The details of Eve Babitz’s life always get in the way of the real story, which is the writing itself. Babitz’s work got a real second wind at the end of the 2010s, amid debates over the merits of autofiction. Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977) certainly might count, although their pseudonyms and obscured details are more often attributed to the trust the discreet author inspired. It would also make sense, I think, if her work had seen a resurgence during the 2000s, when bloggers became the new It Girls, way after Babitz had mastered being the life of a party and its best documenter, kind of like her peers in the New Journalism and Gonzo movements, only more charming. It would make sense, too, if her popularity spiked again later in this decade, after a wave of homeward migration. Everything Los Angeles–born Babitz has written is about L.A. in some way, and so it’s about, among other things, a hometown.
In fact, the timing of Babitz’s reprisal feels arbitrary, probably because it is. Reissues by Counterpoint Press (Black Swans: Stories, and Sex and Rage: A Novel) and New York Review of Books Classics (Eve’s Hollywood in 2015, Slow Days, Fast Company in 2016, and I Used to be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz in 2019) followed a rediscovery of sorts by the writer Lili Anolik, who, after happening upon a Babitz quote in a book she can’t remember, Googled the name, in 2010. Infatuated, and appalled by the lack of reading materials still in print, Anolik hunted down Babitz herself, who, she learned, had become reclusive after a near-death experience involving a lit match and nylon pantyhose in 1997. The resulting Vanity Fair story, “All About Eve—And Then Some” became yet another celebration of the writer everyone wants to know.
It’s true that Babitz’s reputation precedes her—she’s dated rock stars, been called a genius by movie stars, posed nude with art stars, etc.—but it’s also true that reading her work unaware of her biography would tell you that she knows a good time better than the rest of the literary world, then and now. Babitz’s style is, unfortunately, inimitable. It is bell-like, a higher vibration that becomes clear and profound. Her stories are like enthralling conversation, lively yet cool, seductively generous at times, at others touchingly guarded. A first sentence to a story in Slow Days, as an example: “Ever since the Garden of Allah was torn down and supplanted by a respectable savings and loan institution, the furies and ghosts have made their way across Sunset to the Chateau Marmont.”
There are way too many examples of horrible people who are exciting writers, or exciting people who are horrible writers. Babitz appears an exception to that rule. Her best writing shows a spontaneous personality writing about her own life and writing in a way that doesn’t thwart spontaneity—rare proof that this is possible.