Hollywoods Eve, Lili Anolik
Hollywoods Eve, Lili Anolik
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Hollywood's Eve
Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Author: Lili Anolik

Narrator: Jayme Mattler

Unabridged: 7 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/08/2019


Synopsis

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)

About Lili Anolik

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. She is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Hollywood’s Eve and Didion and Babitz. Her last podcast, Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College, was produced by Cadence13. In 2024, she was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for profile writing. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tammy on January 16, 2019

This is an expanded version of Anolik’s Vanity Fair article. There is a good bit of information about the author’s pursuit of Babitz and some interesting observations about Joan Didion. It’s a solid biography if you haven’t read the article. If you have read it there isn’t much that is new.......more

Goodreads review by Britta on January 09, 2019

More fan-nonfiction than a biography, but I found the mix of the author's personal point of view, interviews and biographical snippets very fitting for the subject in question, and also a highly enjoyable read.......more

Goodreads review by Sara on March 11, 2019

I hate the way this book is written. The writer is far too indiscreet with punctuation. Colons, semi colons et al abound, sentences veer all over the place, and paragraphing makes little sense. The narrator often speaks in first person, and then suddenly switches to quotes from the subject (Babitz)......more

Goodreads review by grace on March 06, 2022

so conflicted about this one it was self aware and raw and real while also tainted by the love (or obsession?) the author clearly has with idealized babitz. it was condescending and exposing, just as flawed as babitz herself. somehow it made eve into a person of flesh instead of just words on a page......more

Goodreads review by Bree on February 10, 2019

I can’t remember the last time, if there ever was a time that I’ve read a biography and if this is in deed my first, I’m glad it was. I’ve never read anything by Eve Babitz. Shamefully, Sex and Rage has been sitting unread on my shelf for about 7 months, but this biography was such a joy to listen to......more