LILI ANOLIK'S LOVE/HATE LIST

Dream Baby Press asked Lili Anolik for a list of 10 things she loves and 10 things she hates ❤️🚫

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. She is the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. Her latest book, Didion & Babitz, is out now.

You can order Lili’s new book here.

And follow her on Instagram here.

THINGS LILI ANOLIK LOVES:

1. Getting my way

2. The year 1986

3. Rotary telephones. I have two in my apartment, an orange one and a red one. But I don’t have a working landline, so I can’t actually use them. I’ve got to get on that

   

4. The first season of Girls. Also, the last season of Girls

   

5. High heels. The shoe qua shoe but also the sound the shoe makes—that dry, sharp click—which, to me, is the signature song of romance and danger and intrigue. Of adult sexual life, basically

6. A note my older boy, Ike, left on my pillow Valentine’s Day 2020

   

7. Quentin Tarantino on Star 80; Janet Malcolm on Sylvia Plath; Pauline Kael on anything

8. Rafael Nadal between 2004 and 2022; Britney Spears between 1998 and 2008

   

   

9. The David Lynch neo-noir Lost Highway. It’s the best movie there is on the Valley and the porn business. Even better than Boogie Nights, which is really saying something

   

10. Men who like talking to women

11. My publicist, Kaitlin Phillips

THINGS LILI ANOLIK HATES:

1. Hearing the word “no.”

2. Dieting. Though sometimes you’ve gotta

3. Prestige TV

4. Vegetables

5. Fighting with my husband who’s too nice to fight with. Who never has it coming. (I also hate fighting with my sons, though sometimes they do have it coming.)

6. Conversations about Stanley Kubrick

7. Politics. Someone raises the topic, and I can feel myself go blank with impatience and hostility

8. People who prefer Hemingway to Fitzgerald; Gene Kelly to Fred Astaire; Madonna to Courtney Love; L.C. to Kristin Cavallari

   

   

9. Non-formfitting clothes

10. Regular Pepsi, Diet Coke. (It has to be the other way around, always, always.)

---

Get the first Dream Baby Press book- MOUTHFUL by Matt Starr.

Buy MOUTHFUL here.

"MOUTHFUL KEEPS A RUNNING LYRICAL TAB OF ALL OF THE STRAY, HORNY, QUOTIDIAN, ANXIOUS BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, GENEROUS THOUGHTS RACING THROUGH MATT'S HANDSOME LITTLE' HEAD. *CHEF'S KISS*”

- BRONTEZ PURNELL, Author of 100 Boyfriends