Didion and Babitz

When Eve Babitz died in 2021, her crumbling Hollywood apartment concealed a remarkable discovery: a stack of sealed boxes untouched for decades. Inside was a lost world—letters, artifacts, and intimate fragments of a dazzling, turbulent era that once pulsed through 7406 Franklin Avenue.

That unassuming house in a faded corner of Hollywood was a cultural pressure cooker in the late '60s and early '70s, where artists, musicians, writers, and misfits collided. It was the crucible for two iconic American writers: Joan Didion, the inscrutable chronicler of California cool, and Eve Babitz, the wildfire muse-turned-writer whose life was as chaotic as it was incandescent.

Their relationship—part alliance, part rivalry—burned bright and eventually burned out. Yet in the personal letters unearthed after Babitz’s death, Lili Anolik finds a key: a new way of seeing Didion not just as a legend behind dark glasses, but as a woman shaped by the same heat and heartbreak that made Babitz.

Dion and Babitz is a literary excavation, a dual portrait of two women who defined—and defied—their era. Through Babitz’s raw, luminous letters, Anolik reframes Didion’s legacy and reveals how alike these icons were, whether they liked it or not.