleine Connors interviews Lili Anolik about her new book, “Didion & Babitz.”

By Madeleine ConnorsNovember 16, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Literary Criticism

• Biography & Autobiography

• Gender & Sexuality

WHEN I WAS 23, living in Los Angeles, I had somehow stumbled onto a copy of Eve’s Hollywood (1974). At the time, Eve was everything I was not. I was unsure of myself, dissatisfied and working as an underpaid assistant in Hollywood. Eve Babitz, by contrast, was cool, reckless, and relentlessly charming. She didn’t always get the guy—but then again, it hardly mattered. Her bustling life, tangled in love affairs, champagne, and sequins, was more fulfilling than a conventional happy ending.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had Lili Anolik to thank for my encounter with Babitz. Her 2014 Vanity Fair profile helped bring the writer back into the zeitgeist. Anolik’s new book, Didion & Babitz, revisits the thorny relationship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz as contemporaries, friends, and adversaries. Anolik cracks open their fraught coexistence and examines what it meant—and means—to be a female writer. On a Friday morning, Anolik and I met over Zoom to discuss Didion & Babitz and the two women’s legendary careers, writing, ambition, and enduring appeal in our cultural milieu. I’m in Los Angles, she’s in New York—a love story as old as time.

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MADELEINE CONNORS: There’s so much talk about the writer as a persona and the It girl as a writer. I was wondering if that was something you had in mind when you were writing the book: how these women influenced what it means to be a female writer in the public eye.

LILI ANOLIK: Writer personas really interest me. No one was shrewder about putting together a persona for herself than Joan. She was so good. She presented a theatrical version of herself and seemed like one of her own characters. It’s a funny thing because people will say, “You brought Eve back.” But actually, I don’t think that was the reason she caught on. Some of her books are great, like I think Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. (1977) is a masterpiece. The thing I did that was helpful for her is that initial Vanity Fair piece. I just put together the whole life so that there was a public persona for her. That’s why she’s popular at some level. People really just like Eve qua Eve. She’s the un-Joan in post-Manson Los Angeles—the wildness, and ending as the Miss Havisham–Norma Desmond of Hollywood. There’s something with that persona that’s irresistible.

Eve proved that frivolity, pleasure, and glamour could also have a depth and intellect. Especially, like myself, reading Plath and Didion growing up, I thought the only way to take yourself seriously was to be sad. I think Eve offered a really great alternative to that.

It’s also that Joan was so powerful. She’s the biggest L.A. writer. I think you need something to balance her out. You need an un-Joan. I felt like the world just needed that too. Joan blots out the sun. They’re twins. They’re doubles, but they’re opposites. The world needed it. You need yin and yang, masculine and feminine. You just need these things.

I’m curious—because you knew Eve, was it ever difficult, as you were writing the book, to manage the idea of Eve as your friend and then also as a persona and writer?

I knew Eve really well in one sense. We spent huge amounts of time together—on the phone, in person, all of it. But I was meeting a posthumous Eve. I was not meeting Eve of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s. She had Huntington’s so bad. Her brain was crumbling. It was not really meeting her full-on.

I always wanted her to be my subject. There are definitely times where emotions get involved, but it wasn’t hard for me. It wasn’t hard for me to look at her as a subject. When the person fascinates me in that way, I’m into them, but they are my subject.

In our culture, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz have had this revisionist history of being these feminist icons. Something I like about your book is that both can be selfish, narcissistic, and self-involved—awful to people around them. I really like how the book highlighted that they were real people.

That kind of worship where you can only see the glowing qualities, that’s not a real person. They’re moving through time and space, trying to negotiate their place in the world. It’s going to get ugly. That’s part of the thrill of it. The thing about Joan that fascinates me the most is just seeing how she did it, how she becomes Joan Didion. It’s like becoming president. A gentle person doesn’t ascend to the throne in that way. I love the machination. I like her ambition. I like the coldness.

Do you think, with social media, another Joan and Eve could happen? Or is it this idea that “persona” is dead because everyone is overexposed and writing is such a different career now?

