Are You a “Joan” or an “Eve” Type of Girl?
Book Review
I’m going to be honest, until a month ago, I’d never read anything by Joan Didion. I know, how can I, someone who claims to be an essayist not read the greatest American female essayist of all time? Everyone who considers themselves literary has read her, but not me. I’m not that well-bred, and besides, I tend to dislike anything considered literary or a New York Times bestseller, I’m more of a genre writer and reader. Give me a romance set in a world of dragons or robots, not some dark, introspective peek into someone else’s forsaken life.
Just after the fires in LA, a writer I follow on Substack, Jessica Reed Krause, posted Didion’s essay about the Santa Ana winds. I was immediately smitten with the prose. Didion took me right into the canyon; I could feel the hot wind on my cheeks as if I were standing in the Palisades pre-fire, my skin prickling, my heart knowing something bad was about to happen. She captured the emotions I felt in the days leading to the fire that would take my own home and even the lightning storm that preceded it—the weather in California is 99% sunny, 99% perfect, until it isn’t. When it turns, you know you’re about to face an apocalypse of some kind. They call it “earthquake” weather, hot and quiet and still, heart and mind on guard.
I decided I needed to read some of Didion’s work, yet before I could get a copy in my hands, the same Substacker interviewed Lili Anolik, who had just released a biography of sorts titled, Didion and Babitz. Suddenly, I was introduced to not one LA essayist but a second, Eve Babitz, LA party girl of the 60-70s, aspiring artist and writer, and sometimes friend of Joan. To say their relationship was complicated is spot on, each one very different than the other.
Joan, the ever diligent, disciplined writer—distinguished before she even moved to LA, critical of the world of Hollywood from the start, more New York than Malibu, yet in the center of it all regardless. Eve, born of Hollywood musicians, in the center of it all for the fun of it, but never for career advancement. Joan hosted the dinner parties and Eve attended. Their evenings sound glamorous, given the star-studded list of attendees, but also cozy. Theirs was a world where the select few could linger over a “moving feast,” 1920s Paris ala Hemingway/Fitzgerald style. They knew Harrison Ford when he was just their carpenter and pot dealer, Spielberg and Lucas before Jaws and Luke Skywalker, and Jim Morrison before he’d incarnated the Lizard King.
My son is about to move to LA, so reading up on the city during the 60-70s made the read worth it. It’s a gossipy book and not very fair to Joan, but a page turner none-the-less. From the start, writer Anolik lets you know she’s an Eve girl. The thesis of the book is that Eve and Joan are shadows of the other, perhaps reflections. In each woman resides a Joan and an Eve, each creative has a path to choose. Joan’s is disciplined, orderly, and proper. Anolik suggests that everything Joan did was calculated toward her success as a writer. It comes off cold, something Anolik herself rejects. Yet no one can argue that Joan’s method produced success.
Eve, on the other hand, was the sensual one, living in the moment. Drugs, sex (lots and lots and lots of sex), parties, random books and art jobs, flitting like a butterfly across various scenes in LA, sometimes landing a hit (she did collage for a while and created some of the most famous album covers of that age) sometimes producing a mess (even Anolik admits Eve had one readable book, Slow Days, Fast Company) yet still published, often because of her relationship with Joan. In March of 2014, Anolik first wrote an article about Eve in “Vanity Fair” that led to Babitz’s books being reissued and introduced to a new generation of women who craved her lifestyle. Free love, independent, creative, sensual. A girl boss for the girl bosses looking for relief from having to be a girl boss.
What do I mean by that? Well, if the author’s thesis is correct, then each of us has both an intellectual side, ala Joan, and a sensual side, ala Eve. Both women were successful in their own right, pursuing their art, Joan reaching the highest of heights. Yet Joan did it in the ultimate girl boss way—structured, competitive, and exacting. The way of success. Three generations of feminism has taught us women to pursue this path, at the expense of our sensuality. Eve, while lecherous in her use of drugs and sex, lives into the moment. She refuses structure and the daily 9-5. Each day is a celebration, a new chance to meet someone, stir up the pot, and perhaps smoke all of it as well.
I’ve noticed that while my generation (X) strove to be the perfect “Joan,” the Boomers ahead of me and their Millennial children that follow me, tend to idolize the “Eve.” Perhaps because for Boomer women, Eve represented their own youth, marked by the exciting “Summer of Love” an event most of us missed out on but everyone has heard about. Yet the message us Xers got was “Lean In,” “Bring home the bacon,” and “You can have it all.” We continued this pressure on the Millennial women, but somewhere along the line, many of them started asking, “Why?” Let’s be honest, most of us aren’t Joan Didion, Sheryl Sandberg, or Taylor Swift. We’re not going to be the CEO or the star of our own podcast/influencer-ballerina-farm fantasy. Younger Millennials LOVE the Eve Babitz story because she’s free of any claim to perfection. Her parents barley paid attention to her, letting her choose the LA community college over UCLA, dropping out when it no longer suited her. In essence, Babitz is the modern woman free of responsibility. I imagine that looks really good to a lot of young women right now.
