At one point, Joan Didion was a writer, known for her books and essays, which people read and liked — or didn’t. There was The White Album, which everyone read, and A Year of Magical Thinking, which everyone bought, and an assorted many other titles that everybody claimed to know but probably didn’t. At her peak, she had devoted followers who loved everything from “Saint Joan,” and when people discussed her writing, they talked about its contents and style.

In that world, Lili Anolik’s new book, Didion and Babitz, a dual biography of Didion and her Los Angeles female writer colleague, Eve Babitz, would have been about their writing and careers, and her perspective would have been a refreshing antidote to the Joanites. It would have been about this moment, 1960s LA, when two very different writers, separated by eight years and two very different philosophies, and who died within days of each other, tried to capture the world they lived in and the parallel development of their two careers. Babitz’s argument won over time, even as her fame was ephemeral. And Didion’s enduring, increasing fame came in large part from how the world left her behind. But as Anolik at one point writes, “What if the competition wasn’t a competition at all? What if the competition was actually a cooperation, Joan and Eve writing L.A. together?” It is perhaps a tell about what is going on psychologically in books and essays about Didion that their authors have a tendency to refer to her by her first name, as though they were her pal.

We, however, do not live in that world. We live in a world of celebrity worship, a world in which people want to feel connected to celebrity writers less for their writing than their vibe. In that world, this world, there was an estate auction for 224 items from Didion’s Upper East Side apartment. There were knickknacks, hurricane lamps, blank notebooks, and paperclips, but the items that mattered were iconic. Their value came from their obviousness, and nothing was more obvious than the writer’s Celine Faux Tortoiseshell sunglasses. Few pointed out that these weren’t that distinct among her many pairs of glasses, because who cares? Dueling bidders drove the price of the glasses up and up, and when the hammer eventually came slamming down, they’d sold for $27,000. Because these weren’t glasses anymore. They were Didion’s glasses.

Were it actually about their work, and their lives, then I would have liked Didion and Babitz. But nobody reads anymore, and writers become more famous than their work, deified for what they represent — for their vibe, their mood. “Joan Didion” means aloof chic. It means to watch the culture from within and afar. It is a shorthand for a kind of cold, intellectual sophistication against the hot LA sun, just as Tom Woolf has been for witty detachment from the detached high society.

To be a Didion fan today, you post images of her smoking and looking over her oversized glasses or share quotes on Twitter or chat about dishy gossip about her. “Did you know she smoked ‘precisely’ five cigarettes per day? That she never hired an interior decorator? What’s ‘Insider Baseball?’ I hate baseball. But isn’t that picture with the yellow Corvette so iconic? And the Gap ad! I love how she did a campaign for Celine, Phoebe Philo is SO Joan.”

Didion and Babitz is both a diagnosis and symptom of this flattening of Didion, an attempt to correct the myths about Didion, which ultimately says more about its writer than its subject. Supposedly, the book exists because of the letters that Anolik discovered on Babitz’s passing, which gives the world a new perspective on Didion from within this friendship. But it doesn’t really, and it isn’t. It’s not actually a necessary corrective to the Didion myth, from the perspective of a contemporary who saw 60s California better, supported by evidence. It’s a fangirl’s biography of how your favorite writer was actually mean and cold, and mine was emotional and fun, heavily skewed by the bias of its sourcing and writer.

In Anolik’s telling, the two were like platonic lovers, fighting and caring for each other. But you don’t see that, as a reader. Almost the entire book sees the world and Didion from Babitz’s perspective, and you’re left unsure whether this is a writerly failing (that Anolik failed to show Didion’s side) or a factual one (that Didion didn’t actually care much for Babitz). There’s little new here about Didion — so much of it reads as lightly supported gossip. By the time she’s questioning the sexuality of Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, Anolik lost me. Most of the book is about Babitz anyway, despite the title. But if you really care about Babitz, you’d just read Anolik’s definitive biography of her, Hollywood’s Eve, a far better-written and more interesting book.

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So, what’s the point of Didion and Babitz? To sell. Despite most of the book being on Babitz and Babitz’s thoughts on Didion and Anolik’s thoughts on Babitz, it’s Didion’s name and photo at the top of the cover and every extract is on Didion. Her name sells, after all, and publicists who work for publishers know it. In an era where nobody reads, maybe you can sell books by giving them titles that look good on bookshelves and social media. Which is why it is relevant to relate in a book review that, the day before it launched, Lena Dunham posted a selfie with Didion and Babitz on Instagram.

Ross Anderson is the life editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.