In the late 1970s, Joan Didion sent her friend Susanna Moore a note containing two pieces of advice: ‘Read The Golden Bowl’; ‘Stop running away.’ It arrived just after Moore had abruptly moved from Los Angeles to London without telling Didion she was leaving. If Lili Anolik is to be trusted, there is a good chance that the note was written on personalised stationery, with ‘JOAN DIDION DUNNE’ engraved at the top. In Didion and Babitz, Anolik remarks that Didion ‘always – at least in the notes I saw – ran a line through the DIDION’. If ‘Joan Dunne’ was how she wished to be known, why didn’t she order stationery engraved with just that? Was it because she wanted to call attention to the fact that she, a major writer, was allowing her identity to be subsumed into that of her husband, a minor writer? 

It’s a good question, and a good detail – a near-perfect encapsulation of why
Didion evokes such powerful reactions in so many people and why some of us can’t stop thinking (and writing) about her. It’s all there in miniature – the famous marriage, the glimpse at a domestic life that is both orderly and glamorous, the deliberate highlighting of the building materials with which she is constructing a literary and a public self, the utterly misleading sense that she has accidentally exposed some sort of personal vulnerability when in fact she is entirely in control. 

Didion’s carefully cultivated contradictions provoke strong feelings: possessiveness, fear, adulation, annoyance, reverence, the urge to demystify. Almost all those emotions are on display in these three books.

Anolik is on the demystification express. She doesn’t like Didion; she announces she’s on ‘Team Babitz’, as if there were a competition between the