Lili Anolik, DIDION & BABITZ
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked Live at the Whitby Hotel.
[0:05]I'm so excited to be in front of a room of amazing people who came out to listen,
[0:10]and I will be interviewing Lily Analik and Dydian and Babbitts. We have a lot to discuss.
[0:17]I'm excited to take you so much for being here. All right, so welcome.
[0:22]Why, Lily, did you become so obsessed with you, Babbitts? You wrote about it in the book,
[0:27]and I loved that, but what was it about her that got you hooked right away?
[0:31]Well, I guess some of it's the, like, Magellan spirit. Like, you feel like you've discovered somebody,
[0:37]you know? So I had been, I was unpublished, like, 2010. I was on the subway,
[0:43]feeling bad about myself, and I was reading this. Does anybody here in our Joe Esther house?
[0:49]He did, like, the screenplays for, like, show girls and basic instincts, kind of great sleazy movies,
[0:54]and he, he had this period where he was writing memoirs. They were also sleazy, and I love them.
[1:00]And he wrote this one called Hollywood Animal, and he'd begin each chapter with a quote.
[1:04]And there was one from a woman named you, Babbitts, and it was about LA and sex,
[1:09]and I just was knocked out by it. And I remember Googling her, and she was a writer,
[1:14]totally out of print, and I just started reading her books. And I just, I was thrilled by her,
[1:19]right? So I started stalking her. I knew she had been, like, the, the one bit of personal
[1:23]information, kind of out there on, on her, other than that in, like, 1963, I think. She'd post
[1:29]naked with Marcel Duchamp playing chess. That was out there, but then I knew she was in the book.
[1:34]Yeah, yeah. I knew she had, like, a great sex resume. I didn't know how great, but it was,
[1:38]like- Wait, what is the sex wrestling? Is everyone supposed to have one?
[1:44]Who here has this? No, no, no. Don't brag. I don't want it out. I don't want it out.
[1:49]Yeah. You know, it was like, I knew, like, on her sex resume was, like, Jim Morrison and
[1:54]Harrison Ford. I knew it was, it was a killer sex resume, and that was nothing to
[1:58]compare to what I'd find out. It was a much longer, a more impressive sex resume than even
[2:02]I had guessed. And Rache, also on it, at all, like, the key eagles, you know, like, Don Henley,
[2:08]Glandry, Annie Liebowitz, very young Steve Martin. Anyway, she was great.
[2:14]There should be a novel about what happens if all the people on your sex resume, if it all
[2:20]comes out. Yeah. I don't know. Right? Like, what would happen then? Maybe people wouldn't want that.
[2:24]Okay, sorry. Keep going. Yeah. It's in order to all keep going. And anyway, the thing I
[2:27]knew is that, like, she's been very social, and I knew that in the late 90s, she'd been in a
[2:31]fire. Like, she'd set herself on fire accidentally. So, you know, she had no online presence. All the
[2:37]books were out of print. She kind of never really hit when she was actually writing in the
[2:42]mostly in the 70s and 80s. But I had a brother, I have one brother, and he was at USC for business
[2:48]school. And I couldn't find her anywhere, but he was, he was living in Hollywood or West Hollywood.
[2:53]And he had a phone book, you know, they still had phone books in like 2010. And there she was,
[2:57]she was in the phone book. So I just walked in. I started delivering letters to her. She ignored me.
[3:01]I just tasted it for years. You know, I tasted it for years. And then Vanity Fair, I was doing a
[3:06]little better two years later. And Vanity Fair kind of accepted a pitch to write on her. So then I
[3:12]really started stalking her. And then finally, one of her old boyfriends called me and said,
[3:16]Eve said, you can take her to lunch. And I flew to LA the next morning. And that's sort of how it
[3:21]started. But it was years, you know. And at the end of the book, you understand, when you first
[3:27]made her why she was so resistant to meeting you. And it wasn't exactly what you thought.
[3:33]Yeah, because I mean, she was this very kind of glamorous figure in her books and in kind of
[3:38]people's recounting of her. And then we met at this place at the farmer's market in West Hollywood.
