Why Men Should Read “Cool Girl” Lit

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I am no arbiter of cool, but I think anyone would have a difficult time denying the title to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. For everything they had in common as California natives of the same era writing about many of the same places and people, these two writers had just as many stark contrasts. Even their versions of cool operate in different realms. Didion’s is captured in the many black-and-white photos of her that proliferate in the literary world, from tote bags to bookmarks to nearly every single cover of any book written about her. Hers is a severe, sentence-fragment kind of cool. Babitz’s cool is the charmer’s cool: gregarious, seductive, biting, intimidating, hilarious, hot. Didion’s cool was quiet and physically unassuming, which she used to her advantage in her reportage. Babitz’s cool was boisterous and socially dominating—the kind of cool that would drink you under the table and then go home with you.

Another contrast: Didion has remained a prominent figure, though she’s become almost ubiquitous in the past two decades, whereas Babitz’s career followed a much (much) rockier path. In fact, until 2015, when an article in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik sparked renewed interest in Babitz’s work, many of her books were out of print. Anolik then expanded that piece into Hollywood’s Eve, a hybrid biography of Babitz’s life and career spliced together with Anolik’s reflections on her own relationship with Babitz in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair attention. Then, a few years after Hollywood’s Eve, Babitz passed away (one week before Didion did), and Anolik discovered a box of materials she hadn’t seen before, which included a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, a note so telling and revealing and evocative that Anolik had to return to her subject a third time, only now with a compelling foil. The result is Didion & Babitz, truly the culmination of Anolik’s already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion.

Anolik uses the phrase “a man’s woman” to describe both of her subjects in Didion & Babitz, and it struck me as ironic that these two figures could be, as personalities, so appealing to men and yet, as writers, mostly seem to appeal to women. At the very least, much of the commodification of Didion’s and Babitz’s cool is aimed at women. Didion in particular is so universally known that pretty much any woman embarking on a literary career will inevitably be faced, again and again, with her essays. Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, puts it this way: “I don’t think I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books.” In Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour puts it a little differently: “I have read Didion my whole life, and have been told I should worship Didion my whole life.”

Understandably, many women have a complicated relationship with Didion. But what relationship, if any, do men have with her? And what about Babitz, whose reputation as a “groupie” often discounts her credibility? Is it because of the “Cool Girl” label? Do men think these writers will only reach women? Or are men reluctant to learn the truth about how women think, live, believe? Are they afraid of what they’ll learn? About women? About themselves?

When Didion and Babitz started out, they entered a hostile literary environment where some men spoke of women writers like this:

Norman Mailer, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind the fact that he wrote this in 1959, the same year Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House and Lorraine Hansberry premiered A Raisin in the Sun—Mailer manages to toss pretty much any non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Jewish person into his pool of also-wrotes. This is the secret core of prejudice: It is never isolated. It will always indict more types of people under its purview. In this way, bigotry is all-inclusive.

Let’s start with Didion. Her literary career began officially in 1956, when as a senior at UC Berkeley she won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest administered by Vogue, where she would work as a copywriter until the mid-sixties. Anolik points out that although Didion liked to wax proletariat, as in her claim that “the people with whom I preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations,” she was, as Anolik writes, “every inch the all-American bourgeois girl.” She was also decidedly ambitious. At the end of eighth grade, she gave the graduation speech in front of her classmates and their families. In high school, she sat on the Sophomore Ball committee, worked on the yearbook staff, was elected to the student council, and hobnobbed with the children of elites, such as Nina Warren, the daughter of California’s then-governor Earl Warren (of the Warren Commission fame). At Berkeley, she joined a sorority, where she befriended Barbara Brown, the daughter of Pat Brown, another California governor. Also during this period, she wrote her first short stories, reported for the school’s newspaper (including an interview with the poet W.H. Auden), and won a place in the same guest-editor program at Mademoiselle that Sylvia Plath had won two years before, which she would later immortalize in The Bell Jar.

At Vogue and later Life and The Saturday Evening Post, Didion launched a career as an essayist and journalist, though her true ambition lay in fiction. Indeed, her first book was a novel, Run River, which debuted in 1963, but it wasn’t until the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that Didion began to establish herself as a major writer and generational voice. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, she was counted among the ranks of the New Journalists, an umbrella term for magazine writers (from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson to Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin) who challenged the conventions of journalistic style and form. For decades, she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter with her husband and co-writer, John Gregory Dunne, though few of their screenplays were actually filmed; they were more prolific as script doctors. She was known for her detached style, often referred to as “cool,” which works perfectly in concert with the black-and-white Julian Wasser photos of her that feature on the covers of any book written about her.

