Lost and Found: Reading Joan Didion in California
Scott Bradfield reviews the Library of America edition of Joan Didion’s early novels and essays.
— LARB Editorial
Scott Bradfield reviews the Library of America edition of Joan Didion’s early novels and essays.
“Slow Days, Fast Company” consistently reveals Babitz’s fascination with America, which she considered a place apart from Los Angeles.
Sophia Stewart reflects on Didion’s legacy as a serious writer and a style icon.
Dan Wakefield recalls his favorite year, spent with Eve Babitz in her city.
Because Tom Wolfe and because James Baldwin and Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr, but because Didion most of all, an American essay today without...
Lauren Sarazen praises “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.” by Lili Anolik.
"Much of Didion's writing about LA reads not as accurate description of the city but as penance for her great sin of leaving New York."
If her early books cemented Eve Babitz’s image as the Edie Sedgwick of 1960s L.A., then “Sex and Rage” was an attempt to examine her own celebrity.
On her hunger for both the rainbow and the rainbow’s end.
In “Black Swans,” Eve Babitz probes the causes and consequences of why the ’60s and ’70s were so debauched.
Didion, on the first plane out of New York after 9/11
What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Joan Didion or Nathanael West is that a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy.
Didion is so afraid of her own depths of feeling she can’t avoid revealing them. That’s her contradiction, her fascination.
Reading Didion’s prose has always been an aural experience as much as a literary one, as much about rhythm and intonation.
This is autobiography at its most fragmented.
Didion circles the images of her past like a wary woman who has found a basket lodged in the reeds that contains a sleeping infant.
Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer.
Didion's latest "South and West": irredeemably past, and yet speaking to the current impasse.
Nikki Darling pays homage to two women authors forever associated with Los Angeles.