Lili Anolik, DIDION & BABITZ
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby interviews journalist Lili Anolik about her vivid, engrossing, and outrageously provocative dual biography, DIDION & BABITZ. Lili describes the obsessive hunt that led her to Babitz, and then delves into the complex friendship between Babitz and Didion, the trove of unseen letters that changed everything, and the surprising love story that shaped Didion’s life and work. Lili also talks about her compulsive curiosity, her unconventional research methods, and what it really means to write about obsession.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Totally Booked Live at the Whitby Hotel. I'm so excited to be in front of a room of amazing people who came out to listen. And I will be interviewing Lily, Anilic, Diddian, and Babets. We have a lot to discuss. |
| 0:17.1 | Oh, I'm excited. Thank you so much for being here. All right, so welcome. |
| 0:22.0 | Why, Lily, did you become so obsessed with Eve Babitz? |
| 0:26.1 | You wrote about it in the book, and I loved that. |
| 0:28.4 | But what was it about her that got you hooked right away? |
| 0:31.9 | Well, I guess some of it's the Magellan spirit. |
| 0:35.6 | Like, you feel like you've discovered somebody, you know? |
| 0:38.1 | So I had been, I was unpublished. It's like 2010. I was on the subway, feeling bad about |
| 0:44.6 | myself. And I was reading this, does anybody hear know Joe Esther House? He did like the |
| 0:50.5 | screenplays for like showgirls and basic instincts, kind of great sleazy movies. |
| 0:54.9 | And he had this period where he was writing memoirs. They were also sleazy, and I love them. |
| 1:00.1 | And he wrote this one called Hollywood Animal, and he'd begin each chapter with a quote. |
| 1:04.8 | And there was one from a woman named Eve Babitz, and it was about L.A. and sex. |
| 1:09.3 | And I just was knocked out by it. And I remember |
| 1:11.7 | Googling her, and she was a writer, totally out of print, and I just started reading her books. |
| 1:17.9 | And I was thrilled by her, right? So I started stalking her. I knew she had been, like, |
| 1:22.2 | the one bit of personal information kind of out there on her, other than that in, like, 1963, I think, she'd pose naked with Marcel Duchamp playing chess. That was out there. But then I knew she- Pictures in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and she had like a great sex resume. I didn't know how great, but it was like... Wait, what is this sex resume? Is everyone supposed to have one? |
| 2:03.6 | Who here has a son? No, no, no. It's fine. Don't brag. I don't want to know. I don't want to know. You know, it was like, I knew, like, on her sex resume was, like, Jim Morrison and Harrison Harrison Ford. I knew it was a killer sex resume. And that was nothing to, compared to what I'd find out. It was a much longer, more impressive sex resume than even I had guessed. |
| 2:03.6 | Ed Roushay. And that was nothing compared to what I'd find out. It was a much longer and more impressive sex resume than even I had guessed. |
| 2:06.4 | Ed Ruchet, all this on it. |
| 2:12.9 | All like the key eagles, you know, like Don Henley, Glenn Fry, Annie Leavowitz, very young Steve Martin. |
| 2:14.2 | Anyway, she was great. |
... |
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