TLDR: Why This Book is Hot
🌴 California 🌞 1960s and 1970s 🙊 gossip 🎞 famous people 🏰 Chateau Marmont 🎩 luxury
“Hello. I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.”
Eve Babitz
I’m in love with Los Angeles.
Pink skies, dusty hikes, early mornings, eucalyptus, quiet nights.
Hot people.
Eve Babitz was a 20th century L.A. hot person. One with a backstory that reads like a mid-century Paris Hilton. A nepo-baby, her father was the first violinist in the 20th Century Fox orchestra (a real big deal when soundtracks were made by orchestras) and he was well-connected as a result. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather, and she grew up surrounded by family friends such as Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Bertrand Russell. She was a real-life Penny Lane: the girlfriend of Famous MenTM like Steve Martin, Ed Rushcha and Jim Morrison.
She lived the requisite hot person sexy life and she wrote about it, beautifully. This is the woman who, inspired by seeing a Joseph Cornell exhibition on acid, became an album-cover designer for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds’. The woman who introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, the woman who was responsible for Steve Martin's famous white linen suit. She was a red hot slut and unafraid to write about it:
“Harrison [Ford] could fuck. Nine people a day. It’s a talent, loving nine different people in one day. Warren [Beatty] could only do six.”
Her work is a little bit Joan Didion, a little bit Barbie, a little bit Erotica-era Madonna. In her memoirs, she wrote about L.A., celebrity and gossip. Critics dismissed it as unserious, fluffy, girl stuff. If you haven’t heard of Babitz that’s why.
But today we love revisionist history, especially of the feminist sort. Many a podcast and Instagram post has reclaimed famous pretty girls like Britney, Jessica and Barbie as feminist icons by peeling back their manicured images to reveal the very real pain and talent behind their pretty privilege.
So hot girl Babitz is starting to get her due. By the end of 2023, her archive will be opened at the Huntington Gardens and Library, home to works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Thoreau and Newton — dudes whose hotness never got in the way of their talent. (Do you even know what they looked like?)
A hedonist, she found pleasure everywhere: in sex, of course, but also food, sunlight, friends, and creativity. Her writing builds nervy energetic stories. It’s careening, zigzagging. It charges off in one direction and then doubles back on itself, often in one sentence:
“My grandmother is brilliantly charming and a complete manipulator and a whiner and has a laugh that makes the birds shut up so they can learn something,” (Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood, 25).
I love the ride. She was not a sad, tortured writer. An L.A. woman, Babitz knew how to have fun.
But even as she took up the pleasures afforded to her because of her looks, she was aware they got in the way of her writing. In a letter she never sent to Didion in 1972, she wrote,
“Big tits, I suppose, they think they have a right because of that. Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work. Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?”
Babitz suggests Didion can be a serious writer because her 5-foot-2, 95-pound frame didn’t distract people from what her mind was capable of. Babitz’s body got in her way. In that same unsent letter she reads Didion to filth for hiding behind her privilege and refusing to share,
“For a long long long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do Joan…what you do is live in the pioneer days, putting up preserves and down the women’s movement.”
Hello third wave feminism. These are mere buds of the kind of thinking that over thirty years later became the dominant form of feminism and led the way to Slutwalks, Take Back the Night and the pro-sex worker movements.
I don’t want you to read Babitz though just because history hasn’t done right by her. I want you to read her work because her work is good. It’s thoughtful, filled with joy and sorrow, and a deep desire to share the truth as she saw it — it might make you feel a little more seen, a little more angry and a little less crazy.
Have a crush but not ready to commit?
Instead of sharing what I usually do — shorter-crushable reads about or by Babitz — these are cultural organizations based in L.A. Because that gorgeous city of her’s isn’t just beauty, it’s got brains too.
Junior High: a community arts space + Magazine prioritizing the safety + expression of female, queer, nonbinary + POC artists.
Semiotext(e): Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America’s most influential independent presses since its inception more than three decades ago. They host readings, talks and parties I always wish I could be in L.A. to go to.
Huntington Gardens and Library: The most incredible collection of rare books I’ve ever seen, nestled within over 200 acres of botanical gardens.
Light, Space & Surface exhibit at LACMA: In the 1960s and 1970s, various Southern California artists began to create works that investigate perceptual phenomena: how we come to understand form, volume, presence, and absence through light (the most incredible L.A. resource of all). Maybe get as obsessed as I am with Helen Pashgian, another beautiful woman whose incredible work has been annoyingly overlooked.
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When I exchange a book with you, I’m definitely flirting—inviting you to take an intimate peek into the stories that shape my mind.
I want you to flirt too. I hope you read and continue to share the books I recommend here, whether that’s to heat up a book exchange with your current flame, spice things up with your long-term lover(s), or explore ideas to arouse your own intellect.
Prepare to fantasize about new worlds, dominate conversations with your never-ending search for wisdom and submit to the awe-inspiring magic of literature.