Lili Anolik on Didion, Babitz and Literary Stardom
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As a journalist you’re very loyal to your subjects, sometimes staying with them for the length of a book or a podcast series. What’s your process in selecting a topic, and when does the hinge swing from curiosity to obsession?
The way I broke into print was by writing about seventies porn people, and I was able to do that because I knew Al Goldstein. (How I knew Al Goldstein is a story for another time.) So, Al was the publisher of Screw, which was porny even for a porn magazine. Al would look at all the new fuck films coming out, and he’d review them using something he called the ‘Peter Meter’. Basically, he’d judge a movie’s quality based on how many erections it gave him. And I feel I choose my subjects more or less the same way. So when a subject excites me, when it’s ringing all the bells, blowing all the whistles on my Peter Meter – well, that’s how I know. I have to be thrilled, otherwise I’d never be moved to write the book or record the podcast in the first place. And, by the way, I don’t regard books and podcasts as different. For me a podcast is just a book that talks.
But, yeah, you’re right. It all comes down to obsession.
And are you conscious when choosing whom or what to write about, of creating thematic patterns, or a paper chain of specialist interest in your work? Because it does seem like there are all these cosmic links between the topics.
I guess I have a type! But, no, it’s not something I think about in a conscious way. I’m just hyper alert, I think, to what fascinates me, and then I sort of go from there.
Do you remember the first piece of journalism you read that informed your practice as a writer?
I wish style or sensibility were catching. I’d love to write more like the writers I love. Only I feel that style is personal to you and that it’s beyond your control. It comes out of you how it comes out of you, you know?
The writer who meant the most to me early on is Pauline Kael. She wrote about movies for the New Yorker. I missed all that, though. I missed her when she was an active mover-and-shaker in the culture. I started reading her after she retired, reading her collections. And I just went crazy with delight. I fell completely under her spell. What got me was her voice, which was so smart, so fast, so hip, so swinging, so intimate, so funny. And so erotic. (And, yes, I realise this is becoming a theme here.) But she really was a high libido writer. Everything she wrote had such force and flow, such spirit. Oh, and American, Pauline was also a very American writer – no other country could have produced her – and I think I liked that too.
Temperamentally Joan and I just didn’t match up. I saw her as a high-toned cry baby, basically.
Janet Malcolm’s book about Sylvia Plath – or, rather, Janet Malcolm’s book about the books about Sylvia Plath – is also a real sweet spot. The Silent Woman, it’s called. An odd, perverse book, and totally wonderful.
I think that was the nascent reaction I had to reading Didion – she’s inescapable if you are interested in literary non-fiction, particularly as a woman. What were your first impressions of Joan and Eve? Did you immediately identify a connection between them?
I had a friend in high school, a girl named Caroline McCloskey. Caroline was pretty, wild, smart, and had taste. And I remember the two of us, at fifteen or sixteen, exchanging books. I gave her Pauline – Reeling, I think – and she gave me Joan Didion – The White Album. And then, after I was done with The White Album, I picked up a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, just to make sure I was giving Joan a fair shake. But, yeah, I turned away from her fast. Temperamentally Joan and I just didn’t match up. I found her self serious, gloomy in a way that seemed half put on – I saw her as a high-toned cry baby, basically. Though I also recognised that when she wasn’t being a high-toned cry baby, she was tough minded and serious business and for real. And that when she went into high-bitch mode, she could be quite funny. (Her piece ‘On the Women’s Movement’ is premiere high-bitch mode Joan.) And she was, without question, a real writer. (‘The smoke of creation rises from those dry-ice sentences,’ as Pauline observed.) But, still, no. Not to my taste. So, I guess my response to her as a writer has always been respectful rather than warm. It’s as a careerist that Joan fascinates me. Nobody, with the possible exception of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, did it better than Joan. As a literary figure, I mean.
As for the connection between Joan and Eve – well, I knew Eve so well. And we talked so much. So I was certainly aware that she and Joan were on the same social scene in the late sixties and early seventies. And I was certainly aware that Joan had got her into Rolling Stone, and so, in a sense, launched her. But I had no clue that their relationship ran any deeper than that.
I wrote a profile of Eve for Vanity Fair in 2014; wrote a whole book on Eve for Scribner in 2019. After which, I moved on – did a podcast on a porn star, did another podcast on the writers of Bennington College, class of 1986. And then what happened is this: Eve died, Christmas 2021. At the back of a closet in her hellhole of a rathole of a shithole of an apartment in West Hollywood (that place was, I’m telling you, filthy and chaotic beyond belief) were these boxes. They’d been packed by her mother decades before. And inside them were letters, hundreds of letters, most of them written by Eve. And the letters were nothing short of revelatory. They showed an anguished personality, desolate emotions, psychological suffering. Eve – laughing, buoyant, charm-itself Eve – was fiercer, darker, more ambitious, more anguished than she ever let on in the pages of her books, or in person. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like I was meeting a whole new Eve.
