A TOP 12 BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK IN THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES
THE BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK FOR NOVEMBER 2024
'This book is magic. It's all I ever needed' LENA DUNHAM

Eve 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, centred on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood in the sixties and seventies.

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. Franklin Avenue was also 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), 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.

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 - letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don't read them so much as breathe them - as the key to unlocking Didion.

"A gossipy, shocking, intimate, very funny and always smart take on the two writers...Fascinating, funny and ferocious at times, it's a reminder that even literary biographies can be thrilling" - Glasgow Herald

"Theirs was an almost Shakespearean relationship, full of longing, jealousy and thorny ambivalence...immaculately researched and laced with gold" - The Times, Books of the Year

"[Anolik's] research and sources are unparalleled; she interviews so many people on the scene, including Babitz herself, that most of this book is direct speech: cool people, talking at you...[a] fun, brilliant book" - Telegraph

"[A] riveting account of two complex, elusive and humorous writers..."I can't stand meetings. I'd much rather figure things out from gossip," said Babitz. If that comment raises an approving nod, I'm sure you'll enjoy this fascinating slice of history" - Independent

"Absorbing...the best chapters read like glittering high school gossip, offering up Didion's most-coveted secrets" - The Times

"A captivating look into the way two very brilliant, very different writers maneuvered around one another, and the starry, messy world they inhabited. Someone get Ryan Murphy a copy, we smell a new season of Feud" - Town & Country, Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

"As Lili Anolik argues in this joint biography, Didion and Babitz represent more than what it means to be a woman who writes: They're two halves of American womanhood. It's a big swing, but one that Anolik knocks out of the park, showing readers how Didion was the sun to Babitz's moon, the superego to her id" - Bustle

"So, are you a Joan or are you an Eve? That's the question everyone will be asking each other this fall" - Literary Hub

"A love letter in the form of this detailed biography that reads like a propulsive novel" - Oprah Daily

"Anolik is a galvanizing, exacting, mordantly funny and lionhearted writer...[Didion's and Babitz's] legacies will be forever shaped by Anolik's double portrait forged in inquisitiveness, empathy, intellectual firepower and love" - Booklist (starred review)

" A crackling dual biography of two of L.A.'s brightest literary lights" - Publishers Weekly

"What Hollywood's Eve has going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz" - New York Times on HOLLYWOOD'S EVE