I don’t think that they would be writing. I think they would be doing a form of writing. Particularly for Joan, because she was a cultural center, that was important to her. I feel the closest would be like a Lena Dunham. Joan did want to be an actress; that was her first interest. Books seem so niche now. I feel like she would be pursing something bigger, where she would be the creator and the controlling intelligence, because she was a control freak. I don’t think she would want to be a director, but maybe something close to what HBO’s Girls was.

In conversation now, people will say: “Oh, if you read Joan Didion, you should also read Eve Babitz.” It seems like, at the time, Eve didn’t even consider herself a writer that would ever be in conversation with Joan Didion. Now, I feel like they’re married to each other when people talk about California literature. It’s interesting that Eve elevated in status too.

It’s amazing. When I started on her, when I started chasing her in 2010, when I finally got Vanity Fair to say yes, she was out of print. Nobody knew who she was. I pitched her all over town; nobody knew who she was. I would do these interviews with people who are her contemporaries, and half the people could not believe that I was bothering with this person. A lot of people thought of her as a bimbo.

What was it in our cultural zeitgeist, do you think, that allowed the iron to be struck while it was hot?

So much of this is timing. The world was ready for her. She’s a cultural heroine. It’s polymorphous perversity, sexuality, drugs, and fun. And being an artist. It’s the spirit of L.A. embodied in this one woman. Joan’s model was Hemingway, and Eve’s model was Marilyn [Monroe]. And if you pick Marilyn, you know that Marilyn is an important artist, but you know that most people thought she was a dumb blonde, and her life was unhappy and she was not recognized until death. Eve could have foretold this.

I also wonder too, because politics have been so stressful the last couple years. I think Eve offers this escapism, like a relentless party of pleasure, drinking, and being out on the town. I think that’s really seductive to people.

Didion was on all these scenes, but she was an observer. Eve was a full-on participant. I mean, Joan had a crush on Jim Morrison. Eve knew what it was like to fuck Jim Morrison.

I’m so excited for people to read it. Every dinner party I go to, I’m talking about it. I’m so moved by it. It’s also a fun book about the complexities of professional female friendships too. I feel like all women have had adversarial friendships. Charli XCX and Lorde released that song about having a weird, competitive obsession with each other. All the themes are really poignant.

There is a kind of relationship, and we don’t seem to have a word for it. We can’t really trap it in language. They had a friendship that was adversarial, but it seems as if they were attracted and repelled by one another. It’s a thing you definitely encounter. There’s primacy placed on romantic love, like gay or straight. Your partner is supposed to be the big relationship. But that twinning and doubling and loving each other and hating each other, usually same-sex, is a powerful, powerful thing. You get it in My Brilliant Friend (2012). I always felt like this was a nonfiction version of My Brilliant Friend.

In Eve’s life, there’s a revolving door of men all the time. Of course, they were influencing her, but she’s the protagonist of her own life. She’s not resigning it or signing it away to anyone else. Even when it seems like she thinks she wants to, she can’t really make herself do it.

No, it’s not in her nature. I didn’t want to say it was fun to write, because I worked obsessively on this, but I really wanted to get it right. When you’re going up against Joan Didion, you just want to make sure your ducks are in a row. You want to know you did everything you can, but it was weirdly pleasurable to write.

Living in Los Angeles, it’s fun to hear about the Chateau Marmont and Malibu at a different time. Barney’s Beanery too, which I think is campy and tacky. The Beverly Hills Hotel—I would never go there for a night out, but it seems like people did.

I remember Mirandi [Babitz, Eve’s sister] was explaining to me that Eve thought Hollywood was it and Malibu was pathetic. [Malibu] was like, for movie people and squares. She said when Eve said “Hollywood,” she meant the Sunset Strip from the Chateau [at the border of West Hollywood] to the Beverly Hills Hotel. And I said, “Beverly Hills Hotel is in Beverly Hills.” But it was part of Eve, so it was a part of Hollywood. I like that.

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Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Believer. She is the author of Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and lives in New York City with her husband and two small sons.