| Title | : | L.A. Woman |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 |
| Publication | : | First published April 1, 1982 |
L.A. Woman Reviews
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eve babitz you will always be funny!!!
this was not quite as good as
slow days, fast company, but what is.
also it had some really good lines about how boring it must be to be married to a man and, as a hater who lives her life by the adage that women are more interesting than men...what a pleasure.
the most interesting character in this is sophie from the first half, which makes up roughly 25% of this dual focus story, a not ideal breakdown by any estimation, but the whole thing is written by eve babitz so how bad of a time can we have!
bottom line: every day is a struggle against exclusively reading babitz and didion.
3.5
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tbr review
my memoir
(just kidding i am a Suburb Girl if anything) -
Audiobook….. read by Mia Barron
…..5 hours and 40 minutes
This is my 3rd Eva Babitz book in a short period of time —
I’m ready for a break — but will continue to read her other books. She was a fascinating woman.
“L A Woman” is a novel that feels like a biography.
We meet Sophie and Lola — both who grew up in Los Angeles during the 70’s…
Love, Sex, and Rock n Roll —
There was Vietnam and Watergate — but the 70’s was also an innocent era.
Vinyl, cassette tapes, 8 tracks, — life felt safer than it does today. It was possible to open up junk mail without worrying about getting a virus.
People were obsessed with Farrah Fawcett— Jim Morrison—and nobody was cooler than the Fonz in his black leather jacket.
No movie was more terrifying than Jaws.
There were shag carpets — and kids were allowed to play outside without parental supervision.
And then there was Eve Babitz — the brilliant an L. A. single party girl icon. (designed music album covers, wrote fresh unguarded short stories, memoirs, novels, was associated with Jim Morrison and other musicians and famous Hollywood actors —
Eve Babitz embraced spontaneity- rejected conformity- and lived her life in an unconventional way.
Uninhabited free-spirit —
she died too young (complications with Huntington’s disease)
Not my favorite Eve Babitz book — but still engaging. -
L.A. Woman is the first book I've read without realizing it was fiction. Published in 1982, it's the first person account of Sophie Lubin, daughter of a film studio violinist who grows up in Los Angeles of the 1960s and devotes herself to partying on the Sunset Strip. Author Eve Babitz, writing about herself. But rather than indulging in sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (hi-jinks would be the technical term), Babitz is all about the lo-jinks, sketched as if she were your Auntie Eve, and with panache, taste and several glasses of champagne tells us about her family and friends, slipping in her own exploits, just not very cohesively. I loved it.
-- Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I'd yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down to Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach until finally there I'd be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf through eternity.
-- In my day, growing up in Southern California meant you didn't grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly -- what it is -- to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it's too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.
-- When Lola first went to live in San Francisco with Sam, she married into a time and place which had nothing to do with her. It was WWII and she had to completely abstain from speaking German--any German at all--since the whole country including herself couldn't hear it without boiling over, and though she was used to occasionally dropping German flourishes into her everyday speech, she no longer dared even for fun. Plus, in San Francisco, a woman from L.A. had to resign herself to hats and gloves and stockings because no woman could go out wearing a belly dancer outfit for fun. Women were respectable.
Perhaps the real reason Lola married Sam wasn't to be polite or to oblige her mother, but really because she thought she ought to do something that wasn't fun -- to strengthen her character -- something womanly like sacrificing her life. But then I still couldn't see why anyone would marry Sam just to get character.
-- The truth was, I couldn't act at all, because anytime I had to say someone else's words, they turned into marshmellows sticking my mouth into lumpy resistance, refusing to blithely tumble into the air like they should even in Beckett and not just Shakespeare or Noel Coward, for whenever I had to speak anyone else's words I put up a fight. My word, I deep down thought, were just as brilliant and original as theirs (more original inf act, since everybody had heard their words, whereas they were just finding out mine that very moment). I was just a lousy actress, in other words.
-- The Oriental was a "neighborhood" theater, only since the neighborhood was West Hollywood, the neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Stravinsky. I ran into nuns from Immaculate Heart in line too, and married couples, people on dates, lonely movie stars sneaking in to see themselves fourteen times a week, artists wrecked on mescaline who came for the cartoons, people of "the industry" and kids from Hollywood High just down Sunset a few blocks.
