Joan Didion & Eve Babitz: Contemporaries, Peers, Rivals

The writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were both ambitious California natives, moved in similar circles in Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s and died within days of each other, in December 2021. In “Didion & Babitz,” the journalist Lili Anolik casts them as opposite sides of the same coin: “two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned — the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.” For all they had in common, the book never quite paints them as the “secret twins” and “soul mates” the author would like us to think they are.