Eve Babitz could make men sink with lust. And many women will envy her long, illustrious list of conquests.

I can’t remember a book that celebrates pure hedonism this woman’s life embodies. The cocaine. The amphetamines. The alcohol. The sex binges.

Is it the “Secret History of L.A.”?

Not so much.

And not all the names are named.

But it is a pretty good read. Particularly the very funny descriptions of the girls at Hollywood High, a totally corrupt bunch even before the age of consent. ( )

The author has a giant crush on Babitz and if this were a blog post, that would be fine but this is a biography. The combination of twee, overblown, often plainly bad writing and the author awkwardly and unnecessarily inserting herself into her own narrative just are incredibly frustrating.

Just read Babitz.

If there wasn’t such a dearth of information on Babitz, I wouldn’t have read through to the end. Final attempts at authorial insight slightly redeem the book. A good editor could have improved the book greatly. ( )

For its targeted audience, this was an excellent biography. That audience would be history of Los Angeles, Feminist Writers, and 60s music era personalities. I had never heard of Eve Babitz before but I am interested in events surrounding Hollywood and the greater Los Angeles area.

Anolik has proven herself talented enough to keep the reader turning pages even if Babtiz' life has gone dormant for lengths of time. Babitz is a Los Angeles native, as was Norma Jean Baker. This book is worth reading just for Anolik's struggle to place Babitz within a comparable narrative structure to recent writers. Apparently, Anolik is not familiar with world literature besides modern novelists like Proust. This book was consistently humorous enough to make me laugh about Babitz' relationship to Joan Didion and Didion's literary reputation. I'm glad I read this book.

The title is a reversal of Eve Babitz' own book title of Eve's Hollywood.
B&W Photos, Entertaining Footnotes, No Index nor Bibliography. Random chapter headings with starred essay breaks. ( )

Hollywood's Eve is not a conventional biography and its subject, Eve Babitz, is not a conventional person. For one, she is a living work of art in a famous photograph, immersed in a game of chess, completely naked, with a non-plussed Marcel Duchamp. As an artist, her collage LP covers grace the record albums of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, Leon Russell, et al. And, as an aside, even though she was a mainstay in the LA music scene as it conquered the world, it would be misleading to characterize her as a 'groupie.' You see, if anything, personages like Steve Martin, painter Ed Ruscha, rockers Gram Parsons and other glitterati, were on her radar BEFORE they were household names. If anything, Babitz 'collected' men (and perhaps women) and took from them, not the other way around. She was an artist in need of a muse, and she simply reversed the process. No "male gaze" with Eve! In 1974, however, she found a new pursuit with a literary 'voice' that was romantic yet sardonic. Her prose dripped with irony and heartbreak. For almost two decades, novels, memoir-like vignettes, short fiction, articles, and essays. Her first published book, Eve's Hollywood, exploded into the American literary consciousness; as this narrative makes clear, she was the antithesis of the East Coast literary establishment (listening, Joan Didion?) who despised Southern California with a passion that disguised their envy. Times change, an unfortunate accident took place, in a car no less, and younger generations moved into the scene, and Eve was lost in the times. But not for long. A few articles, this biography, and a host of publisher's reissue programs, brought most of her oeuvre back into print. All of this took place shortly after the publication of Hollywood's Eve, probably the reason for the new impetus; nonetheless, the very best part of this captivating little biography is that Lili Anolik tells her story in Eve's voice. What a bonus! Reading prose dripping with irony over the failures and foibles of the rich and famous is such a treat! ( )

I was hesitant to give this 5 stars at first, but then I realized I read it in an evening so obviously it sucked me in. It would recommend not reading this before reading Babitz so that all the references make sense. ( )