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Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions�and mutual antagonisms�of Didion and her 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 Joan Didion, revealed at last� Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental 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, and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion, a mystery behind her dark glasses and cool expression; an enigma inside her storied marriage to John Gregory Dunne, their 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), a woman who burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, 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�letters found in those sealed boxes, letters so intimate you don�t read them so much as breathe them�as the key to unlocking Didion.