Before my bell jar gazebo passed the best minds of my generation, to say nothing of the cars. Lotuses and Rolls-Royces and chopped Plymouths and immense convertibles went back and forth, back and forth, before my eyes, with people inside--Afghans, ladies with blonde hair spread a yard on either side of them, and men--elegant men, crisp sophisticated originals (including Cary Grant), James Dean slouchers, mad Marlons, confidential smoothies, awkward European guys who wore sandals with socks, slinky invisible guys whom girls committed suicide over.
If you asked me, for the first year or two it was enough. I mean, plus they paid me.
-- Sheila, a girl my age who went to L.A. High and lived next to me in the court, worked part time in a travel agency and looked like a Botticelli--and she was worse than me. I mean, when I moved into that court and had tea with Sheila the first day, we decided to list all the men we had slept with--we were both not twenty-one yet--only I forgot their names counting to 50 I remembered, and Sheila got to 150 (she could even remember last names) before she got confused.
Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that, which had been used to squash girls like us and keep us from having fun for thousands of years, now suddenly didn't stand a chance because Sheila and the rest of us weren't going to get pregnant, die of syphilis, or get horrible reputations around L.A. -- where an L.A. woman had always pretty much painted the town anything she wanted.
The commercial way to write a novel like L.A. Woman would have been to sort everything into conventional "funny women's fiction": Sophie is a Hollywood princess who works at a movie theater box office by day, parties by night, has a fling with hot rock star/ cute movie star while loyal friend who's a writer or some serious person waits for her to grow up (or more accurately, settle down). I think there's AI that can generate a novel like that in the time it takes to watch the most recent Sex and the City reunion and eat a Ben & Jerry's Mini Cup.
Sophie Lubin is absolutely a passive character and that does hold the novel back a step for me. She's in the running for the least ambitious person in Los Angeles County, dedicated neither to fame or fortune, or to bottoming out. Either would be "something." The story never "takes off" or "goes anywhere." It won't be for everyone. But as keen as I am for a story, I'm also big on Los Angeles based fiction, and if I take L.A. Woman at face value as a mediation on what an L.A. woman believes an L.A. woman to be, the novel sings.
I had guys coming out of my ears like streetcars. Only instead of one coming by every ten minutes, like they were supposed to, the old ones never left so my life grew dense with simultaneous romance. Lovers were like the lantana before the trellis caved in.
What separates Eve Babitz from writers who've monetized their address book into a publishing career is that tell-all authors tend to focus on the rats. Babitz is more interested in the maze. Her characters live and breathe, though. These inevitably fall into three categories: actresses or dancers who the industry must replenish, boy geniuses who need care and handling, and the women who support the boy geniuses. Many have used the term "groupie" to describe Babitz but rather than sleep their way through contrived plots and lazy prose, but Babitz's writing is alive. -
L.A. Woman is a novel by Eve Babitz first published in 1982 and re-published in the UK in 2019 by Canongate Books with an eye-catching funky bright yellow cover that screams for attention.
Eve Babitz was not known to me prior reading this book, but after googling her I think she is an extraordinary woman, artist and novelist with a very interesting life. After learning about Eve's background, the book felt autobiographical to me but it's hard to say to what extend is the book based on her real life. She was friends with Jim Morrison who also features in the book.
L.A. Woman reads like a few different stories tied in together but without any main plot. The book is narrated by Sophie who refuses to marry and settle down and chooses to become a photographer, living a glamorous extravagant life in Hollywood with plenty of men to date. The book is easy to read and I flew through it in just two sittings. There are quite a few different characters thrown in and it took me a moment to figure out and remember who was who. Overall this was an entertaining and wild read and it's hard to believe this is a book from 1982! Eve Babitz was for sure ahead of her time.
"Ophelia confessed to me, 'I never knew what to do either, so I got married.'
'I'm saving that as a last resort,' I said.
'But you know so many men,' Ophelia said, 'isn't there even one for you?'
'They're all adjectives,' I said, 'they all make me feel modified; even a word like girl friend gives me this feeling I've been cut in half. I'd rather just be a car or a big one, than sit there for the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.'"
Many thanks to NetGalley and Canongate Books for my review copy. -
I give this book 5 stars not because it is the best book I have ever read, but because it satisfied the appetite I had for it---when I must read Eve, I MUST read Eve, and nothing can stop me, and I can do nothing until the book is done. I will say it again and again, Eve gets L.A. I read her to know that the reasons I live here are understood. I read her for lines like: "I was like Dillinger, surrounded by men out to get me." I read her because she is dead serious when she writes: "I mean, how could someone expect you to vote when you were beautiful and had so many different outfits to wear?" I am absolutely nothing like her, and I love her for everything about her that I adore and admire but have never wanted to be.
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Like a dirty Joan Didion.
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3.5
read this in one sitting on the train and had to stop myself laughing out loud at several points. eve babitz you will ALWAYS be effortlessly funny and cool (and if people forget i will remind them) -
So, this actually had hardly anything to do with Jim Morrison or being a groupie at all, it is however a fizzy, loveable little novel about L.A. and being fabulously promiscuous and really being young and living well. It was really funny, kind of all over the place in terms of narrative, really it's just Eve Babitz telling us stuff in a natural, rambling, swoony way.
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this book called me poor and boring but i loved it
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Dreamy wander around 70s LA with cocktails, hot men, the movies and friendships. Babitz has such a wonderful style - funny, bohemian, privileged, rich, dismissive and that wonderful mixture of frothy and truly great.
Loved that Sam took heroin for his migraines, loved the stories about her mom, loved the stuff about men and marriage... It was all a bit baggy tho, and kinda ran away with itself at times. The intro is great too - it was her idea for Steve Martin to wear a white suit!
Eve Babitz is a dream - I'm reading all of her books. -
L.A. Woman isn't so much a novel as series of anecdotes and aperçus. The narrator, Sophie, is a proto-feminist good time gal living in 1950s/'60s haute bohemian L.A. She has a dry sense of humor and a hilarious trick of twisting her words in a manner that sounds stupid but is actually brilliant. (I'd be very surprised if Babitz wasn't a fan of Anita Loos's Lorelei Lee). At times Sophie's syntax gets so baroque its incomprehensible, and she can get a little navel-gaze-y, but her zest for life is always palpable and refreshing. Her eccentric family and odd friends are also fun, not least the character "Jim" who if I'm not very much mistaken is the lead singer of The Doors.
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I absolutely loved Eve's Hollywood (1974), but apparently Babitz's style doesn't translate well to fiction, at least in this one. Plotless and meandering novels are fine, but the bright and perceptive voice has turned dull and introspective. One minute you're reading choppy reminiscences, and next there's a barrage of long sentences without punctuation marks. There's no cohesion or charm in the mess.
Eve's Hollywood is dreamy and breezy and has pink sunsets, rock stars, and best taquitos in the world. L.A. Woman is stiff, goes through the motions, and doesn't hold its shape. Even worse, I couldn't care less about Sophie and her navel-gazing. Gets one extra star purely because the parts about Jim Morrison at the end were pretty good. -
Every time I finish an Eve Babitz book I am convinced it is my favorite, but I love this one for the sly communist humor.
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I suppose that
Eve Babitz keeps rewriting the same book over and over again. The problem is, I don't mind. It has become such a cultural truism -- especially for those of the Eastern persuasion -- that there is something fundamentally wrong with L.A. I used to buy into that myth, but half a century of living here has made me see different.
L.A. Woman is more fictionalized than Eve's Hollywood, but it's the same basic book. Eve's power is in her positivity:And I was an L.A. woman. In fact, looking back on those one-night stands, I must have been crazy. Yet there were thousands of girls living between Sunset and Santa Monica in between La Brea and La Cienega who painted the town red like me -- and who got away with it too.
I first arrived in L.A. from Cleveland (yechhhh!) at the tail end of 1966 -- right around the time the place seemed to be really getting interesting. I'm glad I stuck with it, and I'm glad Eve Babitz is there to be its muse. -
It’s a “no plot, just vibes” kinda book that I’m actually 100% here for
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There's literally zero plot to this book but it's great fun and there are some very memorable lines.
