Lili Anolik + Carole Radziwill: Didion and Babitz

Join us for an in-person event with contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author Lili Anolik for the paperback release of Didion and Babitz

About this Event

Join us for an in-person event with contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author Lili Anolik for the release of the paperback version of Didion and Babitz. Joining Lili in conversation is acclaimed journalist and previous Real Housewife of New York Carole Radziwill. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, and more!

Joan Didion is revealed at last in this “vivid, engrossing” (Vogue), and outrageously provocative dual biography “that reads like a propulsive novel” (Oprah Daily) revealing the mutual attractions—and antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972

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. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.

7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ‘n’ rollers, and drug trash. 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, their union as tortured as it was enduring. 7406 Franklin Avenue was 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.

Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.

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. And “what the book makes clear is that Didion and Babitz were more alike than either would have liked to admit” (Time).

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. She is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Hollywood’s Eve and Didion and Babitz. Her last podcast, Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College, was produced by Cadence13. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Carole Radziwill is widely recognized for her starring role on Bravo’s wildly popular reality soap opera, The Real Housewives of New York City where the Bravo fandom somewhat mistakenly dubbed her the “voice of reason." She left after six seasons citing “irreconcilable differences” and also, “that she’d had enough.”

Carole Radziwill isn’t your average reality star—mainly because she had a real job before reality TV. She started her career at ABC News, producing for 20/20, Peter Jennings Reporting, Primetime Live, and Day One, back when people still watched network news. She won a few Emmys and some other awards no one really remembers, least of all her. In 2001, she went to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division and produced segments for a Jerry Bruckheimer/ABC series which was kind of like Saving Private Ryan meets Nightline.

Carole left ABC News in 2002 to write her first book, What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship and Love. It was published by Scribner in 2005 and landed at number four on the New York Times Bestseller List—just below Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, which really captured the literary mood of the nation.

In 2014, she published her second book, The Widow’s Guide to Sex & Dating, a dark comedy about love, sex & death. Famously, it contains not a single sex scene. Still, HBO and Critical Content optioned it—proof that no one actually reads anything in Hollywood. After a few years of “development,” it was quietly shelved, next to all those other brilliant ideas everyone conveniently forgot about.

In 2021, Carole joined The Moth, the creative storytelling equivalent of a TED Talk but with fewer billionaires. She debuted a short story titled The Cartier Curse, about a tank watch that once belonged to Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In true Carole fashion, all the men die. It aired on The Moth Podcast in May 2024 and—unsurprisingly—was a huge hit.

In addition to the whole career thing—Carole earned a BA in English Literature from Hunter College and an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, because, why not? She was a finalist for Stanford’s prestigious John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship but completely blew the in-person interview by being, well, herself.

Carole’s working on a bunch of writing projects that may or may not ever see the light of day—but if they do, she plans to sell them for an obscene amount of money, buy a lake house in Como, and fuck off.

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