A Year in Reading: Lili Anolik

For obvious reasons, I spent a lot of time this past year reading and rereading and rereading some more Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. (Hang on, maybe it’s not obvious: I have a new book out called Didion & Babitz.) Reading, as well, writers in the Didion-Babitz orbit. Key husbands: John Gregory Dunne. Key brothers-in-law: Dominick Dunne. Key nephews and/or barely-legal sex partners: Griffin Dunne (Didion’s nephew; Babitz’s barely-legal sex partner). Key boyfriends: Dan Wakefield, Grover Lewis, Joseph Heller. Key friends: Susanna Moore, Colman Andrews, Tom Nolan.

My next project—I hope my next project, my next project if I can pull it off, if I’m lucky—involves the novelist/memoirist/writer’s writer Paula Fox, and Paula Fox’s granddaughter, musician/actress/walk-on-the-wild-side, Courtney Love. I read everything Fox wrote. (Everyone’s favorite Fox, Desperate Characters, is also my favorite Fox. Though I also love Western Coast.) Plus, I read everything her father, Paul Hervey Fox, wrote, no matter that Paul Hervey Fox wasn’t in her class as a writer. (Graham Greene reviewed a film he scripted, The Last Train from Madrid, declaring it “the worst movie I ever saw.” And Graham wasn’t being too rough on it.) Oh, and there was a book Love insisted I read, Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis, about the marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It’s a completely deranged work, just totally obsessive and borderline fetishistic. (I mean deranged, obsessive, fetishistic in a good way—as compliments—so we’re clear.) It knocked me out.

As far as books I read purely for kicks go: a lot of Robert Indiana, the non-fiction; E.M. Forster, the fiction; the diaries of Ned Rorem; the autobiography of Barbara Skelton, both volumes; David Lipsky’s climate change version of Dr. Strangelove, The Parrot and the Igloo. I picked up a copy of Anatole Broyard’s Greenwich Village memoir, Kafka Was the Rage—an all-time favorite—at the Strand. I meant to send it to a New York friend who’d moved to London and was homesick. Instead I started rereading it, and kept rereading it, and then never put it in the mail because I couldn’t bear to part with it. Oh well. That Rufi Thorpe could do better than The Knockout Queen seems impossible, but somehow she did. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is absolute heaven.

I read a couple of excellent books in galley form by friends: Matthew Specktor’s The Golden Hour, and Chiara Barzini’s Aqua. Both books are kind of sort of memoirs but—like all really good books—defy categorization.

And I’m never not reading Pauline Kael. One of her collections is always on my nightstand. Always, always.

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