
Eve's Hollywood
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Narrated by:
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Mia Barron
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By:
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Eve Babitz
About this listen
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and 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.
©1972, 1974 Eve Babitz (P)2016 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
-
-
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-
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Performance
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Story
Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural 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 posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
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- By Ariana Sweany on 10-29-24
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-
I Used to Be Charming
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- By: Eve Babitz, Sara Kramer - Editor, Molly Lambert - introduction
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
-
-
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-
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- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
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Performance
-
Story
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Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.
By: Eve Babitz
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- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
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-
obsessed with Eve
- By Debbie L. Smith on 06-25-20
By: Eve Babitz
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Hollywood's Eve
- Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural 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 posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
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By: Lili Anolik
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Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
-
-
I’m still Team Joan
- By Dorothy L. Lipman on 11-16-24
By: Lili Anolik
-
Sex and Rage
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The popular rediscovery of Eve Babitz continues with this very special reissue of her novel, originally published in 1979, about a dreamy young girl moving between the planets of Los Angeles and New York City. We first meet Jacaranda in Los Angeles. She's a beach bum, a part-time painter of surfboards, sun-kissed and beautiful. Jacaranda has an on-again, off-again relationship with a married man and glitters among the city's pretty creatures, blithely drinking pink ladies with any number of tycoons, unattached and unworried in the pleasurable mania of California.
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-
Adored all of the characters—even the insufferable ones
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By: Eve Babitz
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Black Swans
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Performance
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Story
L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.
By: Eve Babitz
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I Used to Be Charming
- The Rest of Eve Babitz
- By: Eve Babitz, Sara Kramer - Editor, Molly Lambert - introduction
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
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Only Thing Wrong - the Narrator
- By SusanV on 10-25-19
By: Eve Babitz, and others
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The White Album
- Essays (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Susan Varon
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1979, Joan Didion's The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.
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You Feel Like You Are There
- By Kelly Jo on 07-15-24
By: Joan Didion
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Play It as It Lays
- A Novel (FSG Classics)
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.
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Didion is a genius
- By Rogue415 on 04-09-25
By: Joan Didion
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Blue Nights
- A Memoir
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most powerful writers, a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.
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Twilights turn Long and Blue
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Joan Didion
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Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Picador Modern Classics
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Maya Hawke
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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More than perhaps any other book, this collection by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era captures the unique time and place of Joan Didion’s focus, exploring subjects such as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up in California and the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
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The vivid imagery.
- By Anne on 03-20-25
By: Joan Didion
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Hollywood's Eve
- Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, 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.
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Really bad book
- By jlmillsaps on 04-20-20
By: Lili Anolik
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A Book of Common Prayer
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Writing with the telegraphic swiftness and microscopic sensitivity that have made her one of our most distinguished journalists, Joan Didion creates a shimmering novel of innocence and evil. A Book of Common Prayer is the story of two American women in the derelict Central American nation of Boca Grande. Grace Strasser-Mendana controls much of the country's wealth and knows virtually all of its secrets; Charlotte Douglas knows far too little.
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Strong tale badly told
- By A reader in Berkeley on 06-04-17
By: Joan Didion
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Just Kids
- By: Patti Smith
- Narrated by: Patti Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.
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Darkly Self Centered & Narrow View
- By Sara on 10-05-15
By: Patti Smith
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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The Year of Magical Thinking
- By: Joan Didion
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
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Great book to Read, but I didn’t like it
- By Michael on 05-08-15
By: Joan Didion
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The Friday Afternoon Club
- A Family Memoir
- By: Griffin Dunne
- Narrated by: Griffin Dunne
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good.
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Griffiths phrasing made it easy to listen and absorb.
- By Nancie Keay on 06-17-24
By: Griffin Dunne
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate; she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
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I love it...
- By Claudia Gallegos on 07-12-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
What listeners say about Eve's Hollywood
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ryan Stanley
- 09-11-18
A fun read!
All of my friends just started reading Eve Babitz, and I was told that this was a good place to start. I also chose this book based on the narrator's voice in the sample. It was a nice light read that still had its somber and insightful moments. This book is a series of nonfiction stories in which Babitz recounts memories with various Hollywood oddballs. It starts off a little trite, but it gets better towards the end. She has a wonderful way of capturing the sad and beautiful feeling of California. Plus, the narrator really brought this to life!
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- Anonymous User
- 04-17-25
Eve, you are experiencing a richly deserved moment, characterized by your epigrammatic nature and velvety language.
What wit glad I discovered Eve, the voice of LA. Crispy, as you, where there
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- chetyarbrough.blog
- 04-16-23
YOUTH
“Eve’s Hollywood” is Eve Babitz’s memoir of life in southern California. Some names are undoubtedly changed to protect the not-so innocent. Babitz’s picture of Hollywood and her recalled life seems like a fantasy. Her story is filled with the glamour of life when young–with the 60s’ experiences of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.
Babitz story is of her life in Hollywood among women coveted for looks more than brains by predominantly male rainmakers. The irony is their brains, not their beauty, were the source of their success. Good looks opened doors but being a good Hollywood actor or writer required brains.
Each sex wishes for equal opportunity in their pursuit for money, power, or prestige (hopefully within the boundaries of rule-of-law). Coming to grips with the consequence of men and women being equal is a hard subject for men to accept. Babitz memoir may or may not help men understand that women’s ambitions and capabilities are no different than men's.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-16-20
White Privilege Galore
In her first vignette, “Daughters of the Wasteland,” the author, Eve Babitz attempts to establish herself as a legitimate observer and reporter of Los Angeles culture. Rather than offer a cohesive story, she lists her glamorous childhood experiences to garner street cred. One after the other, her loose comments pretentiously retort, “I know what’s up because I was born into a cultured family in LA,” into my (most likely) biased ears.
But the shallow tone persists throughout the work and further morphs into a flippant, hedonistic and careless attitude only white privilege can afford. Her glorification and admiration of the tumultuous, gritty, and exciting lives she imagines the tough Mexican pachucos live is a superficial and insulting view of an entire community. As she desires to immerse herself in their “real lives” she glamorizes the violent life she imagines they live only because her privileged status allows her to fancy such disturbing dreams.
Scores of literary millennial women love Eve Babitz. Eve Babitz is unapologetically sexual, beautiful, literary, and witty. She is an enticing free spirit. Her attitude is one young women breaking barriers yearn to adopt. But not all women are free to adopt Eve’s philosophy of life. Intersectionality exists.
This is the part that terrifies me the most: in a moment in our American history where systematic oppression is finally being unearthed, Eve Babitz is who struck a cord amongst women of my generation. Why?
Eve’s funny- maybe this is whole book is one big joke I don’t get.
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1 person found this helpful
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- John Branca
- 03-29-25
About as boring and irrelevant as it comes. so self-indulgent. i
What is the point of this book? It has no point. Except perhaps for family members of the author
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