‘Proust is the godfather of fashion’ / What writers’ clothes reveal about them

Joan Didion by Julian Wasser

‘Proust is the godfather of fashion’: what writers’ clothes reveal about them

This article is more than 9 years old

Samuel Beckett had a Gucci bag; Dorothy Parker worked for Vogue. A new book on writers’ style uncovers the hidden links between clothes and prose

Paula Cocozza
Sunday 16 July 2017

The title reads like a provocation: Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore. What? Shouldn’t authors, especially “legendary” ones, be exempt from fashion scrutiny? Surely we should look at their words, not their outfits. If they produced great works of art, who cares how they dressed?

 

Joan Didion
Jenni Belin.

HOW JOAN DIDION AND EVE BABITZ WERE THE ‘MADONNA AND COURTNEY’ OF THEIR TIME

Lili Anolik, author of the new book Didion and Babitz, argues that the iconic writers represent “two halves of American womanhood.¨

by SAMANTHA LEACH
NOVEMBER 13, 2024

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were not merely literary sensations. They’ve become symbols: platonic ideals of what it means to be a young woman with a keen eye, a cultivated style, and a sharp pen. (All you need to see on someone’s Instagram Story is a pic of the Eve’s Hollywood reissue, or a repost of Joan Didion’s Celine ad, to know what kind of woman you’re dealing with: a writer.) Though both are known for writing about 1960s Los Angeles, the friends-turned-rivals couldn’t have come about their iconography more differently. Eve was the bimbo-ish party girl who happened to become a writer; Joan was the highly-disciplined intellect who happened to write about the LA party scene. And in her new book about the pair, Didion and Babitz (out now), author Lili Anolik — who ushered in the Babitz renaissance after publishing a profile on her in Vanity Fair in 2014 — argues that what these women actually represent are “two halves of American womanhood.”

‘A spy in the land of the privileged / Why Eve Babitz’s cult Hollywood memoir still matters 50 years on

Eve Babitz

‘A spy in the land of the privileged’: why Eve Babitz’s cult Hollywood memoir still matters 50 years on

This article is more than 4 months old

In 70s LA, Eve Babitz partied with everyone from Salvador Dali to Jim Morrison, but she was also a trailblazing writer. As a new generation discover her work, her sister and agent celebrate her originality, ambition and lust for life

Kat Lister

Saturday 10 August 2024

In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sibling’s spunky request. Their mother said no. But she cushioned the blow by offering to get her a leopard print swimsuit instead. “There’s a picture of her wearing it reading Elinor Glyn,” Mirandi continues. “I mean, there you go,” she chuckles. “That’s what she gravitated to.”

 

Joan Didion, photographed by Bob Weidner in the 1950s.

Before Joan Didion Had John Gregory Dunne, There Was Noel Parmentel Jr.—A First and Searing Love

Didion’s marriage was one of the most revered in American letters. But when the man who came first broke her heart, the devastation lasted a lifetime.

Lili Anolik

18 November 2024

I first came across the name Noel Parmentel Jr. in 2022, when I found a letter Eve Babitz had written to her cousin Patricia Helton in 1976. “There are certain people who never actually venture into my scanning region, people [like] Noel Parmentel Jr. who I’ve heard about all my life from various people who’ve been torn to shreds by him and his charm,” she wrote. “Joan Didion’s next novel is apparently about Noel Parmentel Jr.”

 

Eve Babitz and Joan Didion may be dead. But their feud isn’t

Eve Babitz was a Hollywood it girl of the 60s and 70s, and the author of several witty, freewheeling chronicles of her LA life. Photograph: The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

A new book on the Los Angeles authors leaves no petty stone unturned as it explores their fraught friendship

By Lois Beckett in Los Angeles

Joan Didion, the original girlboss of American letters, keeps inspiring new takedowns. Critiquing Didion’s racism, the writer Myriam Gurba compared her to an onion: “She’s very white, very crisp, and she makes people cry.” An anonymous woman in a Los Angeles bar called Didion “that lady from Sacramento”. (Didion might have fooled the New York Times, but Angelenos know she wasn’t from Los Angeles.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Great Joan Didion

Joan Didion photographed for Interview by Matthew Rolston, 1983.

LEGEND

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Great Joan Didion

By Christopher Bollen

December 10, 2020

Unquestionably, Joan Didion has been the voice of a generation. Those pioneering, inveterately cool essay collections that bracketed a volatile decade, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), confirmed her crown long ago. But she has also been the voice of those who’ve followed—you can hear her concision; her taste in the spare, shimmery detail; her lean, muscular sentences; and her dogged questioning of perceived truths in every writer who has been heralded, in the intervening years, “the voice of their generation.” Didion is the model and exemplar, but she’s also just the best writer there is at melding the personal and the political, and bundling all the lit match- sticks of modern life into journalistic form.

