Eve's Hollywood

Eve's Hollywood

Eve Babitz

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Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of  vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is. 


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  • starr
    Feb 03, 2025
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    i think i am maybe repulsed by eve babitz?
    whether or not these memoirs are true to herself or an exaggerated persona, i just have little interest in the world of someone so privileged, ignorant, foolish, and apathetic.

    that. being. SAID. i did really enjoy her infectious love for los angeles and the tiny window into a world decades past. her casual writing style is approachable and rambly in a nice way. she starts one story with a paragraph about janis joplin's untimely death and then seamlessly transitions the rest of it into a love letter to taquitos. and it works, somehow, again and again.

    i still have more babitz on my shelf that i will be picking up hopefully soon because i want to be wrong. we shall see!!!!!!!!!

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  • JaneyBones
    Mar 11, 2025
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  • Liata
    Mar 11, 2025
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