It took me far too long to realise the Jim in the book is actual real-life Jim Morrison. -
In my day growing up in Southern California meant you didn’t grow up, at least not like girls did elsewhere. Having not grown up myself, like Lola, I know what it was exactly—what it is—to be a woman-looking person in your twenties with none of the trials and tribulations bogging down your whole life, driving you from one predictable crisis of adult life to the next until it’s too late. I, like Lola, was unable to take adult life seriously in my twenties at all and in fact sometimes I wonder, when I look at adult life even now, how on earth I got myself anywhere past my teens.
Every time the school counselor’s office called me down and wanted to know why a girl with my grades wasn’t planning on going “on” (i.e., to UCLA), I felt like oatmeal from head to toe. The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade— provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition—besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask.
eve babitz, the voice for all of us southern california bitches who grew up here.
a truer thing has NEVER been said!
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me except i'm from san diego and every native person from socal with any dignity knows that
SD >>>>>>> LA
so, i guess not me. -
This novel is a mess, but it's also the only book I've enjoyed since Leah Remini's Escape from Scientology. At the sentence-level, it's almost incomprehensible, but Eve's spirit is so pure and vulgar that she manages to convey a pure, vulgar little story about a groupie in the 60s. The whole thing just really SPOKE to me. I mean, the first sentence is "One summer morning while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn't want to go to New Jersey." Been there.
This is just simple wisdom: "Ladies and victims never reason with teenaged purse-snatchers or rapists and that's why I knew I wasn't one."
And only Francesca Lia Block writes about LA with such tenderness: "But the feeling in LA that the place was not safe—that hovering earthquake in the air—was why anyone in the trance even came down long enough to learn to thread a camera at all. They had to take their eye off what was probably the apocalypse and invent Theda Bara out of a girl from Cincinnati to make sense out of the light."
This book might not be for you, but it is certainly for anyone else who sincerely believes they are too beautiful to vote! -
I feel strongly that the word "novel" printed on the cover of this book is a stretch, an unearned badge. Too mature for the Young Adult section perhaps, too false to be considered memoir, but also too simple and unimaginative to hold a place on any shelf containing works of quality fiction. Let's call it romance. Let's call it a guilty pleasure. A quick read and remotely entertaining, the only thing I can say that I have learned from Babitz is that women in Los Angeles might love Tennessee Williams and that they might, at times, be minutely inspiring.
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yes, she *does* know how to write a sentence. my heart swells with luv for eve and lust for LA.
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that was a fun read actually
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more a snapshot of a vibe than a narrative but i liked it all the same. it stretched out like a long hot LA summer.
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No one captured the spirit of LA like Eve Babitz did in her works of fiction and non-fiction that tell stories of Southern California debauchery, where the living is so easy that it almost becomes difficult to keep up with. LA Woman, one of her lesser known works, unfolds like a socialite's party diary. One of her only true novels (next to Sex & Rage), LA Woman tells the story of Sophie, a 17 year old graduating from Hollywood High. When Babitz describes Sophie's plans for after high school, she writes, "The idea of doing anything once I got out of the twelfth grade --provided I could even get out since my spelling was impervious to tradition--besides just lying on the beach seemed too much to ask."
When Babitz wasn't writing non-fiction, she wrote autofiction - injecting her spirit and her stories into made-up narrators like LA Woman's Sophie and Sex & Rage's Jacaranda. People sometimes get upset at Babitz not owning her story in these narratives, but I couldn't care less. The idea that fiction needs to be made up is tired to me. When reading criticism of Eve Babitz's autofiction, I often think of something that Makenna Goodman said in an interview, "I think there's this myth in literature that, to be a good writer, or to be an effective storyteller, one has to make up something....I'm so bored by that, it feels fake to me...it reads as if I'm watching the writer fake it til they make it and I don't want to see that - I just want to go right into the root of human experience." What Goodman said doesn't feel too far off from something Babitz may have said in response to her critics. Someone who constantly tried to push her limits as a creator, Babitz dabbled in several different fields. In LA Woman, through Sophie, we hear a little bit about Babitz's passion for photography, and the various bands she photographed. A jack of all trades, Babitz could be considered someone who is completely down for whatever. Her "fuck it" attitude towards life comes through in her prose, her willingness to engage in any sort of opportunity for an adventure. She was one of our greatest chroniclers of Southern California life, always writing in her notebook, and particularly remembering things that most intellectuals didn't deem as important.
