Download Didion and Babitz

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Didion
and
Babitz
Description
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this
outrageously
provocative and
profoundly moving new work on the mutual
attractions8212an mutual antagonisms8212ofDidi
on and her fellow literary titan, Eve
Babitz.Could you write what you write if you
weren8217tso tiny, Joan? 8212EvBabitz, in a
letter to Joan Didion, 1972 Joan
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Didion, revealed at last8230Eve 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. This world turned for a
certain number of years in the late sixties and
early seventies, and centered on a two-story
rental in a down-at- heel section of Hollywood.
7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination
salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists
mixed with movie stars, rock 8217n8217
rollers, and drug trash. 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, their union as
tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue
was the breaking and then the remaking8212an
thus the true making8212ofanother 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. Didion, in spite of her
confessional style, is so little known or
understood. She8217sremained opaque, elusive.
Until now. With deftness and skill, journalist
Lili Anolik uses Babitz, Babitz8217sbrilliance
of observation, Babitz8217sincisive
intelligence, and, most of all,
Babitz8217sdiary-like letters8212leters found
in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you
don8217tread them so much as breathe
them8212asthe key to unlocking Didion.