[3:44]And you know, as soon as I saw her, I knew something was wrong. I mean, it wasn't that she was like
[3:50]older. Of course, I expected her to age. But she looked crazy. Like if you saw her on the street,
[3:54]you'd think it was a homeless person or a crazy person. And it was the fire, but she had hunting
[4:00]tins. Like she didn't even know what when I when I started spending time with her in 2011,
[4:06]I think it's at this point. But she had I thought she was having strokes. You know, I'd come out
[4:10]every six or eight weeks. I come see her in California. And I thought she was having perhaps strokes
[4:14]because she was living alone and she was living in this kind of insane squaller. But it, but it was
[4:18]hunting tins. Her father had died of hunting tins. Her mother had kind of kept that from her. But
[4:22]Huntington's is a genetic condition. So the brain's essentially just crumbling. Yeah, no, it was it was
[4:28]Can I just read a little section from when you meet when you met her? Okay, between 2014 and 2021,
[4:35]Eve went from nowhere to everywhere. It was like she'd skipped fame and fortune,
[4:39]bougie aspirations and gone straight to legend to the general public. This was a happily ever
[4:44]after ending. A jewel had been fished out of the trash heap of history and in the neck of time.
[4:48]She was still around to enjoy her glory. But the truth was she wasn't still around.
[4:52]Since 2001, the year Huntington's began to take her over. She'd existed in a kind of posthumous state
[4:57]as if she'd somehow contrived out of herself, which is perhaps why the ending was for Eve
[5:01]unhappily ever after. It's too late. She'd mutter darkly to Miranda as the meteor quest began to
[5:07]trickle in and then pour in. And then you talk about how when you see her, you know that this is
[5:14]kind of the end. So yeah, well, it was like it was it was more ambivalent than I was saying there
[5:20]because I think it was also a source of pleasure for her. I mean, I don't think you start
[5:24]writing career, like a professional writing career, if fame and fortune aren't on your mind at some
[5:29]level. So I think, you know, it was kind of thrilling for her to kind of have this moment and to get
[5:36]to get famous late. But she was a terrorized being at some level at this point in her life, you know.
[5:43]So yeah, so I think it was happily ever after unhappily ever after just a mix.
[5:47]And you went back and found this treasure trove of information about her. And you started
[5:51]reading letters and things between her and Joan Didion and their friendship and how in the end
[5:56]they end up actually passing away within six days of each other, which may be really surprising.
[6:01]Talk about the two women, their relationship. Why it was so important and why dedicate a whole
[6:07]book to it? Well, yeah, so I actually so I wrote this piece for Vanity Fair on Eevee and I kind of
[6:11]got the ball rolling. I'll her book started to come back into print. And I wrote a whole book on her
[6:16]in 2019 for Scribner called Hollywood's Eve. And I really had moved on. You know, I felt like I had
[6:22]done my, I tried my hardest and you know done done my best for for Eve. And I was going to move on.
[6:30]And I was under contract to write a book for Scribner on the writers of Bennington College in the
[6:34]80s. I'd done a podcast on a porn star. I was, you know, I had moved on. I was not, I was doing
[6:40]other things. And Eevee dies Christmas time. I'm so bad on years. I think 2021 dies Christmas 2021.
[6:50]And she'd moved out of her house about a year before she died. She just lived, there's no
[6:54]overstating the squaller of this of her condo in West Hollywood. It was just, you couldn't move in
[7:02]it. The stench was just insane. It was just, it was crazy. There was something, she would lose cats.
[7:08]I'm sure something, no joke, something was dead in there. And I remember when Jewish family
[7:11]services came to clean it out. They had to wear hazmat suits. So I really didn't think anything
[7:16]could have survived that environment. But her mother, her mother was an artist and sort of a preservationist.
