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.
