Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

by Lili Anolik
Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

by Lili Anolik

Paperback

$17.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, March 21
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (1943-2021), the brilliant chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time.

“I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker

“The Eve Babitz book I’ve been waiting for. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz, age twenty, posed for a photograph with French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1963. They were seated at a chess board, deep in a game. She was naked; he was not. The picture, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. She spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, rocking and rolling, and honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieved that American ideal: art that stayed loose, maintained its cool; art so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. Yet somehow the world wasn’t paying attention. Babitz languished.

It was almost twenty years after her last book was published, and only a few years before her death in 2021 that Babitz became a literary star, recognized as not just an essential L.A. writer, but the essential. This late-blooming vogue bloomed, in large part, because of a magazine profile by Lili Anolik, who, in 2010, began obsessively pursuing Babitz, a recluse since burning herself up in a fire in the 90s.

Anolik’s elegant and provocative book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.

“A dazzling, gossip-filled biography of the wayward genius who knew everyone in Seventies LA.” —The Telegraph (UK)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501125805
Publisher: Scribner
Publication date: 09/03/2019
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 212,658
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Paris Review. She’s written Hollywood’s Eve and created the podcast Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Read an Excerpt

Hollywood’s Eve
Hollywood’s Eve isn’t a biography—at least not in the traditional sense. It won’t attempt to impose narrative structure and logic on life, which is (mostly) incoherent and irrational, lived moment-by-moment and instinctively rather than by grand design and purposefully; or to provide explanations, which (mostly) dull and diminish; or to reach conclusions, which are (mostly) hollow and false. In other words, it doesn’t believe, or expect you to, that facts, dates, timelines, firsthand accounts, verifiable sources tell the tale.

Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is: a biography in the nontraditional sense; a case history as well as a cultural; a critical appreciation; a sociological study; a psychological commentary; a noir-style mystery; a memoir in disguise; and a philosophical investigation as contrary, speculative, and unresolved as its subject. Here’s what Hollywood’s Eve is above all else: a love story. The lover, me. The love object, Eve Babitz, the louche, wayward, headlong, hidden genius of Los Angeles.

A book can be infatuated—hopelessly, helplessly, heedlessly—same as a person. I’m telling you this not as a way of asking for allowances, but for understanding. In the following pages, things might get a little heated, a little weird, a little out of hand. Now you know why.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews