There’s been so much buzz around this book that, months ago, a newsletter I read was like, “This is going to be the book of the summer”—even though it wasn’t coming out until November! What’s it like for you to judge the success of a project outside of how it’s received publicly?
I’m just so used to writing niche stuff that interests a small group. I can feel it’s different with this project, because people want to talk to me, instead of me trying to hustle people to give me the time of day. This was just supposed to be a revision of Hollywood’s Eve, because these letters came to light after [Eve Babitz] had died. I’d written about the letter Eve wrote Joan [Didion] in ‘72 for Vanity Fair’s September 2022 issue. And I planned to just use that as an introduction. But the letter so fundamentally changed my vision of Eve. And then I felt like I was writing a shadow book on Joan. So at a certain point, when I’d fucked with the original so much, something like 91 percent [of the writing] was different. And I’m like, okay—that’s a different book.
You write in this book about your initial obsession with Eve being “unbalanced” and “fetishistic.” Can you talk about the role obsession plays in your work?
It’s completely like a love or sex thing for me, almost. I mean, it’s not a physical thing, but I get so obsessive, and that’s all I can see and all I can think about. I really was not eager to go back to Eve because—I know you’re not supposed to quote Woody Allen anymore—but what he says in Annie Hall: “It’s got to be like a relationship. It’s like a shark. You’ve got to keep going forward or you die.” I felt like I had to do right by her. And then I just got so immersed in it, and she just seemed so endlessly complicated, and so did Joan. So there was almost no resisting it.
When you’re in that mode, is there anything you do that’s self-protective to avoid burnout?
No, I don’t. I’m a very, very bad sleeper as it is. I feel like I am much less present in my family life. I always feel bad about that. I just don’t sleep, and my temper’s shorter, and it’s already short. The only balance is that I do have kids that need tending to, and I have a husband, and all that kind of stuff. So I am present, but this shit does just hijack my life.
How do you think Eve and Joan ended up influencing each other, if at all, in their work?
Joan, since 1979, I’m sure gave Eve a handful of thoughts. Eve would not have been on her mind. I’m sure in her mind, Eve was someone who got left in the dust, who was a casualty of the decade of the ‘70s, of that Manson-era Hollywood, and to be thought of with affection or exasperation, but not taken seriously.
But there was a period where they were all over each other. They’re both on the same scene, and Eve is a participant in the scene, and Joan is an observer of the scene, and there’s just a mutual fascination between the two. Joan absolutely cultivated, managed, watched, guarded over her reputation, absolutely obsessively. And she never put a foot wrong. Evie did not care. She had that courage. She referred to herself as a groupie. She fucked too much. She never got married. The big breasts, getting photographed naked…I think Eve both envied and rejected what Joan was.
There was almost this Madonna/whore complex, where Joan was viewed as the patron saint of the literary world, and Eve was this sort of reckless mess of an artist. Do you think for women writers as public figures, there’s any more opportunity for nuance today?
I don’t really think there is. The sexism is funny. When I had this Bennington podcast, writers from, like, The New Yorker would call it gossipy. And I’m like, well, first of all, what people desire and how they behave is a serious indication of who they are. And fiction is higher gossip. I think that’s what Virginia Woolf calls it. I open with a quote from Eve, where she talked about that great letter that she wrote Joseph Heller. It’s one of the most thrilling things she wrote, where she actually talks about the sexism she felt she faced. She would never whine publicly. That would be against her code, against her style. But that same kind of misogyny exists.
I got nominated for a magazine award this year for a piece on Caroline Calloway, which, lovely, I was so happy. But when I’m there, and I’m seeing who my competition is and who’s going to win, it’s stuff that’s either about children getting shot at school, or you either put someone in prison with your article or you got someone out.
Sofia Coppola, when she was really good, she got attention, but she didn’t get those heavy-hitting awards. Kathryn Bigelow will win it for doing a war movie—and she’s great. It’s not a put down of her, but it’s like, they’ll nominate the woman when they feel like she’s taking on masculine, serious topics. It’s that kind of sexism.
For me, part of what makes your writing so compelling is the dishy aspect. And if so much of your work already revolves around reclaiming stereotypes about women, isn’t gossip a fascinating lane to do that through?
Yeah, it is. I also feel like it’s a kinship with Eve, whom I actually don’t feel like I’m very much like, except when she talks about how she can’t get into the big important meetings with the VIP men. Gossip is how she learns everything, and she says, “I’d rather it that way.” So would I. I feel like you’re getting the real history through those conversations.
When you’re doing a project that requires so much historical deep diving, where do the research and writing intersect?
It’s like it’s instinct. I spent a huge amount of time doing the [Vanity Fair] profile of Eve in terms of research, then doing [Hollywood’s Eve] was another level. Before, I was unpublished and I couldn’t get access, but I feel like I’ve kind of been on the scene now for about 10 years, and I know Griffin Dunne pretty well. It’s who’s giving you access. All that changes what you’re able to do.
And my way is so impractical. If I knew any other way to do this, I would do it. It’s crazily inefficient. I am still under contract to do that book on Bennington, which started out as a very long oral history for Esquire, then went through a hugely long podcast. It was like a book that talks. I just feel like the deeper in you can get…the deeper, deeper, deeper, the better, the better, the better.
Do you have any sort of hard and fast guardrails around your writing time and practice?
I do a lot in the middle of the night. I don’t drink or take drugs or anything like that, but I can only imagine the shape my liver is in because I have taken Nyquil every night since I was 18. I pass out in a clenched, upset sleep for three or four hours. And I actually sleep better when I’m not working. But when I’m working, it’s not pretty. I’m not good at balancing, which I’m sure I will actually need to do at a certain point to keep my life sane.
Do you have any sort of small rituals? What’s the setup of your writing space?
I have three cork boards going with different projects. I have a poster of The Shards, one of Bret [Easton Ellis]’s books. I have a letter from Pauline Kael and some pictures of Chet Baker. And I drink a lot of regular Coke and Diet Pepsi when I’m working.
As a working writer, you write things that are an obligation to somebody else, and you also have this piece of your writing life that’s just chasing your own whims and passions. How do you balance those?
Listen, I’ll be direct. I do well for a writer, I think, [but] that’s basically poverty level. I’ve been with the same guy since I was in college. He’s a cosmetic doctor, so I don’t have to worry about money. So, basically, I just do what I want to do. I’m extremely good with deadlines. I’m a professional and all that. But I don’t know, making money at this is extremely, extremely hard.
Do you think if you weren’t in that situation, you would’ve gutted it out in the same way?
Probably, because it’s so important to me. But I don’t know if I’d have been able to have kids. Life just costs so much fucking money. My sense of things is that we’re going back to Shakespeare’s day, where basically an artist would have a patron. And there’s vestiges of them, but it’s not a healthy system. So it seems like you have to think of a new way to do it, because the old way just does not seem feasible to me anymore. The one thing you could do is if you get a teaching job—that seems to be still an option. But even with Hollywood work, of all my friends [in the industry], very few are making a living at it. And these are people you would consider quite successful.
Did you have one of those childhood experiences where you were like, “I am a writer”?
To say I was a writer would just seem too bold or too egomaniacal—or just nuts. But I was a bad sleeper since I was a kid and I read all the time. I would try to read very hard books. For Christmas, when I was 14, my dad gave me Pauline Kael’s last two collections. She had just retired from The New Yorker, and I loved her so much. She was just it.
Is the letter in your office a letter from her to you?
It is. To get into Princeton, I wrote an essay on reading her for the first time. And when I was a freshman, I wrote her a letter and sent it to The New Yorker, and she wrote me back, saying she was too sick to meet. But then I ended up doing my senior thesis on her, and that was my first time writing something long, and hustling, actually getting interviews. I interviewed a guy who’d written a good piece on her, an art critic named Jed Pear. And I remember he showed me a letter from her, and he left the envelope out, and I read it upside down and I got her address off of it. I think I got a boyfriend to drive me out to her house the next weekend, and I put a letter in her mailbox with no return address so she’d know I drove—I was that obsessive. Anyway, she called me the next day and then I went down to see her.
Where does that boldness come from in you?
I probably learned it by doing that, because I was self-conscious. I always think of the last line of a Salinger short story, “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” It’s two college friends, both around 28, which I guess was middle-aged then. Both get unhappy in their lives and they get drunk over the course of a long, snowy afternoon. And at the end one cries to the other and says, “I was a nice girl once, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?” I think about that all the time, because I used to be so polite. And now I’m just used to getting yelled at and told I’m a jerk or to go away. I just don’t mind at this point.
What’s the most profound thing you’ve taken away from all of this dissecting of writers and writers’ lives?
Well, anyone who’s good, that’s the thing. That’s what they are before anything else, before they’re even human. So I think of the line in Double Indemnity, like Barbara Stanwyck talking to Fred McMurray, and they’re going to kill her husband. And she says, “Straight down the line,” and he says, “Straight down the line.” Later in the movie, another character says, “You know what straight down the line means? It means you end in the graveyard”—meaning you’ve got to be willing to just go all the way.
I know temperamentally I’m not well matched with Joan, and I guess I give her a hard time, but also I’m totally in awe of her. She was like Eve, in that way. They were writers before they were anything else. And the commitment was total. I feel like a real writer or a real artist would feel that you only ever try your absolute best. It’s not to say you’re going to hit it. You’re rarely going to hit your best level, and your very best level might be just enough to be acceptable.
There was a TikTok I saw recently where someone was like, your ability is never going to match your taste, and your entire artistic life is just trying to get them to converge—and they never, ever will.
That’s beautiful. That’s totally true. If you’re willing to just fucking pedal to the metal and try your absolute hardest, you might get close-ish at the very best. But there’s no comparison between Joan’s career and Eve’s career. Joan sustained a high level much longer. And even when it’s a not-good Joan book, it’s still really a very good piece of craftsmanship.
Eve, when she was not good, was really not good. But she has greatness for me with Slow Days, Fast Company. She needed the right boyfriend, the boyfriend who was gay, but not all the way gay, loved her, but not that much, was just elusive enough to keep her attention. She needed the exact right editor. She needed to be on just the right amount of drugs, and she needed her confidence to be at a certain level, while also feeling enough useful self-hatred to hit this really high level. And she couldn’t sustain it. She hit it once. It’s all you’ve got to do.
Lili Anolik recommends:
The new Redd Kross album, which my friend Josh Klinghoffer produced.
For Keeps, the old greatest-hits collection of Pauline Kael, the one you can’t get on Kindle.
Fanta Orange Zero.
Tell Me Lies on Hulu.
Every bit of Courtney Love content available on Instagram and TikTok. (There is no such thing as a bad Courtney Love clip.)
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lindsay Miller.
Lindsay Miller | Radio Free (2024-11-29T08:00:00+00:00) Writer Lili Anolik on total commitment to the creative path. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/11/29/writer-lili-anolik-on-total-commitment-to-the-creative-path/
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