Didion & Babitz

An outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the complicated relationship between Joan Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

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. 

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.