L.A. Woman
Our first featured book of this year is “L.A. Woman” in honour of Eve Babitz, who passed away in December 2021.
Eve was born and raised in Hollywood, California. Her father, Sol Babitz, was a violinist who worked for 20th Century Fox and her mother Mae was an artist. Her godfather was composer Igor Stravinsky and she spent most of her childhood surrounded by her parents’ LA artist friends. Launched into the world of “decadent debauchery” and brilliant writers and bohemians, she quickly made a name for herself within the LA society. She was one of the female artists associated with the landmark Ferus Gallery that launched the career of artists like Ed Ruscha.
The movement was a bridge between the Beats generation of the 50s and the psychedelic culture of the sixties. They rejected all prescribed rules of art and emphasised art shaped by the individual experience. Eve emphasised this throughout her work, drawing on her individual experience to show the beauty in things that seem ugly, boring or strange. After designing album covers in her twenties for the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt (as well as the classic rock album Buffalo Springfield Again, she wrote and published her first book “Eve’s Hollywood” in 1974. It was the first in a series of both fictionalised and true accounts of her time in the “haute bohemian” society of Hollywood.
L.A. Woman was published nearly ten years later in 1982. The main character, Sophie Lubin, is a kind of “autobiographical alter ego” of Eve, containing many elements of Eve’s life; including her romance with Jim Morrison, who was rumoured to have written The Doors song “L.A. Woman” after her. Roaming Hollywood boulevard, Sophie engages with the milieu of L.A., working as a photographer, dabbling in acting in Rome, and becoming a groupie. Intertwining Sophie’s story with the older women she grew up around (such as her father’s German-Jewish friend Lola), Eve creates a narrative that is both sentimental and real, gripping yet playful, and compellingly humorous and intellectual. Even when Eve drifts into the tragical side, rest assured you are never “too far from a punch line”.
Sources
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/07/the-perseverance-of-eve-babitzs-vision/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/20/eve-babitz-chronicler-of-1960s-and-70s-hollywood-excess-dies-aged-78
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/style/the-eve-babitz-revival.html
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/01/eve-babitz-bares-it-all
https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2021-12-18/hollywood-bard-muse-and-reveler-eve-babitz-dies-at-78
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/eve-babitz-4/la-woman/