The first letter I pulled out was one Eve wrote to Joan in 1972. And, really, it wasn’t a letter at all. Really, it was a tirade in the form of a letter. And it contained this line: ‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?’ I read it and I immediately understood that I was eavesdropping on a lover’s quarrel. I’m not, to be clear, saying that Joan and Eve were actual lovers – they emphatically were not – just that their relationship was far more fraught, far more intimate, far more passionate than I’d ever imagined.
I know you’re a Babitz loyalist, but I’m wondering whether there’s anything in Joan’s writing that you ever sought to emulate, or that really charmed you?
Oh, yeah. I love Joan’s piece on Howard Hughes in Slouching Towards Bethlehem – ‘7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38’. Political Fictions is pretty out of sight. So is ‘On Self-Respect’. And the freeway sections in Play It as It Lays. I even like her 1984 novel, Democracy, which no one else seems to like. And that’s just off the top of my head. No, I respond, and strongly, to some of her work, for sure.
Eve and I also just started out on the right foot. The first thing I read by her was Slow Days, Fast Company – her masterpiece. I loved how she wrote about 70s Los Angeles – the sunshine and the palm trees, the surf bums and bunnies, the casual drugs, the easy-going sex. (Joan took it all so seriously, particularly in Play It as It Lays – L.A. as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah? Give me a break, you know?) And I loved how Eve wrote period, her footloose and improvisatory style.
I’m a little touchy when I get called a biographer. I don’t see myself as official. I don’t believe in official.
You say that I’m an Eve loyalist, but I think that I’m far rougher on Eve as a writer than I am on Joan as a writer. I dismiss pretty much all of Eve’s work except for Slow Days, half of Eve’s Hollywood and a few scattered pieces here and there. Oh, and Eve’s letters. I love Eve’s letters.
Though, of course, you’re right. It’s no secret. I prefer Eve as a person and as a figure. And, when Eve is at her best, I prefer Eve as a writer.
Joan does have a cool relationship with her reader, and I would say that conversely, you have a very convivial relationship with yours. In Didion & Babitz for example, there’s an element of hand-holding you provide, which really draws a reader in to your clear fascination and obsession with your subject.
I’m a little touchy when I get called a biographer because I don’t see myself as a biographer. I don’t see myself as official. I don’t believe in official. Nor do I believe in an official version, which to me is what a biography is. What I’m doing with Didion & Babitz is coaxing a clean narrative from incontinent fact, right? I’m using a mixture of evidence and intuition to get to the bottom of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Another writer, a writer who isn’t me, looking at the same incontinent fact, the same evidence would come up with a different narrative altogether. So I want to make it plain to my reader that Didion & Babitz is very much my version of these two women. Not the version, my version. That’s why I think the reader needs to have a sense of who I am, of what my taste is, of what my sensibility is, of where I’m coming from, what I’m reacting to. That way the reader can decide whether he or she wants to trust me or not, wants to be persuaded by me or not.
I’ve seen this book toted as literary accessory all around the city [London], mainly in the hands of young, female readers who I assume could be new to reading Joan and Eve. What’s the specific contemporary appeal of these writers?
Joan and Eve are literary heroines. They’ve earned their spots in the pantheon. And my sense is that which one you prefer as a writer is based on which one you regard as the superior translator of female sensations and stratagems.
Joan and Eve, though, are cultural heroines, as well. Meaning, people are interested in Joan and Eve apart from their books, are interested in Joan qua Joan and Eve qua Eve. How did they move through time and space? With whom? And at what cost? – all that. There’s something universal about them, I think, something archetypal.
Women (some men, too) identify with Joan and Eve. No, scratch that. Women identify with Joan or Eve. It sounds corny to say but, as I see it, Joan and Eve were the two halves of womanhood, and they were drawn to each other precisely because they were the two halves. They represent forces that are, on the surface, in opposition yet, under the surface, in perfect alignment. Joan is the sun; Eve the moon. Joan is the superego; Eve the id. Joan is Thanatos; Eve Eros. You get what I’m saying? They’re necessary to each other. It’s the same with their work. Eve’s greatest book, Slow Days, Fast Company, is as vital to Joan’s greatest book, The White Album as The White Album is vital to Slow Days, Fast Company. Read only one of the books, get only half of the story. You want to understand post-Manson Los Angeles, you’ve got to read both.
Well, the next question I was going to ask relates to the darker reading of a young female obsession with these two characters – that of the classic Madonna/Whore, Apollonian/Dionysian paradox in femininity. Are we still dealing with a culture of literary criticism that says women either keep their cards too close to their chest or reveal too much?
I don’t think we’ll ever escape it. Or at least we haven’t escaped it yet. And it’s a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose type situation for women. You choose to be the Madonna, you choose to be the whore – you’re going to pay the price either way. And both, finally, are a pose, as every woman is a mix of the two.
Look, feminine consciousness is central to both writers. Eve was looser, more digressive – more specific to the feminine realm. ‘I’m a gossip writer from LA,’ she said in a letter to Joseph Heller. And as for Joan, well, she always wrote as a woman, but she chose Hemingway as her artistic model and ideal. (Eve chose Marilyn Monroe.) And there’s a muscularity to Joan’s prose, a cocksureness. As a writer, she’s a little macho, there’s no denying.
