At one point, Joan Didion was a writer, known for her books and essays, which people read and liked — or didn’t. There was The White Album, which everyone read, and A Year of Magical Thinking, which everyone bought, and an assorted many other titles that everybody claimed to know but probably didn’t. At her peak, she had devoted followers who loved everything from “Saint Joan,” and when people discussed her writing, they talked about its contents and style.

In that world, Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion and Babitz, a dual biography of Didion and her Los Angeles female writer colleague, Eve Babitz, would have been about their writing and careers, and her perspective would have been a refreshing antidote to the Joanites. It would have been about this moment, 1960s LA, when two very different writers, separated by eight years and two very different philosophies, and who died within days of each other, tried to capture the world they lived in and the parallel development of their two careers. Babitz’s argument won over time, even as her fame was ephemeral. And Didion’s enduring, increasing fame came in large part from how the world left her behind. But as Anolik at one point writes, “What if the competition wasn’t a competition at all? What if the competition was actually a cooperation, Joan and Eve writing L.A. together?” It is perhaps a tell about what is going on psychologically in books and essays about Didion that their authors have a tendency to refer to her by her first name, as though they were her pal.