Lili Anolik

And, anyow, what if the competition wasn’t a competition at all? What if the competition was actually a cooperation, Joan and Eve writing L. A. together? Their sensibilities were polarized, their styles clashing. Their inventions, though, were identical: to make literature that exploited what was novel and exposed what was familiar in a city, a society, and an epoch under convulsive pressure. from Didion & Babitz

This kept me turning pages, even if I had never heard of Babitz and never read show more Didion. (So, judge me, Reader. I haven’t read EVERYTHING …. YET.)

Anolik writes like she’s whispering into my ear, sharing juicy revelations about an era and place foreign to me, when the scene revolved around sex, drugs, and rock and roll—and artists and writers and Hollywood–at a time when I was at a conservative small town college and starting marriage to a seminary student. So, why do I care about Eve Babitz with her zillions of boyfriends, some gay or bi or rich or famous, her struggle to find a place as an artist in a world were she was considered ‘a piece of ass’? Because Anolik made me care.

The book reveals Joan Didion through Eve Babitz’s eyes, their friendship/competition and how it impacted ‘literature’, what each brought to the table.

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 interest. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” Joan Didion

Didion, such a legend, so controlled, so aloof. And the high spirited hedonist Eve, goddaughter to Igor Stravinsky, whose family partied with famous musicians and artists. Eve tried art and then writing, never quite taken seriously. He voluptuous body out of sync with the times–the one way I identified with Eve: “I thought I was fat, too. I look at pictures now and see that I looked like a normal person, but that was fat then.”

I know I’m not a major important serious author who’ll be forever under the Bs at the library. I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L. A. rather than hates it. Eve Babitz

Anolik is biased, for sure, but she lets us know it. She was obsessed with Babitz, and this isn’t her first book about her. But with all this delicious insight, I really have to read Didion and Babitz now. Better late than never.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. show less

All families are creepy in some way. Diane Arbus Page 214

The discovery of her sister's murdered body in the cemetery that separates their home from the school that they've been attending, sets Grace off on an investigation that pretty much includes everyone in their social circle, the faculty of the school, and shockingly, her own family. The truth will take her to some dark places both in her family, in her community, and ultimately in herself.

This murder mystery suffers from being one show more revelation, one twist, one shock you for shock's sake to be taken seriously. In the end, the truth of Nica's death comes across rather anticlimactic and the effect is more numbing, less surprising. Given all that, Dark Rooms is still a solid debut novel that could have been tighter, but the premise was engaging enough to keep me turning the pages. show less

Hollywood's Eve is not a conventional biography and its subject, Eve Babitz, is not a conventional person. For one, she is a living work of art in a famous photograph, immersed in a game of chess, completely naked, with a non-plussed Marcel Duchamp. As an artist, her collage LP covers grace the record albums of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, Leon Russell, et al. And, as an aside, even though she was a mainstay in the LA music scene as it conquered the world, it would be show more misleading to characterize her as a 'groupie.' You see, if anything, personages like Steve Martin, painter Ed Ruscha, rockers Gram Parsons and other glitterati, were on her radar BEFORE they were household names. If anything, Babitz 'collected' men (and perhaps women) and took from them, not the other way around. She was an artist in need of a muse, and she simply reversed the process. No "male gaze" with Eve! In 1974, however, she found a new pursuit with a literary 'voice' that was romantic yet sardonic. Her prose dripped with irony and heartbreak. For almost two decades, novels, memoir-like vignettes, short fiction, articles, and essays. Her first published book, Eve's Hollywood, exploded into the American literary consciousness; as this narrative makes clear, she was the antithesis of the East Coast literary establishment (listening, Joan Didion?) who despised Southern California with a passion that disguised their envy. Times change, an unfortunate accident took place, in a car no less, and younger generations moved into the scene, and Eve was lost in the times. But not for long. A few articles, this biography, and a host of publisher's reissue programs, brought most of her oeuvre back into print. All of this took place shortly after the publication of Hollywood's Eve, probably the reason for the new impetus; nonetheless, the very best part of this captivating little biography is that Lili Anolik tells her story in Eve's voice. What a bonus! Reading prose dripping with irony over the failures and foibles of the rich and famous is such a treat! show less

I didn't think I was going to be that interested in this book. However, this odd parallel bio angle was intriguing to me, even though the structure is pretty loose and unconvincing. It felt like a false and forced combination in order to tell more stuff about Babitz that wasn't in Hollywood's Eve. The personal stories of meeting Babitz were pretty engaging, but not important enough. She doesn't convince the reader that Didion thought much about Babitz at all. Nonetheless, after finishing it, show more I drove over to Hollywood Forever to visit her urn...appropriately stored on a shelf with some of her memoirs. If you didn't know it was there, you would just pass it by. A person larger than life in life (and more so in death)...is now just quietly, at rest. Maybe....you could even skip this book and just read Eve and Joan instead. In other words, all that is good about these writers is found in their own writings. This book just points you to them. show less