[7:22]She would draw kind of buildings that were about to be torn down in LA. At any rate, the mother had
[7:28]kind of put together these boxes of all these letters and manuscripts. And then she taped them in
[7:34]such a way that they were hard to open. And in the fire, Eevee's face was undamaged. It was her torso,
[7:40]but also her hands a bit. So I think she would have gotten too frustrated trying to open them,
[7:44]you know, the tape. And so in the back of the closet were these stacks of, you know,
[7:50]of these boxes with, it was a treasure trove. It was, it was all these letters and manuscripts.
[7:55]And Eevee, crazy as she was at the end. She was a really charming person. And charming in a sense
[8:01]that that was her kind of coat of honor. And to her being charming meant not bitching, not complaining.
[8:08]But that meant she, she would always answer a question I asked, but she would never kind of admit
[8:12]to personal pain. I just think she thought it was bad manners. And these letters, they were
[8:17]letters that were never sent primarily. It was almost all letter she wrote, preserved, but did not send,
[8:23]right? So they were almost like a diary. And, you know, all of a sudden her interior
[8:27]life was kind of open to me. And the first letter, I, by the way, when I found out about these boxes,
[8:33]like if I could have gotten away with it, I just would have burned them. Like no joke, I just,
[8:37]I felt like I knew I was going to have to come in and redo, like the whole book, essentially,
[8:41]is what I was thinking. And I went, oh, you know, if no one would have known, I would have destroyed them.
[8:45]Not really, I probably wouldn't have, but, but it was not, I haven't just looked into that, right?
[8:50]But to be, it was not happy now. I was not happy to find this out. But anyway,
[8:53]but kind of the first letter I pulled out was this letter she wrote in 1972 to Joan Diddy. And
[8:57]and it contained this line, you know, could you write what you write, Joan, if you weren't so tiny?
[9:03]Yeah, it's funny. It's like a funny line, but she was enraged with Joan. And she really felt,
[9:07]it was about Joan had written a piece for The New York Times. I think collected in the white album
[9:12]that was kind of on the women's movement. And it was kind of putting down the woman's movement.
[9:16]And Evie had her own problem with feminist. I think she didn't like their style.
[9:20]But she knew that there was a problem, right? And she thought that Joan was an acknowledging
[9:24]this problem. And it was just, it was a rip shit letter. It was a, it was a temper tantrum,
[9:28]or not a temper tantrum, but like a rant. And all of a sudden, I knew that the relationship between
[9:32]the two women, I knew they had been friends. And I knew that Joan had helped Eve early on,
[9:36]had gotten her into Rolling Stone, her first piece. But I had no idea, I had no idea kind of,
[9:43]kind of the depth, the rage, the intimacy of this relationship. So it was news to me.
[9:49]Anyway, I was going to write about this letter for Vanity Fair, which I did, but then it ended
[9:53]up. And I meant to just revise the Eve book, like it's been six to eight weeks revising the Eve
[9:57]book. But, you know, I knew, I knew.
[10:00]I was writing, I knew I was writing a new book on even,
[10:02]I knew I was writing a shadow book on Joan,
[10:04]and so that's sort of how it happened.
[10:05]But it was against my will, I guess it's our way.
[10:07]But you did it anyway.
[10:09]I did it anyway.
[10:10]Thank you so much.
[10:12]Thank you for noting my sacrifice to do.
[10:15]So for those who have been huge,
[10:18]John Diddy and fans, let's just say,
[10:20]what does this book shine a light on
[10:21]that maybe they don't know?
[10:23]And would they feel differently about her if they read it?
[10:26]Well, they might.
[10:28]I mean, temperamentally, I'm just not a tune to Joan.
[10:31]I mean, I know how great she is,
[10:33]but I have never really gravitated to Joan.
[10:36]But if you write about Los Angeles,
[10:38]literary Los Angeles,
[10:40]Joan is so big she blots out the sun, right?
[10:42]She's the towering figure.
[10:45]And so I had written about Joan before this book,
[10:48]but I guess the way I felt with Joan was that,
[10:50]I was always standing outside a locked door,
[10:53]you know, because Joan writes personal essays,
[10:55]that's what she's sort of famous for,
[10:57]but she's quite opaque and quite guarded.
[10:59]You know, and she only tells you what she wants you to know.