Joan Didion / Blue Nights / Review

BLUE NIGHTS

by Joan Didion

Reviewed by William Doreski

Published on March 18, 2013

Joan Didion built her reputation on insightful journalism that muffled but acknowledged the author’s presence. Slouching Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, and other collections maintain a thin line between the recognition of the journalist’s speaking voice and the journalist as subject matter. Journalism becomes an act of witness; consequently, readers trust Didion’s accounts because they seem dramatically convincing in a way that conventional print reportage does not. Didion’s descriptions of the Haight-Ashbury community of the late 1960s and the aftermath of the Manson murders have become icons of contemporary nonfiction. Her novels either mime her nonfiction to catch something of the immediacy of contemporary life, as Play It As It Lays does, or they fail to generate much drama.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion / Reviewed by Maia Silber

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN

by Joan Didion

Reviewed by Maia Silber

Published on March 30, 2021

In a lecture she gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976, Joan Didion recalled her own undergraduate days at the school. In seminars, she said, she struggled to concentrate on Paradise Lost and “the Hegelian dialectic,” finding her mind wandering instead to the Bevatron laboratory she could see from her classroom window. She was not, she assured her audience, thinking about the military-industrial complex, but simply “wondering if the lights were on.”

Joan Didion / The Searcher

 

John Wayne

The Searcher

In 1965, nearly forty years before the publication of Where I Was From, her most recent and most sustained meditation on her native state of California, Joan Didion wrote “John Wayne: A Love Song.” 

By Hilton Als

JUNE 24, 2004

In 1965, nearly forty years before the publication of Where I Was From, her most recent and most sustained meditation on her native state of California, the novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote “John Wayne: A Love Song.” In the essay, Didion describes a trip she made to Estudio Churubusco, outside Mexico City. There a film was being shot–The Sons of Katie Elder, a western starring Dean Martin and John Wayne. For years before visiting the set, Wayne had loomed in Didion’s imagination as the kind of man–a man emblematic of the Old West–who’d build a woman a home “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” That this was a line Wayne crooned in another movie Didion saw when she was a child did not make the image of the house, the cottonwoods, the bend in the river and Wayne’s scripted intention any less real for her.

Last Words / Those Hemingway wrote, and those he didn’t

Ernest Hemingway


Last Words
Those Hemingway wrote, and those he didn’t.

By Joan Didion

October 25, 1998

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Joan Didion

Joan Didion, in her own words: 23 of the best quotes

The Californian author became the ultimate literary celebrity for her journalistic style. Here are some of her best quotes on writing, love, ageing and fear, plus a selection of essays

Marta Bausells
Thu 23 Dec 2021 20.12 GMT

Joan Didion inspired writers and readers for decades. Her journalism, memoirs, and cultural and political commentary made her a unique chronicler of 20th-century culture.

Obituaries / Joan Didion

Joan Didion

Joan Didion obituary

Detached observer of American society and political life through her collections of journalism, novels and screenwriting

Veronica Horwell
Thu 23 Dec 2021 21.22 GMT

The writing of Joan Didion, who has died 87, was mantra-like, mannered, even “set in its own modulations” (that was Martin Amis’s snipe). It was also unique and remarkable. Even the shape of her books was uncommon, the sentences spaced on pages as tall and narrow as king-sized cigarette packets.

 

Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne at work in Trancas, California, in 1972.

How Joan Didion the Writer Became Joan Didion the Legend

Joan Didion arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on the way to becoming one of the most important writers of her generation, a cultural icon who changed L.A.’s perception of itself. Lili Anolik mines the author’s early years to examine Didion before all that.

BY LILI ANOLIK

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

In a 1969 column for Life, her first for the magazine, Joan Didion let drop that she and husband, John Gregory Dunne, were at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu “in lieu of filing for divorce,” surely the most famous subordinate clause in the history of New Journalism, an insubordinate clause if ever there was one. The poise of it, the violence, the cool-bitch chic—a writer who could be the heroine of a Godard movie!—takes the breath away, even after all these years. Didion goes on: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.” I suppose I’m operating under a similar set of impulses—a mixture of candor, self-justification and self-dramatization, the dread of being misapprehended coupled with the certainty that misapprehension is inevitable (Didion’s style is catching, but not so much as her habit of thought)—when I tell you I’m scared of her.