I Wish Eve Babitz had a blog

My Thoughts on Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

Hello all. I'm writing this (typing this) on my laptop at 1:18 am, even though I've been trying to give myself blue light sunsets. I get really good about that sort of stuff and then I end up bored, staying up one or two nights a week just to schedule some emails or get some thoughts down. At. Least. It's. Not. Instagram.

I started reading Didion & Babitz in December of 2024 after my parents got it for me for Christmas. I new, vaguely of the book, because Anolik had moderated an Airmail event that I went to (with Bella Ve and two interns) last summer. Bella Ve mentioned that the person being interviewed was Joan Didion's nephew and that Anolik was responsible for the Babitz resurgence.

I also want to mention that as I started reading the book, I connected with Lili who is a Princeton Alumna (like myself) and had her on the podcast to discuss the book. At that point, I think I was ~75 pages in.

I bop around between books a lot. I always remember reading things on the plane, and reading this one on the way back from Kansas stuck with me at it's beginning. I was dating someone I thought I could maybe marry. I was happy, you know?

And I think it's a well written book. It has a cool style and discusses two interesting women, while pitting them against one another in a researched, posthumous, yet self-aware away. I lost a friend in the middle of this book. I broke up with the person I thought I could marry (twice) and changed my mind a few more times. I stood across a table from Anolik explaining that I wanted to be married with two kids before 30, realizing as I said it out loud, that my friend who was only 30 did not have children, and that perhaps I was finding weird ways to mourn.

I've never been really keen on Didion. I had to read Goodbye to All That for college and remembered it, but not super fondly. I read The Year of Magical Thinking and felt really tepid on it. But Sex & Rage gave me legs to confront this unnamable repression that I'd grown up with.

I think the thing I'm left with after finishing this book is that there is a clear, contemporary distinction between artist and writer. A writer writes. They can craft clear, sharp sentences, and get an idea across really clearly. But an artist has a way of looking at the world that can't be replicated. That can only be experienced through their work or through literally being with them.

I keep thinking about Eve Babitz and then man telling her "is that the blue your using?" How Eve latched onto that phrase. I have had many phrases like this throughout my life. Like:

• "not that type of curly" or

• "we're looking for a different voice. A louder voice" or

• "even your laugh is sexual" or

• "you're too hot for church" or

• "I'm in town sometimes and want to spend time with you" from someone who I really just wanted a college recommendation from.

I, like Eve, had a Marilyn phase. For the past two years, I've struggled to feel like a real person in the eyes of others. I call it getting "Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ed," but my wonderful, kind father said "Maybe people really do just like the way your mind works."

I recently went home for a few weeks. I was depressed. I was getting too thin and couldn't see it. And standing in the Medicine Lodge, Kansas public library, I reached for Marilyn Monroe's journals. I went to the old Presbyterian church and leafed through it as I played a couple of songs I've written on the piano while my father wandered around.

I have said in conversation with one friend and one former flame that being an artist is insanity. It's like riding this constant wave of highs and lows, highs and lows and trying to maintain something sustainable while still producing beautiful work that shares your perspective of the world with others. I think artists also have an ethical responsibility to make work that leaves the person consuming it more healed than they were when they came to the piece of work, or as Prince says "gives hope" instead of discouragement . I think artists who get lost in the industry game fail this mission.

Anolik, on my podcast said something to the degree of how all biographical work, looking back on the past, is subjective. I think, as an artist, it becomes a little bit terrifying, you know, to realize that one person could collect all of your letters and notes and such and create a new sort of story out of your life. To which, I ask, who are you living your life for? Who are you making your art for? I've been realizing a lot lately that the industrialization of art has this funny way of making ourselves pigeon hole ourselves.

I started collaging last summer after my heart got broken one too many times. I had all of these spillover feelings and needed to look at them in a new form. So, when I read that Eve collaged--God, I nearly gasped. And at the end here, we're left with these two women pitted against one another, you know? And as a female writer, we're left being told that we have to choose. Respectful wife or party girl. Writer or artist. Madonna or Whore.

I don't want to choose.

When I left Kansas to return to New York, I realized all at once that I grew up on sad girl tumblr. But that when I was really down and out and needed healing, I found myself floating toward Black woman hypergamy tumblr. I listened to every Destiny's Child album on an Amtrak back. Was surprised by how much of it sounded like gospel. How healing the music really is, with the undertones of Gospel and female friendship.

Didon and Babitz were geniuses in their own respects. Lili is a modern day phenomenon.

But now, I'm left thinking of Maya Angelou. Of Alice Walker. Of women who wrote honest works of unearthing, of healing, as others played the industry game.

Because in this book it seems to me that the only real winner was Jim Morrison. At least he got to gallop around a stage a lot and croon his heart out. But he even knew that mass media would make things get weird:

If I had to pick anyone in this book to be. To replicate, I think I'd be Jim Morrison. I've realized that art is the thing that heals. Art is the thing that keeps you going, and God, maybe if Marilyn had a blog she would have been sane because people would have realized that she was brilliant and needed to just keep on keeping on and giving herself purpose and beauty without giving up the rights to her very being.

Artists are enigmatic. They remind us that we are human, because in spite of mass media, in spite of industrialization, in spite of misinterpretation, they are determined to see the beauty in any moment.

I am an artist. And I finally feel like I can claim that word because I have a book of my own coming out. If you are an artist don't waste your time trying to become famous. Stop trying to become famous. Let go. Trust. Surround yourself with other artists. I want to marry an artist, I think. Someone who makes things with their hands and can look at me when I go on my weird little tangents (Eve had artist non-linear brain) and think that I'm making perfect sense and make me feel seen.

I wrote this song when I was depressed. It helped me think of something better. Use your art like that.

I love the USPS:

I will keep blogging I think. Because if, someday, some young writer takes up an obsession with me, you can always come back to hotliterati.com to set the record straight.

Yours, but also mine, and most importantly God's,

Hailo