★ 11/16/2015
In this reissued collection of autobiographical essays, first published in 1972, Babitz (L.A. Woman) describes coming of age amid the glamour of 1950s and '60s Hollywood. Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm. Babitz peppers her writing with cultural references that include Marlon Brando, Janis Joplin, and Igor Stravinsky. The essays cover Babitz's family history, the halls of Hollywood High (where the school mascot is the Sheik, after Rudolph Valentino's character in the silent film of the same name), and her early adulthood. Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and an ingénue in the same breath. "I got deflowered on two cans of Rainier Ale when I was 17," she begins her essay "Sins of the Green Death," an unflinching look at her sexual awakening and disillusionment with education and the values of her parents. Babitz takes the reader on travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs. Hollywood is, she says, quoting Jim Morrison, "trapped in a prison of her own devise," but it is a prison she seems glad to be trapped in. (Oct.)
"One of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles." —Kevin Dettmar, The Atlantic
"The writing—its innocence, its sophistication, its candor, its wit, its profligacy and pluck, its willingness to fly in the face of received wisdom, its sheer headlong, impish glee—made me positively dizzy with pleasure."—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz . . . reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila . . . Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning'—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book.”
—Steve Martin
"Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating.” —Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
“It's so good that I don't want to finish it.” —Laia Garcia, LennyLetter
“Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.” —Deborah Shapiro, The Second Pass
“Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz.” —Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure… The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.” —Naomi Fry, New Republic
“Babitz skips around time with ease and writes with the airy, knowing offhandedness of Renata Adler’s Jen Fain, except she eschews Manhattan sophistication in favor of a Hollywood unpretentiousness.”—Alison Herman, Flavorwire
“Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm . . . Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and an ingénue in the same breath . . . Babitz takes the reader on travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs.” —Publishers Weekly
“[A] charming tour guide who takes a wasteland and gives us back a wonderland.” —Steffie Nelson, New York Magazine
“Her voice on the page is no less mesmerizing than her presence in a room . . . The singular spectrum of her adventures, her friends, and her tastes reveal themselves in her unconventional and delightful dedication page(s).” —Nicole Jones, Vanity Fair
"Eve Babitz, whose autobiographical vignettes of LA had an easygoing Mediterranean warmth and acceptance (she didn't billboard over the dark side of LA and Hollywood, she just didn't elevate it into a noir nihilism) that was the antithesis of Joan Didion's desert vision of bleached bones beneath numbed nerves. The pleasure principle still prevailed in Eve's writing, whatever the setbacks and heartbreaks." —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair
"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." —Holly Brubach, The New York Times
"What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Didion or Nathanael West . . . is that no matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast in pursuit of 'movie dreams.'" —Steffie Nelson, The Los Angeles Review of Books
"Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate letter-writer of Louis XIV's time, transposed to the Chateau Marmont in the late 20th-Century—lunching, chatting, dressing, loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles." —Mollie Gregory, The Los Angeles Times
"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
“Her romp through ’70s L.A. winkingly fulfills the promises of pleasure and delight so often scorched to nil by writers like Joan Didion.” —Ian Epstein, Vulture
“Eve’s Hollywood—a memoir of sorts that detailed her life growing up in California, attending Hollywood High, and hanging out with a bevy of rock and art stars—announced Babitz as a writer with a brand of glamour that was sophisticated yet gritty, intellectual with a lust for life and also for, well, sex. Her writing moves as fast as her nights.” —Garage
