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    Didion & Babitz: A Belletrist Book Club pick

    £9.89
    £10.99
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9781805463948
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorAnolik, Lili
    Pub Date03/07/2025
    BindingPaperback
    Pages352
    Publisher: ATLANTIC BOOKS
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    An outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the complicated relationship between Joan Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

    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.