Didion & Babitz

<p><b>A TOP 12 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK IN <i>THE TIMES</i> AND<i> SUNDAY TIMES</i></b><br><b>THE BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK FOR NOVEMBER 2024</b><br><b>''This book is magic. It''s all I ever needed'' LENA DUNHAM</b><br><br>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. <br><br>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 <i>true</i> 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.<br><br> 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.</p>