Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz.

All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine. Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are, regardless of who she wants them to be . . . In Eve’s Hollywood, she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the wide-angle perspective of a woman much older—and she’s only in her 20s. In Nathanael West's celebrated novel of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, Eve Babitz sees nothing but an unfair diatribe against her beloved hometown of Los Angeles. Babitz often hears of Hollywood being described as a 'wasteland', a fake town full of fake people where even the greenery is plastic. In Eve's Hollywood she refutes that myth. That said, I will say that I really enjoyed her commentary on LA as a "cultural wasteland"; rather than conforming to the stereotype, she presents LA as a place of innovation and artistry and critiques those on the East who couldn't see that beauty. As an LA hater myself, it was nice to hear the other side of the argument from someone who holds Hollywood so dear.those times magic happened: the writer-reader conspiracy. Yes, the woman CAN write, she’s indeed a killer combination of looks and brains, the type that contributes to the conversation as much as she contributes to the life of the party. Actually, no, she IS the life of the party. Her gift for clear-eyed observation and a relatable yearning to be the cool one, the dangerous one, or the “I don’t give a damn” one make this tasty to read nearly 50 years after she wrote it.

Second, Eve’s Hollywood is nothing at all like what I usually read. My personal library is filled with histories, biographies, “classic novels,” the occasional work of zeitgeisty contemporary fiction, and a hidden shelf full of titles in the so-bad-they-are-necessary category. What my library does not have is memoirs, confessionals, or essay collections. As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with; and better still, made herself felt in every encounter. There isn’t a damn thing wrong with this loosely connected series of memoirs masquerading as essays on Hollywood if you enjoy reading this type of thing. restless, mad, boring as hell,…..(but also accepting of a little pessimistic moodiness these days) > still feeling the after-blow-crappies & shame with an overall Cholesterol number of 300

About the Author

To me, this paragraph encompasses a great deal about Babitz’s prose style. There are careening sentences, wonderful turns of phrase, and overconfident pronouncements. There is also the pervasive sense of unexamined entitlement, as though everyone in the world hangs out with the rich and the famous, carefully choosing the right person with whom to eat caviar.

Her articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In 1971, Joan Didion passed a personal essay Babitz had written about Hollywood High to an editor at Rolling Stone. Babitz would be commissioned to write many magazine articles. Unlike Didion, she was appreciated less for her writing and more for her openness to discuss her social life. In 2014, a tribute in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik launched a revival that includes magazine profiles, Babitz's books reissued by the New York Review Books Classics, a biography by Anolik and a TV series in development at Hulu based on Babitz's memoirs. And a minute after that, Mirandi was at the table too, and an energetic discussion ensued about the best route to take from the Eastside to Hollywood at midday. I was in LA almost every weekend. (hitched a ride from UC Berkeley to UCLA to visit Larry—a boyfriend of few years-who sadly died last year), and to visit my sister at the same time.The beach from that summer was called Roadside. It was 1958 and a lot of kids from West L.A. went there--tough kids with knives, razors, tire irons and lowered cars. No kids from my school or any of the schools nearby went to Roadside, they went to Sorrento where there were never any fights and where most of the kids from Hollywood High, Fairfax and Beverly spent their summers listening to "Venus" on the radio or playing volleyball. If I had only known about Sorrento, I never would have gone to the beach so passionately, since Sorrento was a disapassionate beach involved mainly in the junior high and high school ramifications of polite society, sororities, Seventeen magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet.

The Sheik” is wonderful for its descriptions of the extraordinarily beautiful but dumb girls at Hollywood High who wielded enough power over students and teachers alike to throw things into chaos on a regular basis. “There were 20 of them who were unquestionably staggering and another 50 or so who were cause for alarm, or would have been in a more diluted atmosphere.” The beauty-as-power theme is a lesson learned, but not resented. It made life more interesting, and Eve is nothing if not an appreciator of beauty for its own sake. There are lovely moments too relating a teenager’s awareness of being in a special time and space during a SoCal summer: “. . . the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.” I love the rhythms of the last paragraph, a great example of Eve’s style that I enjoy so much. So what’s her writing like? Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form. To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land,” she wrote. “Everyone keeps telling you to relax, which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.”In the depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” As Steve Martin, then a young banjo-playing comic and Troubadour regular, explained, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Eve was assured in her taste, no question. She knew what she liked and why. Her account of her affair with Jim Morrison is simultaneously gaga and coolheaded. She would write, “Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.” If she venerated him as a love object, though, she rejected him as an artist: “[Jim’s] voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash.” Eve might have been a hopeless romantic but she was also nobody’s fool. As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with and better still, made herself felt in every encounter.”—Daniel Bernardi, PopMatters I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. In another essay, she describes a summer on the beach with a 14-year-old girl named Carol. The beach was not one most parents would have approved of, but Carol’s sangfroid was more than up to it. One day, a 20-year-old man, recently released from prison, singles out Carol for a string of insults.