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Didion and Babitz
- Length: 13 hrs
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Publisher's summary
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work on the mutual attractions—and mutual antipathies—of Didion and Didion’s 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 a closet in the back of an apartment full of wrack, ruin, and filth was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, letters. No: inside a lost world.
This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and was centered on a two-story house rented by Joan Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, 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, drug trash.
7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, cool and reserved behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, a 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), who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. The two formed a complicated alliance: a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity; a friendship that was as rare as true love, as rare as true hate.
Didion, in spite of her confessional style, her widespread fame, 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—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.
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Story
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Sonny Boy
- A Memoir
- By: Al Pacino
- Narrated by: Al Pacino
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.
By: Al Pacino
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Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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Where I Was From
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Gabrielle De Cuir
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In her moving and insightful new book, Joan Didion reassesses parts of her life, her work, her history and ours. A native Californian, Didion applies her scalpel-like intelligence to the state’s ethic of ruthless self-sufficiency in order to examine that ethic’s often tenuous relationship to reality. Combining history and reportage, memoir and literary criticism, Where I Was From explores California’s romances with land and water; its unacknowledged debts to railroads, aerospace, and big government; the disjunction between its code of individualism and its fetish for prisons.
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California belongs to Joan Didion.
- By Darwin8u on 11-04-15
By: Joan Didion
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Dancing on My Own
- Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy
- By: Simon Wu
- Narrated by: Shawn K. Jain
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.
By: Simon Wu
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The Friday Afternoon Club
- A Family Memoir
- By: Griffin Dunne
- Narrated by: Griffin Dunne
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good.
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Not funny but still worthy
- By H. Winslow on 06-17-24
By: Griffin Dunne