[11:02]And I felt when I read that first letter,
[11:05]it was like light was shining under the door
[11:07]or just it was cracking open in a way.
[11:10]So I feel like what this book does,
[11:12]in no way wants the tear, Joan down, Joan is great, you know?
[11:16]She's like one of the great American writers,
[11:18]but I always felt she doesn't quite tell you how she did it.
[11:20]Like I'd ever felt she really told you her origin story.
[11:24]Or I guess like what it takes to be Joan Dydian
[11:27]that I feel is like what this book tells,
[11:29]that is what this book tells you, how she did it,
[11:31]how did she do it?
[11:33]Wow.
[11:33]You can read the book, I mean, it's a complicated question,
[11:37]but I kind of really understood what was going on in that marriage.
[11:40]And I remember, does anyone here know
[11:42]a writer named Stephanie Danler?
[11:44]She wrote this week better, oh my gosh, love.
[11:46]Yeah, she's great, she's great.
[11:48]And I was at, I was in Los Angeles
[11:49]because I was at the Huntington,
[11:50]which is where Eve's papers are,
[11:52]and I was doing research and Stephanie and I are friends
[11:54]and we were getting coffee.
[11:56]And I was telling her that the book had mutated
[11:58]and it was now gonna be the book on the two women.
[12:00]And she said, well, have you talked to Noel Permantell?
[12:03]Not Noel Permantell like in Joan myth.
[12:06]You kind of knew he was the first love
[12:08]of kind of this important figure in her life,
[12:11]but you didn't really understand who he was
[12:13]or how he was important to her.
[12:15]He was kind of a mythological figure.
[12:19]And I was like, oh Stephanie, you know, I tried,
[12:21]like he's still alive, like he's in his 90s.
[12:23]I'm like, I wrote him a letter, you know,
[12:24]but he's probably, you know, out of it.
[12:26]You know, I'm not gonna harass him.
[12:27]And she's like, well, you can't do a book on Joan
[12:29]if you don't have Noel.
[12:30]And so I went back to my hotel and I knew that,
[12:32]I didn't know how to say this politely.
[12:34]I knew that Noel liked women.
[12:36]You know, just that he was a guy who liked women.
[12:38]And so I figured maybe if I could get him on the phone
[12:40]just the fact that I had a female voice,
[12:42]I maybe he'd talk to me.
[12:45]So he's in the white pages, same as Eevee,
[12:47]which is great.
[12:48]So I call and he does answer.
[12:49]You know, he's a New Orleans guy in his late 90s.
[12:53]And he had a great voice.
[12:54]And I do have a female voice.
[12:56]And he said, yeah, yeah, come over.
[12:58]And I said, okay, so I flew back from LA
[13:00]and I went out to see him in Fairfell, Connecticut.
[13:03]And it was, you know, I felt like I'd cracked, you know,
[13:06]he was, to me he was like the kind of the wet
[13:09]beating heart at the center of Joan's story.
[13:12]You know, they became lovers in the 50s.
[13:15]She was just out of Berkeley,
[13:18]a virgin, you know, she had a serious boyfriend back home
[13:21]who wanted to marry her and open a cardio worship
[13:23]in Bakersfield.
[13:25]That could have been her fate.
[13:26]And no, no, it was older.
[13:28]No, it wasn't, you know, with Jima,
[13:30]if I'm saying that right, you know,
[13:30]he'd already been a Marine, had a family
[13:33]from kind of a well-born New Orleans guy.
[13:36]And conservative, but not really.
[13:38]But he's the guy who got like Norman Mayoward
[13:40]to run for mayor.
[13:41]It's one of those like behind the scenes powerful people.
[13:44]And he got Joan into print.
[13:47]And, you know, her first book, she couldn't sell it.
[13:49]He bullied somebody into buying it.
[13:51]And she wanted to marry him.
[13:53]And he finally kind of made her understand
[13:55]he wasn't going to marry again.
[13:58]And she had a nervous breakdown.
[13:59]She writes about it and goodbye to all that.
