Lili Anolik Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Lili Anolik
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in The Believer, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and Esquire. Lili is the creator of a podcast called “Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College”.

She writes a lot in the middle of the night. She doesn’t take drugs or drink, but she can just imagine the shape of her liver since she’s taken Nyquil every single night since she was 18. She will pass out in an upset and clenched sleep for about three or four hours. And she’ll actually sleep better when she is not working. However when she is working, it is not at all pretty. Lili is not good at balancing, which she’s sure she will have to do eventually to keep her life sane.

Lili has three cork boards going with her different active projects. She has a poster up of “The Shards”, which is one of Bret Easton’s Ellis’ books. She also has a letter from Pauline Kael and a few pictures of Chet Baker. Lili also drinks a ton of Diet Pepsi and regular Coke while she is working.

“Dark Rooms” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2015. “Sharp Objects” meets “The Secret History” in a stunning debut novel about glamour and murder that is set in the claustrophobic and ambiguous world of one exclusive New England prep school.

It’s death that sets the plot in motion: Nica Baker’s murdered. She was enigmatic, beautiful, wild, and just 16 years old. The crime is solved quickly: it was a lonely classmate, with unrequited love involved, and a suicide note confession. However instinct and memory will not allow Grace (Nica’s older sister) to just accept that this case is now closed.

Living at home and dropping out of college, working at the progressive and moneyed private high school in Hartford, Connecticut, from where she just recently graduated, she becomes increasingly obsessed with punishing and identifying the actual murderer.

This is a compulsively readable debut novel that combines the haunting atmospherics and hairpin plot twists of “Dare Me” by Megan Abbott and the verbal dexterity of Marisha Pessl’s “Special Topic in Calamity Physics”.

“Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2019. LA during the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the entire world, a music factory, a movie factory, a dream factory. Eve was the ultimate factory girl, this pure product of LA.

A graduate of Hollywood High, she posed in ‘63, at the age of 20, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (the French artist). She was naked, and he was not. The picture, a cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an immediate icon of sex and art. She spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, to name just a few. There were the men she seduced: Harrison Ford, Jim Morrison, and Ed Ruscha, to name just a few.

Then, when she was almost 30, with her It girl days numbered, she was discovered (as a writer) by Joan Didion. She’d go on to produce 7 books, typically billed as either short story collections or novels, always confessionals and autobiographies. Under read and under known during her career, she has since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-70s, she is on the cusp of literary recognition and stardom as an essential, the essential, LA writer. Her prose achieves the American dream ideal: art which stays loose, always maintains its cool, and is just sheerly enjoyable as to get mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Eve, life was slow days and fast company until this freak fire during the 90s turned her into this recluse, living in her condo out in West Hollywood, where Lili was able to track her down back in 2012. Lili’s provocative and elegant new read is equal parts detective story and biography. It’s also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject. Writer, artist, muse, and one woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.

“Didion and Babitz” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2024. Joan Didion is revealed at long last in a profoundly moving and outrageously provocative new work on the mutual antipathies and mutual attractions of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.

Eve Babitz died December 17, 2021. Found in a closet in the back of an apartment filled with ruin, wrack, and filth was this stack of boxes packed up by her mom decades prior. These boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape weren’t broken. Scrapbooks, journals, pictures, manuscripts, letters, all inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years during the late 60s and early 70s, and was centered on this two-story house that Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (her husband and a writer) in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.

7406 Franklin Avenue, this combination salon-hotbed-living end where artists and writers mixed with rock n rollers, movie stars, drug trash. It was the making of one great American Joan Didion, reserved and cool behind her oversized sunglasses and storied marriage, this union just as tortured as it was enduring. The place was the breaking and eventual remaking, and thus the real making, of another great American, named Eve Babitz, who was the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, nude of Marcel Duchamp, consort of Jim Morrison (among many many others). She burned so hot she finally almost burned herself alive.

These two formed a complex friendship which went bed, amity becoming enmity, this friendship which was just as rare as true love, just as rare as true hate. Didion, despite her confessional style, her widespread fame, so little is understood or even known. She has remained elusive and opaque. Up until now. With skill and deftness, Lili uses Babitz, her brilliance of observation, incisive intelligence, and most of all, her diary like letters, as the key to unlocking the mysterious and mighty Joan Didion.