Joan Didion Biographer Is as Unsparing as She Was: “I’m Just Trying to See Her Plain”
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A revelatory new book is as penetrating and hardboiled about the late Joan Didion as she was about others. The writing icon’s acclaimed career was in key part defined by living in, working with and writing about Hollywood. Now an investigative biographer X-rays her romantic history, her screenwriting career and much else.
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In her previous work the author Lili Anolik, who specializes in literary figures, has brought Eve Babitz back from obscurity, shed new light on Bret Easton Ellis and exposed Donna Tartt to such an unwelcome degree that the novelist of The Secret History and The Goldfinch threatened legal action.
With Didion & Babitz, publishing Nov. 12, Anolik explores the complicated dynamic between the two L.A. writers, explaining to The Hollywood Reporter that “to understand Joan’s The White Album you need to read Eve’s Slow Days, Fast Company, and to understand Slow Days, Fast Company you need to read The White Album. You need yin and yang.”
The new book functions as a dual biography, delving more darkly into Babitz than Anolik’s well-received Hollywood’s Eve did. Since Anolik began writing about the then all-but-forgotten Babitz a decade ago there’s been a revival: reissues, reassessments and a generation of new fans reclaiming her — see, for example, Kaia Gerber and Gracie Abrams discussing the “Eve Babitz renaissance” at length earlier this year. “Eve is thrilling to these young women because she lived dangerously,” Anolik explains. “There’s a feral quality and courage to her, a willingness to be disrespected, a refusal to kowtow.”
For most readers, though, the news from this latest Anolik book will be in a refreshingly unblinking examination of Didion’s personal and professional life, public perception of which has mostly been shaped and set by her own work. Didion made her name in essays, reporting and novels with tough, often merciless accountings of cultural currents as they evolved from the 1960s to the end of the century. She was first laureled for her distanced coolness, both psychologic and aesthetic. Then, late in life, much broader audiences embraced her for the opposite after publishing a pair of bestselling memoirs grieving the loss of her husband and daughter.
Anolik sees those widely beloved final books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, as “PR, [Didion] managing her reputation, a self-sentimentalization.” Conversely, she views her own inquiry as in line with Didion’s truer, earlier project. “What I like about her is her coldness, her sangfroid,” Anolik says. “I’m just trying to see her plain, to strip away the need to make her cuddly, to make her a mother figure, a wife figure. In her best work, what people responded to is how clear-eyed and no-bullshit she was.” She continues, “Joan was often telling the truth about herself, and people were choosing not to listen.”
Anolik’s most crucial Didion source was the late Noah Parmentel, an acerbic writer’s writer who died this year at 98. He’s one of several intimates quoted at length in the book who’ve recently passed away. Parmentel was her mentor, promoter and boyfriend — in Anolik’s telling “the male equivalent of a muse” who inspired thinly veiled love interests in several of Didion’s early novels, including Run River, A Book of Common Prayer and her most famous, Play It as It Lays. “Finding Noah Parmentel was like finding the wet beating heart of Joan,” Anolik says. “She’s so opaque and guarded and he was her one real romance.” (Common Prayer imagines the life of a privileged young woman involved in violent far-left 1960s militancy who’d been born the year after Didion herself miscarried her child with Parmentel: “What if they’d had their baby?” Anolik muses of that narrative. “What if that baby had grown up to be Patty Hearst?”)
Didion traces Parmentel’s influence, including by way of introducing her to her future husband John Gregory Dunne, a writer who would go on to publish what became two classic non-fiction studies of the entertainment business: 1969’s The Studio and 1997’s Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. “Noah decided it was time for Joan to get married and he wasn’t going to marry her, so he picked a hanger-on,” Anolik explains, portraying the resultant union as practical more than romantic. “John Dunne was one of his other worshippers, a sidekick and buddy. Joan marrying John was her way of marrying Noel.”
Anolik also spends time on the pair’s pay-the-bills script writing career, whose output, including the highlights, she assesses as across-the-board awful. (Panic at Needle Park: “arthouse drivel,” Up Close and Personal: “total dogshit.”) She notes that Didion and Dunne cleverly leveraged their literary prestige — as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, O’Hara and Steinbeck did before them — into commissions from intellectually and artistically anxious Hollywood executives of the era. “They were running a con,” Anolik notes.
One producer they worked with, on both Needle Park as well as As It Lays, was Dunne’s brother Dominick Dunne, who later became better known as a writer, too — of true-crime tales. Anolik shares a pained letter Dominick wrote a confidant after As It Lay’s release in which he recalls that it took him years to realize that one of the characters, a bisexual film producer named BZ, was based on him. “I hadn’t a clue at that time how I must have appeared to other people,” he wrote.
Didion likely wouldn’t have dwelt much on Dominick’s reaction. In the 2017 documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold, directed by Dominick’s son Griffin, she recalled her response to observing what became one of the most memorably haunting passages in her oeuvre: a five-year-old girl tripping on acid. “Let me tell you, it was gold,” she said, delighted. Anolik adds, of Didion’s work as much as her own: “Art’s an amoral thing if you’re any good. On a human level, it’s a bank robbery.”
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