I myself prefer Joan, if only because I crave order. I like having a clean house, proper paperwork, and a monogamous marriage, growing old with one man rather than sampling everyone in the room. I also crave success. I’m never going to be a New York Times bestseller, I know this, but I’m also not going to stop sharing my thoughts and stories with the world. I write every day, even if it’s just in my journal and when I’m not writing, I’m still noodling on ideas, often pursuing a different art form to help access the muse, like dance class or a knitting project. I also pray and exercise daily and eat healthy. I keep a clean house and pay all my bills on time. However, I joke that I was homesteading long before the current craze driven by twentysomething women (think Food Babe, Ballerina Farm, Big Little Farm), all of whom long for more flexibility in their lives. I imagine that’s how I’ve balanced my quest for order and perfection, understanding in the end that I’d be happier as a housewife and mother than a c-suite exec, embracing the household and the land while freelancing my intellectual pursuits.
In Didion and Babitz, Anolik proposes we are a mixture of both Joan and Eve, and that’s true for me. While more and more women are coming to realize that the freedom that excessive sex and drugs brings might be too high a price to pay, they also know that the constant grind and drive for perfection is also taking its toll on our happiness. A woman is a complicated creature, balancing our intellect and our sensual nature, including our desire for community and to nurture, in a world of individualism is tricky. Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik is a wonderful exploration of this conundrum, through the eyes of some of the most important female writers from the second wave of feminism. It’s a worthy read that got me to buy both Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company as well as Didion’s The White Album. I figure if my son is going to live in LA, I might as well let those two women set the scene for me.
“Only about five people read it,” or why Amazon
This leads me to another topic I wanted to write about—where to buy my books. There’s a quote in Didion on Babitz where Eve proclaims that her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, “…only about five people read it.” I totally know that reality, it’s hard after all the work you put in for only a few to be interested in it, but hey, at least she had a major publisher try to help her out. I myself have three different publishers, all of them considered indie, aka not the Big Six (might only be the Big Five now, I think two of them are merging). Regardless, I think it’s time to share the reality of a writer’s income potential with my readers, especially since the hate for Bezos and the tech billionaires is rising in the era of Trump 2.0. Here’s the truth: the only way to support me is to buy my work from Amazon because that’s the only place where I actually MAKE money. It’s pretty simple, and here’s why.
You can purchase copies from me on my website, however, those copies are not free to me. I pay anywhere from $6-10 per book to get them from my publisher. Plus shipping. I have to buy the envelopes/packaging to ship them to my customers, plus pay for said shipping. Thus, I charge $7.95 extra for each order. I list the books for $12.95-16.95 each however, if I’m honest, no one ever buys them until I offer them at $10/piece or offer free shipping. So, you can see that I never make any money on this, it actually costs me year over year.
Well, what about local bookstores? Ah, you see, there’s a catch. Bookstores do not order from indie publishers unless you’re already a bestseller on a national list or get this, on Amazon or other websites like Barnes and Noble. So, to get your local bookstore to stock me on their own I have to have sales on the dreaded Amazon. Those rankings are also used by podcasters and reporters to see if they’ll interview me. So unless my readers actually buy from Amazon, I’m not going to get into bookstores or on podcasts, etc.
Most local bookstores do have local author programs. Many well-meaning friends in Santa Cruz have said to me many times, “I refuse to buy anything on Amazon, but I’d totally buy your books if you put them in Bookshop Santa Cruz.” At least a dozen people have said this to me. So I used their consignment program. To do so, I, the author, had to provide five copies of the books AND pay them a $25 stocking fee for each title. In the case of my ancient Egyptian books, I needed to stock all three of them. My publisher charges me $10 per book, plus shipping. So, I had to give Bookshop 15 books at say $12 each PLUS $25 per title. They sell them for $15.95 each and pay me $10.50 for every book sold. Alas, three years later and only two sets sold, or six books total. They returned the rest to me recently. Turns out those dozens of friends didn’t actually want to read my work. I imagine they were using Amazon as their excuse. Or maybe they forgot I put them in the local bookstore. Who knows? All that really matters is that unless lots of people buy your work, the author’s consignment programs don’t pay that well given the extra stocking fees they charge on top of their cut of each sale.
In the end, the best way to support a local indie author is to buy on Amazon. Kindle or paperback, both work. Audible is also available, but alas, they are a subsidiary of Amazon. Still, I made a good amount of money on Audible last year so thank to all those listeners.
Because I was interviewed in the Washington Post recently, a bunch of people have asked why I don’t have copies of Wildfire in Bookshop Santa Cruz. This is why. I’ve never made any money with them. I don’t have the local audience. Moreover, Amazon sales and reviews are what podcasters, movie producers, and local bookshops use to determine popularity. It’s a catch 22, that’s for sure, but I guess what I’m saying is, even though you hate Bezos, don’t use him as an excuse to not read my work. It’s more genuine to just admit you’re not interested.
Like Eve Babitz, I’m fine with, “only about five people read it.”