I mean this, of course, as a compliment. Didion & Babitz is one of my favorite books of the year, and Babitz, an avid champion of gossip, would no doubt have approved of its tenor. ‘Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip,’ Babitz wrote in her classic story collection, Slow Days, Fast Company. The remark is ostensibly a coy nod to her lover—she goes on to explain that the book contains ‘private asides written so he’ll read it’— but it conceals a quiet revelation. In her stories (and perhaps all stories), gossip-mongering is animated by an essentially novelistic impulse—a desire to know other people totally, to suck their secrets dry.
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“But our interest in celebrities is in part an interest in the inevitable clash between person and persona. The chasm between character and reality is where a canny biographer sets up shop, and Anolik is intrigued by the ways in which her subjects fell short of their public performances in their private lives. Babitz invites and accommodates this sort of probing. She was luxurious and prone to self-exposure, often literally: The cover of her first book featured a photograph of her in a bra and a feather boa. Even the image she crafted for herself was avowedly contradictory. She was a party girl and a disciplined writer, a socialite and an intellectual, a whirlwind of glamour who lived in a notoriously disgusting house. (One of her many lovers complained that there were cat hairs in all of the food she served.) Didion, in contrast, went to great lengths to achieve incredible feats of self-curation, both on and off the page. In person, she was proper and composed; in print, she was downright steely. She did her best to hide the cracks in her carefully polished facade, while Babitz had a way of bringing her imperfections to the fore.”
–Becca Rothfeld on Lily Anolik’s Didion & Babitz (The Washington Post)