[14:04]And he said to a mutual friend of theirs who I also knew
[14:07]because he was an old boyfriend of Eve's Dan Wakefield.
[14:08]He said it's time for Joan to get married.
[14:10]And he just picked somebody for her.
[14:12]And she married, don't regret it done.
[14:14]That's how it started.
[14:16]Anyway, it was understanding all of this.
[14:18]And finally, she and Noel fall out
[14:19]because she keeps fixing, noizing him,
[14:21]like writing about him.
[14:23]And it drives him crazy.
[14:24]And they messed up.
[14:27]But he essentially, her way of marrying him
[14:30]was marrying John.
[14:31]And John was like a great editor for her.
[14:33]It was just, you understood the marriage.
[14:34]And you understood how the Joan persona kind of came
[14:37]into being and how her career started.
[14:39]And just what it took to be Joan Diddy.
[14:42]And I felt like this book tells you that.
[14:44]And the thought that she just settled on this great love.
[14:48]Yeah, it was very shocking.
[14:50]It was shocking.
[14:50]No, it was shocking to me too.
[14:52]It was shocking.
[14:52]He picked the husband.
[14:53]It's wild.
[14:55]And what that marriage to John was like,
[14:57]and really, his name had been Greg.
[14:59]He was John Gregory Dunn.
[15:00]And in the 50s and early 60s,
[15:02]when he's working at time, he goes by Greg.
[15:04]John Gregory Dunn was Joan's invention.
[15:06]She felt it sounded better.
[15:07]He'd be taken more seriously.
[15:09]But just seeing how she does it.
[15:11]Because to me, the only writers who
[15:14]have a persona equal to hers are Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
[15:18]And that's where you have to be very true to do this.
[15:21]Like it's where the work and the persona match up
[15:25]in a particular way, a Hemingway seems
[15:27]like a Hemingway character.
[15:28]If it's Gerald seemed like a Fitzgerald character,
[15:30]Joan seems like a Joan character.
[15:32]And maybe Truman Capote is in that.
[15:34]Just where their lives are so big.
[15:36]And they are endlessly fascinating and compelling to us.
[15:40]I'm just talking too much to be.
[15:42]No, you're not.
[15:42]You're doing great.
[15:44]Can you think of two contemporary writers now
[15:47]who are sort of have this back and forth?
[15:49]No, it doesn't exist.
[15:50]It doesn't exist.
[15:51]The closest I think you could, I don't think people
[15:53]fight anymore like literary feuds, which were so great.
[15:57]Or just like, should we start some?
[15:59]Oh, to be, if you let me throw the first pun
[16:01]until we have to come in, I think the closest
[16:04]in it's such a smaller version.
[16:06]I thought it was like Caroline Calloway and Natalie
[16:07]Beat, who would write about their own feuds
[16:10]endlessly and sort of that was there.
[16:12]But no, we don't have anything like that.
[16:14]You know, and I don't think a Joan, when people ask me
[16:18]who is the closest to Joan, I think it's like a Lena Dunham.
[16:22]It's like somebody who's in a different medium.
[16:23]I think Joan wanted the big stage,
[16:25]and I don't know if writers have that anymore.
[16:27]You know what I mean?
[16:28]I'm your own stage now.
[16:29]I say this as I'm standing on my side.
[16:31]You know, like just like where you can kind of
[16:34]hijack the culture in a particular way.
[16:37]But in the book, you show us your own deep obsession.
[16:41]Oh yeah.
[16:42]In a very like visceral way.
[16:44]Like you cannot stop.
[16:45]You put your own life on hold.
[16:48]You are in it.
[16:48]And the voraciousness with which you devour the material
[16:53]is really amazing.
[16:54]So why so obsessed?
[16:57]Like with anything.
[16:58]With anything.
[16:59]Well, it's my nature.
[17:00]I mean, I also feel like, I just, like I know
[17:05]I'm called a biographer, but I don't feel that's what I am.
[17:07]Like to me, a biography is like an official,
[17:10]an official account of people.
[17:13]And I don't, I don't believe in official accounts.