I suppose that’s my big feeling about Joan, and maybe why I always feel slightly sympathetic towards her. She was performing in quite a masculine tone by invoking Yates, and copying-out Hemingway. She so desperately wanted to be in this space where women just weren’t being accepted.
Oh, I’m sympathetic to Joan too! She wanted to be a Big Writer. She didn’t want to be a Big Woman Writer. In other words, she didn’t want to be marginalised, ghettoised. Which meant she had to play the game. (And, by the way, I love Joan’s ambition. There’s an abundance to it, a majesty. I love her ruthlessness, as well. Her ambition and her ruthlessness are maybe the two things I like about her the most.) In order to do that, though, in order to be the one woman let into the men’s club – to join the likes of Mailer and Updike and Roth – she had to sell women out at a certain level. Like when she put down feminism in ‘On the Women’s Movement’. That’s what Eve meant when she wrote in that letter, ‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?’ Eve is accusing Joan of playing up her frailty. That closing paragraph of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem is (justly) so famous. ‘My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.’ Joan is copping to it right there, in black and white!
Eve let me in. She opened herself up to me. Which is to say, she let me violate her.
Frailty was, for Joan, a kind of drag, a way of hiding how bold she was, how assured, how predatory. A way, basically, of not scaring off the men. I mean, if they’re scared of her, they’re not letting her in the club, right?
There’s a bit in the book where you suggest that Joan perceived Eve as being somewhat of an inspired amateur. Do you think that Eve’s true destiny was to write, in that classic sense?
Inspired amateurism is, I think, what Eve aspired to. To her that meant art. The whole notion of professionalism was repellent to her – it was anti-art, it was careerism and oh barf. Which is a big part of why she didn’t, properly speaking, have a career. Like, she never caught fire when she was actually writing and publishing. No, when she was actually writing and publishing, she was, for the most part, either ignored or brutally disparaged. Her glory and fame are almost all retrospective.
But, yes, I do regard writing as Eve’s true calling. Not the visual arts.
A specific part of the appeal to Joan and Eve is the era they were born in that quiet distemper of the 60s. I was talking with my friends the other day about where we would find them now, on the internet and in culture. We all agreed Eve might be live-streaming her walks of shame (not that shame was ever in her vocabulary). How about Joan?
I do not believe Joan would be a straight-up writer if she were born any year after 1981. She’d see book writing, I suspect, as too culturally marginal, too small time to bother with. My guess is she’d be a Lena Dunham type figure. A writer, an auteur, but in a medium people give a shit about.
And as for Evie? The live-streaming thing is hilarious and probably dead on. Or she’d be on the fringes of YouTube, just doing something weird and wild there. Yeah, YouTube avant-garde, for sure.
Was Eve as rare then as she is now?
Joan and Eve are both rare!
As for the money question, hmm. It would be very hard for Eve to be Eve now, unless…
OnlyFans?
Oh, yeah.
She was basically using the OnlyFans model in the 60s and 70s. By which I mean she was financing her art, at least in part, through her sex. I don’t mean she was a prostitute, definitely not. Yet she preferred to live off men. Like, she always had a job, but she resented having to blow her pay check on necessities. She wanted to blow it on books, art supplies, drugs, earrings and whatever else. She expected a guy to foot the bills bills.
On the front cover your book the word ‘provocative’ appears as a descriptor. When you set out to write, did you have that adjective in mind?
God, no! I just set out to write the best, most honest book I could. And if that book ended up being provocative, well, so be it!
In the process of writing this book you became great friends, or companions with Eve. Did you ever feel that you had a responsibility to her, as someone that you’d developed a close relationship with?
Well, Eve let me in. Meaning she opened herself up to me. Which is to say, she let me violate her. (The kind of work I do, it’s not polite work. It’s not mannerly work. It’s not boundary-respecting work, okay? It’s invasive work, if you do it right.) Now, I’d only ever violate someone whose work or persona I felt passionately about. (My version of ethics.) Still, that’s a big thing, and I do feel a real sense of responsibility to get it – ‘it’ meaning the person – right. Or at least as right as I can.
And I assume there has to be a sense of dislocation, in order to write…?
Yeah, because you know you’re probably going to hurt people’s feelings. But you can’t let yourself think about that or you won’t be able to do your job properly. You’ve got to stay detached, cool eyed. If you can’t do that, you might as well pack it in and become an academic or something.
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Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Paris Review, among other publications. She is the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College. Her latest book, Didion & Babitz, was published by Scribner, November 12, 2024.
Emmeline Armitage is a writer and musician originally from West Yorkshire, now living in London. She graduated from The University of Oxford before completing her Masters in Literary Non-Fiction from Royal Holloway, and her work has since been featured in The Bedford Review, The Line of Best Fit and Wonderland, as well as on stage at Hay-On-Wye and Out-Spoken. She is signed to indie hip-hop label Lewis Recordings, most recently having opened-up for The Streets on tour, played the global music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, and being named by the Guardian as ‘One to Watch’.
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