LA Woman, near the end, feels like a love letter to Babitz's friend and one-time lover Jim Morrison, whose spirit floats throughout this book. Sophie is a Jim Morrison groupie and, it's eventually implied, becomes involved with him in some way. Babitz, as well as Sophie, was tough on Morrison, wary of anyone who was fawned-over by so many. In a moment of fragility near the end of the novel, however, Babitz writes, "I couldn't believe it sitting there in my apartment when Sheila called about how Jim died in Paris. It took me two years not to see him coming around corners the way he always did, and in Barney's there was so much of him in the air."
As someone who is aiming to be a Babitz completionist, it's easy to look back on all of her books and think that they're basically saying the same thing. In a sense, they are. Though upon closer inspection, I realized that Babitz weaved an entire tapestry of her life through these books. LA Woman felt like it gave me more insight into her involvement with the music scene, as well as the LA elders she looked up to. When I read all the talk of women who had inspired her, the book felt like an extension on the "Daughters of the Wasteland" essay from her masterpiece Eve's Hollywood.
LA Woman is, all in all, classic Babitz - dreamy prose shot through with spiky observations and retellings. Such an absolute treat. -
Obsession with Jim Morrison x Jewish girl in arts
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I need to say this before I begin: I simply LOVE Eve Babitz. I am doing something I rarely do. I am writing the review right after finishing the book. I am having too many feels. But who cares? I spent my day in a haze. I have this sort of days once in a while. Needless to say I hate them. I just can’t focus, I just can’t think straight and stick to a task. But Eve here was able to connect with me in a day like this. As always. My muse!
Now about the book! I dare say that L. A. Woman is an autobiographical novel and it reads like an homage to Los Angeles. Sophie, the main character, is wild and free. To her, Paris smells like death and it’s senseless. After all, they have a thing called a bidet that looks like a toilet but it’s not a toilet (she found out the hard way). And, New York is just dark. Los Angeles is the place where life happens. This book is a series of anecdotes and some involve Jim Morrison, Sophie’s lover at one point.
About Babitz, Vanity Fair said that she is 'to prose what Chet Baker is to jazz'. And, I couldn’t agree more. Her prose is fluid, wild, swoony and dirty. It seems effortless, although you can tell that it is not. Babitz is unique and inspiring. She doesn’t take life too seriously and I love that about her.
For more reviews follow me on Instagram @booksturnyouon -
0/5
i gave up on this on page 75. idk if Babitz was on something when she wrote this but I could not deal with the lack of punctuation. there was a concerning absence of full stops (periods), so i have no idea how it got past the editors. it was AWFUL!!!
there was no plot and too many characters to keep track of. it’s a stream of consciousness almost and i hated every minute of it. obviously i didn’t finish it so take this with a pinch of salt but i did read summaries and also the last page.
was so excited to read some of Babitz’s work but idk if i can bring myself to give anything else a go :( -
Wow!! Absolutely hilarious and thoughtful. First time reading any work by Eve Babitz and I think this was the perfect way to start. Such an easy read yet going at a 1000 miles per hour with her style of writing in a stream of consciousness manner that I absolutely had so much fun and can say that I loved it. 100% will read this again at some other time in my life! This feels like a book that people should read at several moments throughout their lives.
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Why are there so few reviews on books by Eve Babitz? I adore this woman and this novel was wonderful. If possible, please pick it up.
Side note: if you are going to get into Babitz, I recommend starting with "Slow Days, Fast Company." -
More a memoir in novella form, but every bit as sparkly and decadent as Babitz' essays. It is addictive to read Babitz describe her friends as truly beautiful with no evidence of any of the greener emotional responses that feature in books about women + friends. Another gem.
