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Didion & Babitz

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Didion & Babitz

By: Lili Anolik
Narrated by: Lili Anolik, Emma Roberts
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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. 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, where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock 'n' rollers and drugs.

Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression, her marriage to John Gregory Dunne as tortured as it was enduring. It 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 (and 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.©2024 Lili Anolik (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio Art Art & Literature Authors Entertainment & Celebrities Literary History & Criticism United States World Literature
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This was beautifully and engagingly told. I kept thinking, am I a Joan or an Eve and by the end thought both of course! Fabulously well researched and told.

Thoroughly enjoyable telling

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This book has such an interesting structure it feels like we are doing the research with the writer. We are spoken to as the listener and at time we have to decide what to consider as to the truth. Well written well researched about two women rich in stories.
I have come to this book after the Friday afternoon club which should also be read.

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