Joan Didion Remains as Elusive as Ever. These Books Want to Fix That.

•Casey Schwartz

It’s still bright afternoon when writer Lili Anolik slips into the dim recesses of the Odeon restaurant. Here, at New York’s timeless destination for downtown cool, she prefers to sit in the same place every time, a small booth by the host’s stand.

Anolik orders an Earl Grey tea but furtively sips from a Pepsi she pulls from her purse. On the table: galleys of her new book, “Didion and Babitz,” out in November.

Despite the split billing in Anolik’s title, the conversation quickly turns to Joan Didion.

“She’s so opaque,” Anolik said. “I felt like I’ve been trying to understand her for years, but I’ve been standing outside a locked door.”

Anolik isn’t the only one trying to crack open that door. “Didion and Babitz” is one of four books featuring Didion written since her death in 2021, with at least two more scheduled in the years to come. The published books include a memoir from Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne about his family in Los Angeles; Cory Leadbeater’s memoir of his time working for Didion at the end of her life; and Evelyn McDonnell’s meditative tribute, “The World According to Joan Didion.” Next year, New York Times’ movie critic Alissa Wilkinson’s depiction of Didion in Hollywood will be published in March.

These writers, of course, bring their own gaze and interpretation of Didion, a figure whose distinctive blend of opacity and confession seems to invite dissection, speculation and projection perhaps more than any other contemporary writer. It’s not only Didion herself that these books grapple with, but the fascination she inspired and the enduring patina of cool she held onto for nearly 50 years.

Lynn Nesbit, Didion’s longtime agent and now one of her three literary executors, expressed a lack of enthusiasm for the trend. “It makes me somewhat uncomfortable that so many writers are trying to understand their own lives through the prism of examining Joan’s life and her work,” Nesbit said. “Their books become so much about them, and not about her.”

Anolik comes at Didion through the lens of a subject she already knows well: Eve Babitz, the fleshy, libidinous yin to Didion’s sinewy, controlled yang. The two lived in and wrote about Los Angeles amid the tumultuous years of the 1960s and ’70s, and knew each other well for a time. But their friendship lapsed when Babitz decided she couldn’t take Didion’s edits of her work, or Didion’s voice in her head.

Best known for her 1977 novel, “Slow Days, Fast Company,” Babitz fell into obscurity as Didion’s star rose. Decades later, it was Anolik who helped bring Babitz back into literary attention, with her 2019 biography “Hollywood’s Eve.”

After Babitz died in 2021, her sister, Mirandi, called Anolik to say that she had unearthed cardboard boxes filled with never-before-seen correspondence from Babitz’s one bedroom in West Hollywood. The first letter Anolik pulled was a scorching missive Babitz wrote to Didion in 1972 but never sent. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Babitz demanded.

Though initially reluctant to get sucked back into the force field of Babitz, Anolik couldn’t ignore the pull of the archive and everything it could reveal about both women.

“Didion wasn’t someone who was really important to me when I was coming up,” Anolik said. And this, she said, freed her to approach her subject without being “constrained by awe,” which, she believes, hampers other depictions.

In her book, Anolik describes Didion as “calculating” and “pitiless,” gathering telling instances she found in her research. “She uses all these things, emphasizing her own frailty, to disguise the fact that she’s a predator,” Anolik said. “She cops to it quite often, but you’ll miss it, because it’s the tininess, it’s the sunglasses, it’s the shyness. But she’s a killer.”

But Anolik professes to admire these qualities. “Anyone who is as shrewd at managing her career as Joan,” she said, “has to have her ruthless side.”

Yet Anolik discovered that even for Didion, it wasn’t a straight shot to the top. She tracked down the man who would become, for her, a Rosetta stone: Noel Parmentel Jr., Didion’s boyfriend in New York, the mysterious “N” to whom she dedicated her first book, “Run River.”

He was 97 years old when he got the call, but agreed to talk to Anolik, who rushed to Connecticut to meet him.

“I understood how she made herself Joan Didion,” Anolik said. “She was this small-town girl who was awkwardly shy.”

She added: “When it doesn’t work out with Noel, he tells her who to marry — and she does it.”

Thus began, Anolik argues, Didion’s long, famous marriage to John Gregory Dunne. Their marriage is one of many Didion myths that she sets out to complicate, amplifying long-existing speculation about Dunne’s sexuality.

Dunne, a well-known writer in his own right, was the brother of Dominick Dunne. Dominick’s son, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, published in June his own portrayal of his aunt Joan, one of the characters in his family memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club.”

In Griffin’s narrative, Didion is seen through the lens of a loving history, but one complicated by the events around the murder of Griffin’s sister, Dominique, a rising actress strangled to death by her boyfriend, John Sweeney, in 1982.

John Gregory Dunne and Didion had inadvertently brought the couple together, taking Dominique to Ma Maison, the French restaurant in Los Angeles they frequented, where Sweeney worked as a sous chef. When they got up to greet friends, Sweeney zeroed in on their young niece, alone at the table.

As Dominique’s murder trial began, along with the high-profile media circus that followed, Didion and Dunne departed for Paris, so that their then teenage daughter, Quintana, wouldn’t be called to testify. Griffin heard about their intended trip as the trial was getting underway.

“I had a lot of mixed feelings about that,” Griffin said. “I did feel somewhat abandoned and also kind of confused.”

Yet the relationship went deep. “They took me into their lives at a very early age and they were the coolest people I ever knew,” Griffin said. He made a documentary about his aunt in 2017 in which he said he ultimately cut a scene involving what he called “a difficult conversation” about Dominique’s trial.

In “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” Wilkinson, the movie critic, zooms in on the almost 40 years that Didion and Dunne worked for Hollywood. Wilkinson’s title is a fragment of Didion’s most famous and most misunderstood line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” has by now passed into Didion cliché, but it was not, Wilkinson points out, intended as a positive; it is not the “inspirational quotation” that many believe it to be.

Rather, storytelling, the imposition of narrative, regardless of truth, is our bulwark against chaos, against meaninglessness. And the stories themselves, Wilkinson argues, come from one place in particular: the movies. Didion “knows intimately that it is Hollywood, America’s dream factory, that has taught us who we are,” Wilkinson writes. It was Hollywood that was devoted to “telling us we were fine. We were going to be fine.”

And yet, what Didion already knows, and then finds out anew, is that we aren’t necessarily going to be.

Personal tragedy is the subject of one of her last books, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which was the great blockbuster success of her career, detailing the death of her husband. That book was followed by “Blue Nights,” detailing the death of her daughter, Quintana. Didion’s image late in life is often marked by grief and frailty. And it was then, in this period of vulnerability, that a young man, an aspiring writer himself, came to work for her.

As Didion’s assistant, Leadbeater writes about her last few years of life in his memoir, “The Uptown Local,” published in June.

Leadbeater’s book is a study in socio-economic contrast. He was awed by, and sometimes resentful of, her wealthy world: the tulips planted every spring on Park Avenue; the drivers her neighbors kept on standby all night. Leadbeater’s other life, by contrast, consisted of 3:30 a.m. trips to a Dunkin’ before visiting his father in prison. He saw Didion at once as his savior and, also, eventually, a kind of burden, as he watched friends he’d come up with launching their lives. “I was living as if married to a woman in her 80s,” he writes.

“It’s a profound thing to be with someone for whom every moment could be their last moment,” he said. “The anxiety was that if I made one mistake, it could be the end of her life.”

It was Leadbeater who carried Didion’s ashes home a few weeks after her death.