[17:16]I'll just say this, on the evening it's complicated
[17:18]because I do enter the story because I enter the story
[17:21]and do that piece on her and vanity fair
[17:22]and it changes things up.
[17:24]There's no way not to have that in there.
[17:26]So it's not just blind egomanias, maybe a little.
[17:29]But, but I also just feel like, you know,
[17:32]these are, this is my Eve, this is my Joan.
[17:35]Meaning, I feel like, you know,
[17:37]lives are just indiscriminate like data dumps.
[17:40]Do you know, like it's just incontinent facts, you know?
[17:44]Lives are, these women live till they're,
[17:46]wait, 70s, 80s, they lived for a long time.
[17:49]And so this is a sleek little book.
[17:51]So it's just, it's me picking and choosing.
[17:53]And my prejudices of sessions, it affixes
[17:57]or whatever are gonna determine what's in this book.
[17:59]And so I feel it's important to cop to that, you know?
[18:02]And why address the reader directly so often?
[18:05]I don't know, I just do, it's just my style.
[18:08]It just comes out that way.
[18:10]You know, and I also thought I did have to prepare people
[18:12]because I do feel like Joan is like a canonical figure.
[18:15]And I feel like the story is so fixed.
[18:18]You know, even having Griffin Dunn do,
[18:20]her turn off, you do her, do her documentary.
[18:22]And they don't mention no.
[18:24]I mean, so you're just gonna have to get ready.
[18:26]This is gonna be, this is gonna be,
[18:29]I don't know contrary to the, to the official narrative.
[18:31]And I just, I want you to be ready for that.
[18:34]If I'm going to take your virginity,
[18:35]if I'm going to violate you, I want to tell you first, you know?
[18:38]I mean, I didn't know how into it.
[18:40]We've gotten reading this book, but, okay.
[18:43]Now you know Zippy.
[18:44]Now I know.
[18:45]What are you obsessed with now?
[18:47]Well, you know, I was mentioning that line,
[18:50]could you write what you write, Joan, if you weren't so tiny?
[18:53]So I did do this piece for Vanity Fair's,
[18:55]I think September 2022 issue.
[18:57]And I make my husband do my Instagram
[19:00]just because I can make him, I'll do it.
[19:03]He'll let me boss him.
[19:04]So he had put that piece up on my Instagram
[19:07]and Vanity Fair had a poll quote,
[19:09]which was the line I just, you know,
[19:10]could you write what you write if you weren't so tiny?
[19:12]And before I was doing Eve,
[19:14]I had done this kind of,
[19:14]I'd done a piece for Esquire on the writers
[19:16]of Bennington College, Class of 86,
[19:18]which was British and LS, Donna Tarte, Jonathan Leaveham.
[19:21]And then I had done a podcast on it.
[19:23]And so Courtney Love liked the podcast, you know, Courtney Love, you know?
[19:26]And she started to write me on Instagram
[19:29]and she wanted me to find out who her grandfather was.
[19:31]She thought it was Marlon Brando.
[19:33]And her grandmother is Paula Fox, the Brooklyn novelist,
[19:36]who'd given up a baby for adoption.
[19:37]That baby turned out to be Courtney's mother.
[19:39]Anyway, what I'm going with this is Courtney and I were gonna do
[19:42]something together than she dumped me.
[19:44]Well, yeah, we're back together, but she's done me many times.
[19:49]We've had many come, yeah, a lot of breaking up and making up.
[19:52]At any rate, she dumped me the first time and I just, you know,
[19:55]I can take, I can take no for an answer.
[19:58]But I'd forgotten about it sort of.
[20:00]When Rob, it's my husband, he posted the Vanity Fair piece
[20:04]on Instagram with the poll quote, and this person,
[20:07]it's not Courtney Love, it's, I don't know who it is,
[20:10]keeps writing and saying, oh, that letter is nothing
[20:13]compared to the letters Madonna and I used to exchange.
[20:17]R's were much more vicious, and my favorite part was
[20:20]when it went, I've had other short friends,
[20:22]but for whatever reason Madonna's shortness
[20:24]enrages me.
