DIDION & BABITZ

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 fou