The Latest Breaking News from Joan Didion

The Volkswagen ID.Buzz might come from Germany, but it may not exist if not for what happened in Bethel, New York over half a century ago.

COMMENT: With the announcement that Joan Didion’s deeply private therapy notes are being released, Helen Coffey questions the ethics of putting out artists’ work posthumously when it was never intended for a public audience

Lili Anolik admits her first book on Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, was a way of “driving a stake” through her subject’s heart, hoping to end her self-confessed “unbalanced, fetishistic” obsession with the bohemian LA writer.

Salman Rushdie’s account of his near-fatal stabbing, a 360-degree view of Queen Elizabeth II and Al Pacino’s rags to riches career are among this year’s most compelling personal histories

THE READING LIST: A new book explores the friendship and rivalry between two very different chroniclers of Sixties and Seventies Los Angeles – and shines a light upon why a new generation of readers are still obsessed with Didion and Babitz decades later, writes Katie Rosseinsky

A new book on the Los Angeles authors leaves no petty stone unturned as it explores their fraught friendship

This account of the purported bond between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two fascinating chroniclers of late 20th-century America, is titillating but diminishes both writers

THE LIST: Catch up on 2024’s most illuminating life stories, encompassing tales of recovery, literary feuds and devastating betrayal, with Katie Rosseinsky’s edit of the best memoirs and biographies

The journalist and author of Hollywood’s Eve makes no pretence of impartiality as she charts the difficult relationship between two chroniclers of California