From a certain perspective, one might reasonably assume that the Didion so described—native of the West Coast, working in Hollywood, participating in a nonfiction revolution, an epitome of Cool wearing sunglasses in ads for French luxury brands—would lean, or even swing, toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. But although her allegiances changed and evolved throughout her long career, she tended, on a whole, toward the right. Her perspective has been described alternately as “a Goldwater Republican” (Bret Easton Ellis), “a dyed-in-the-wool Republican” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), and “among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America” (Thomas Mallon) on the one hand, while on the other she’s been called an “apostate” (along with John Leonard) by her former editor William F. Buckley. Additionally, one of her iconic black-and-white portraits was emblazoned on a tote bag for the website Literary Hub, a decidedly liberal publication. She’s also been described as a feminist by writer Evelyn McDonnell; “not a feminist, my ass,” is how she puts it. Writers as various as the conservative firebrand Christopher Hitchens, the pop culture writer Alana Massey, and The New Yorker critic Hilton Als have considered themselves devotees.

That’s because Didion isn’t so easy to pin down politically. She herself characterized her politics as “pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics,” the “same as they were when I was voting for [Barry] Goldwater.” She dismissed feminism in the seventies, refused to read Virginia Woolf, and once declared, “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper” and that he “is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” She could, at times, espouse a by-your-own-bootstraps ideology we still hear right-wingers spout today. Yet she could also accurately diagnose the media’s racist groupthink about the Central Park Five in 1989, see through the Republicans’ mission to impeach Bill Clinton by any means, and generally capture the duplicitous realpolitik of twentieth-century America. During the rise of Ronald Reagan, a disillusioned Didion registered as a Democrat—“the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so”—only to discover that the switch “did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue.”

In American politics, Didion remained her most pitiless and unforgiving; her repeated mention of Goldwater seems spiked with equal parts nostalgia and resentment. In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion writes, “It was clear for example by 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In 2001, she remarked in an interview with L.A. Weekly, “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” Her disillusionment with the American political system might well be her greatest gift to the men of today: By falling out of line with mainstream conservatism while never fully embracing conventional liberalism, Didion maintained an outsider status that both elevated her analysis and made her career, retrospectively, a benchmark against which to measure the right’s cyclical descent into fascism.

Here is how a contemporary man should approach reading Didion to get the very most out of the experience: One can follow Didion’s trajectory, her merciless observation of American political and cultural life, as a narrative of how American conservatism has radically shifted since the sixties. Not that the Republicans of this era were moral paragons by any stretch, but there is one hell of a contrast between Eisenhower warning about the military industrial complex and Donald Trump nakedly trumpeting it. If Didion was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican” in her early career, how does she compare to our present-day diehards? How do her conclusions (as vague or as lofty as they may be at times) about American power and money, about the futility of our electoral process, the crass, calculated cynicism of it—how do these square with conservative thought now?

Reading Didion, then, is to read through our recent history as much as it is to read about it. Men can read her essays, her reportage, her immaculate nonfiction for Didion’s own perspective, but what’s most productive is to read her against everyone else.

Eve Babitz is another story altogether. Her Cool is the playful, flamboyant type. Her writing brims with intelligence and insight, but its lessons and insights focus on individual human foibles rather than macro concerns about society as a whole. She was an It Girl, a groupie, a hanger-on, and a legendary charmer. In her writing, which may not possess the same skill as Didion’s, we find a frank and guileless account of a generation from a unique perspective—one that’s usually overlooked, if not downright disdained. It’s most succinctly–albeit grossly–put by Julian Wasser, the photographer behind Didion’s iconic images. Wasser also shot an iconic image featuring Babitz: a photo of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve. Anolik adroitly uses Wasser’s characterization of the two experiences to typify the contrast between Didion’s and Babitz’s reputations:

“A piece of ass” like Babitz, though, could gain access to areas even unassuming reporters like Didion could not. She didn’t hobnob with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities to get their stories; rather, she told stories about hobnobbing with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities because that’s how she lived. They were her stories.

Babitz had an enormous pool to draw from. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a studio violinist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. As a child growing up in Hollywood (she would attend Hollywood High), she was exposed to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bernard Herrmann, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bertrand Russell. In her early twenties, Babitz wrote, she was “alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.” She was, in Anolik’s wonderful phrasing, “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat.”

Babitz would go on to do things like design the album cover for Buffalo Springfield Again; introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí; appear as an extra in The Godfather Part II; and sleep with the likes of Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Jackson Browne, and Joseph Heller. She chronicled some of these scenes, in her best work, with stunning fluency, despite the fact that she “didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men.” This line comes from the title story of her collection Black Swans, and she elaborates on her view of writers: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” A bit of deflection, to be sure, as Babitz cared so deeply about but felt so inadequate for literary creation that minor discouragements delayed her apprenticeship. Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t come out until 1974, even though she’d completed a draft of a novel “about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood” ten years earlier, when she was twenty.