[20:25]And it said, yo, Lily, check your DMs.
[20:29]So I checked my DMs, and she said, Courtney Love
[20:32]trapped, so she called herself.
[20:34]And she goes, this is my burner account.
[20:36]And from then, we've been back on.
[20:38]So I'm working on this long thing with Courtney.
[20:40]On Courtney, Paula Fox and Marlon Brando.
[20:42]Wow.
[20:42]Yeah.
[20:43]So if I were not Courtney and Madonna,
[20:45]not Courtney and Madonna, I definitely wouldn't survive that one.
[20:49]I have a half chance here.
[20:50]Wow.
[20:51]How do you synthesize all this information?
[20:53]I mean, you interviewed 100 plus times.
[20:57]You had access to enormous amounts
[20:59]of information, and yet you call it down like this.
[21:03]How?
[21:04]It's such a great question.
[21:05]I just don't have an answer.
[21:06]It's just intuition.
[21:07]I tend to go, I mean, I don't want you all to think less of me.
[21:11]But the way I've broken to print, I knew
[21:13]Al Goldstein, a screw magazine.
[21:15]Do you know the pornography from the 70s and 80s?
[21:19]He had a famous New York, and he
[21:21]had a New York television show called Midnight Blue.
[21:23]Anyway, he was, but the way he used to do,
[21:26]he would rate movies, pornographic movies.
[21:29]He had something called a Peter Meter,
[21:31]and with how many erections the movie gave him,
[21:34]and that's how he would rate it.
[21:36]And I feel like a little bit, that's
[21:37]this case with me, like whatever excites me the most
[21:39]is what I include.
[21:41]So it's like the parts of their life that I most,
[21:43]it's just whatever is thrilling to me.
[21:46]That's how I pick and choose.
[21:48]If it doesn't interest me, well, it's not coming in.
[21:51]I mean, it'll get acknowledged.
[21:52]Of course, but I just mean I won't obsessively go into it.
[21:56]So do you see everything in life
[21:57]through this like sexual lens?
[22:00]No, no, no, no.
[22:01]No, I mean, you know, I'm really interested in their work,
[22:03]but you know, sex informs it, I guess.
[22:06]Anything we should know about your past while we're on the topic.
[22:11]I'm married to my college sweetheart, a nice Jewish doctor,
[22:13]and I had two kids, so this is your fantasy life.
[22:17]This is not my actual life.
[22:21]Who are aside from Stephanie Danler?
[22:23]I'm assuming you love her books.
[22:25]I do, I love books.
[22:26]I love books, oh my gosh.
[22:27]Do you have an end, obviously, eight,
[22:30]but other heroes or other people you read
[22:32]and you're just obsessed with?
[22:34]Probably like my two real sweet spots for me are Pauline Cale,
[22:38]that New York, she was a New Yorker,
[22:40]she wrote about the movies.
[22:42]I love her, I love her, I think she's great.
[22:44]And Janet Malcolm, I read really, I read really composer.
[22:47]I tend to read nonfiction just because that's what I do.
[22:51]I'm reading somebody at Ozek right now.
[22:54]She's pretty great.
[22:55]Yeah, that's it, that's what I've got for you.
[22:57]Amazing.
[22:58]Well, thank you for giving us really the backstory
[23:01]of these two women.
[23:02]I've got my pleasure.
[23:03]A little bit about you as well,
[23:05]which I found super fascinating.
[23:07]You're nice to say Zibi.
[23:08]I mean, I beat it.
[23:10]There's a dark side too.
[23:12]I feel like it is only just emerging.
[23:15]It might just be dark side.
[23:16]Yes, I don't know.
[23:17]It's not hiding, this is such a pleasure.
[23:19]Thank you so much for coming.
[23:21]Okay, thank you so much.
[23:24]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibi,
[23:27]formerly mom's don't have time to read books.
[23:30]If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[23:32]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[23:35]and spread the word.
[23:37]Thanks so much.
[23:38]Oh, and buy the books.