02737cam a2200301 4500 1721533021 ER5 20241118120000.0 240719s2024||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2024016287 9781668065488 1668065487 ER5 Anolik, Lili, author. Didion & Babitz / Lili Anolik. Didion and Babitz. First Scribner hardcover edition. New York : Scribner, 2024. 344 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. "Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. No: inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, 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 n' rollers, drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was 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), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated alliance: a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, is so little known or understood. She's remained opaque, elusive. Until now. 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-as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion"-- Provided by publisher. 20241118. Didion, Joan Friends and associates. Babitz, Eve Friends and associates. Women authors, American 20th century Biography. Biographies. lcgft LOS ANGELES (CALIF) Biography. LOS ANGELES (CALIF) Intellectual life 20th century.