Slow Days, Fast Company

Her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., is her best book, as it displays most fully the kind of uncomfortable truths Babitz could so casually wield. The whole book, a brief prefatory note explains, is essentially an attempt by Eve, the narrator, to “get this one I’m in love with” to read her writing by making it all about him. In reality, this was the artist Paul Ruscha; in the book, his name is Shawn. In Didion & Babitz, Anolik describes Slow Days as depicting Los Angeles with “a total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals.” This, ultimately, is where the great value of Babitz’s work lies. Her stories and essays come without any moralizing, and without any attempts to mold reality into a recognizable shape. Yet so much of her writing has an air of truth to it, and an authority in its vision. Her assessments of herself and those in her orbit could be brutal, even unkind—but the truth is in the character Eve’s firm belief in them. Babitz’s devastatingly frank voice and savage wit, in life and in prose, still hit you with a pang of recognition, only she doesn’t instruct you what to do with the feeling. For instance, when Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece renewed interest in Babitz’s work, leading to reprints of her books, her line to Anolik was this: “It used to be only men who liked me. Now it’s only girls.”

In her final years (she died in 2021), Babitz veered into right-wing paranoia and delusion, ranting to Anolik on the phone about how she was having an affair with Donald Trump (which obviously wasn’t true). Anolik told me how she worried that Babitz would run into trouble on the streets of West Hollywood, where she lived. She wanted to don one of those bright red MAGA hats, “so I’d buy her Chinese MAGA hats—you know, MAGA in Chinese characters,” Anolik said, in order to obscure her rabid Trumpism without her knowing. “She loved those hats.” She lived in filth, the stench so bad Anolik could barely stand it. “I think there was a dead cat in her place,” she told me, “a dead something.” But despite the tragic nature of where she ended up, Babitz’s record of late-twentieth-century America is a gift from someone canny enough and charming enough to gain entry to its most rarefied spaces.

“If a man is looking for insights and angles into women,” Anolik told me, “I’d recommend Eve, if only because I believe that Eve, at her best—by which I mean, in Slow Days, Fast Company, her one masterpiece—was a better translator of female sensations and stratagems. In Slow Days, Eve offers up to readers a study of feminine consciousness that has extraordinary charm and verve, not to mention expansiveness."

In her first book on Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, Anolik categorized the writer with the New Journalists, which struck me as arguable, perhaps, but not really accurate. When I asked her about it, she was quick to say that she no longer sees it this way. “I’m so glad I got a second crack at Eve,” she said, because for Anolik, Babitz now falls into the tradition of the “artist-adventuress,” an “American Colette.” I completely agree. Her antecedents were figures like the Russian writer Teffi and the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her contemporaries the art groupies Ultra Violet and Candy Darling, and her descendants Gawker’s Emily Gould and the poet/essayist Kim Addonizio. These writers were best in the short form, didn’t always produce large catalogs of work, and suffered, personally and professionally, from cultures dismissing them as “pieces of ass,” as gossips, as gushing TMI-coded dilettantes.

Here, at last, is the most important lesson Babitz can teach men: Women who live unconventionally, women who drink and do drugs, women who fuck, women who talk, women who reject you at the bar, and women who make art out of all of those things—their inner lives are just as deep as yours, if not deeper. Their perspectives show them a side of society men rarely glimpse: the barrage of dismissal and obstruction and condemnation, and the constant threat of violence and subjugation. Babitz, who was as big a fan of feminism as Didion, was a victim of this herself. She internalized a belief that women shouldn’t write because it might put off men. Can you imagine if one of the twentieth century’s most lively and original chroniclers never wrote a word because of the insecurities of men?

I say these are the lessons from Didion and Babitz that men might learn, but after last week’s election results, I don’t have much faith in American men, no matter how many writers not like them we expose them to. Women have told men about the danger they regularly feel. They’ve written at length about sexism, chauvinism, the patriarchy; they’ve campaigned for suffrage, bodily autonomy, marital agency, sexual freedom, and financial equity. Men know these things. Have known these things. And yet here we are, with a nation of men for whom rampant misogyny and sexual predation are not disqualifying. Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women. In a 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, Didion remarked that Stewart’s success was not that of “a woman who made the best of traditional skills” but rather “the story that has historically encouraged women, even as it has threatened men.” For all the strides made by women in the past sixty years, we’re still living, sadly, in Norman Mailer’s America.

So men can go ahead and read Didion and Babitz as much as they want, but I can’t help recalling something Babitz, ever the cutting realist, said after she went through a horrifically painful fire accident in the late nineties: “People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.”

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