Didion & Babitz: A Belletrist Book Club pick

Description

A TOP 12 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK IN THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES
THE BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK FOR NOVEMBER 2024
”This book is magic. It”s all I ever needed” LENA DUNHAM

Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies.

7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne. Franklin Avenue was also the breaking and then the remaking – and thus the true making – of another great American writer: Eve Babitz, goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many, many others), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity.

With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz”s brilliance of observation, Babitz”s incisive intelligence and, most of all, Babitz”s diary-like letters – letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don”t read them so much as breathe them – as the key to unlocking Didion.