I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz by Eve Babitz

I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz Reviews

• 
  Violeta

  Eve Babitz was the sum of alluring combinations: an intellectual and a girl about town, shiny yet deep, a tough nut but also a sucker for all that she held dear. Add to that a generous doze of a good old sense of humor (the pre-politically correct kind) and you have the potent mix of an opinionated and hugely entertaining writer.
  
  An L.A. native who in her day hung out with everyone who was anyone in the art, film and music world, she interwove her personal mythology with that of the West Coast from the 60s to the 90s. Fifty essays that originally appeared in publications such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Playboy and Condé Nast Traveller among others, are gathered in this essay collection. In her seemingly effortless style (the hardest of them all) Babitz observes and offers her strong point of view on people, places and cultural phenomena she experienced firsthand. Magazine pieces are ephemeral by nature but the writing here is so good that they deserve the timelessness of a proper book.
  
  Some of the people that make an appearance: Francis Ford Coppola in All This and The Godfather Too, Jim Morrison in Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood, Andy Warhol in The Soup Can as Big as the Ritz, Marcel Duchamp in I Was a Naked Pawn for Art – aah those titles!
  
  
  Marcel Duchamp and Eve Babitz at the Pasadena Art Museum, 1963
  
  Some of the places: Miami in Party at the Beach, Santa Fe in Angels We Have Heard on High, Ojai and its music festival in Keeping Time in Ojai.
  L.A. - of course; Venice, Pasadena, Beverly Hills and legendary locales such as Chateau Marmont, the Trobadour club, Helena’s (exclusive club for the rich and famous) included.
  
  
  Line in front of the Whisky A Go-Go, 1964
  
  Sometimes it all got to be too much for me – all that beauty showing all that promise – and I’d grow morbidly paranoid and filled with grave doubts, comparing us there – that all-one-night at the Troubadour – with the hero in Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle,” who starts his life knowing that something so great and special is going to happen to him that he never attaches himself to anything real, and finally, just before he is about to become old, he realizes that the special thing – that beast in the jungle waiting to jump out at him – is indeed unique, because it’s nothing – nothing will ever happen to him. Sometimes I’d think that nothing would ever happen to us either, or at least that it would be all downhill from then on. The latter isn’t far from wrong, I think sometimes.
  Honky-Tonk Nights, Rolling Stone, 1979
  
  Some of the themes: The Tyranny of Fashion, Tiffany’s Before Breakfast, The Manson Murders.
  
  Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s wedding-day photo on their nightstand, 1969
  
  -Life in the West Coast, as opposed to life… anywhere else, in My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?, A Californian Looks at New York, Girl’s Town.
  
  
  Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston photographed at Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive, 1971
  
  -The Sixties and their hippie culture: We used to think that if only we hung on with enough of a vengeance, things would have to get better – kinder and gentler and certainly more colorful. Every time we saw the remotest evidence of this, we’d sigh, “It’s happening, it’s happening.” By which we meant “they” were getting it, that pretty soon the war would end, police would blend into the scenery, and Latin American dictators would divest themselves of their worldly goods and even Richard Nixon would show up wearing flowers. We thought beauty was power. Of course, we were wrong.
  Hippie Heaven, Vogue, 1992
  
  
  Joan Didion in front of her yellow Stingray, 1968
  
  -Americana in relation to…onions, according to Babitz, in No Onions (don’t ask…)
  
  -80’s neo-conservatism in Sober Virgins of the Eighties and Blame It on the VCRs, Smart, 1990:
  When I was a madwoman in the 1960s, everyone I knew was getting laid like crazy. Everyone was wild for sex: they heard the phrase “free love” and ran amok across the land. Married men, married women, squares, hippies – everyone was on the prowl, cruising for the Answer in the form of sex. Of course, if you found the Answer, you were stuck with it for all eternity, like being married, so the Answer would often change.
  
  -What it’s like to have big tits in My Life in a 36DD Bra: When I was fifteen years old, I bought and filled my first 36DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man. Tits! Why, he hadn’t even noticed!
  
  The last story, I Used to Be Charming, is the author’s own detailed account of the terrible accident that transformed her body and her life in 1997 when she lit herself on fire while in her car, trying to light up one of her beloved cigars. It may not be the swan song she had had in mind throughout her dazzling and prolific writing career but it’s bold, inspiring and idiosyncratically entertaining – same as all her work.
  Here I was, I thought, over fifty years old, still so stupid that I was risking my life for a smoke. Was this the brick wall that Mrs Hurly, my fifth-grade teacher, so confidently warned me that one day I’d end up crashing into “if I didn’t pay attention”? Had I managed to avoid all the damage I had done up to this point, breaking hearts, being unreliable, only to hit that brick wall because of a match? I imagined how pissed off my friends would be if they heard I actually died from trying to light a cigar.
  
  It was a perfect read for this time of the year. My copy has been soaked by seawater, stained by salt and sun lotion, crumbled from drying up in the hot July winds. That, I think, is the most appropriate state a book by Eve Babitz should find itself in. In her universe it was always summer.
  
  
  Wilshire Boulevard, 1964
  
  All photographs from:
  The Way We Were: The Photography of Julian Wasser: Limited Edition
• 
  Suzanne

  I met Eve Babitz once in the early ‘90s, very, very briefly, after a reading at a Hollywood playhouse, when I caught her in the lobby afterward and gushed about how I’d read Fast Days, Slow Company four times. She looked at me like I was daft, but luckily there were other people waiting to speak with her, which gave me an excuse to exit the convo quickly, if not gracefully. (Was that the wrong thing to say?) Fast Days remains my favorite of hers, but this collection of her magazine articles might be an easy intro to Eve with low-commitment 5-minutes reads, although they don’t have the coherence and mood-building capacity (light-hearted as it is) of her other books.
  
  One blurb on the back of I Used to Be Charming is from Tosh Berman: “There’s Adam, and then there is of course Eve Babitz. There are those who call her a party girl, but in truth she documented her times and social world in Southern California as if she was Charles Dickens. Or perhaps Marcel Proust.” Well, Proust might be pushing it, but Dickens perhaps. If Charles Dickens had dealt in glamour instead of orphans.
  
  With the exception of the last selection, a 60-page exploration of the Italian lifestyle brand Fiorucci, I enjoyed most of the pieces in I Used to Be Charming . Before, during, and after writing her one novel, Sex and Rage, and several semi-fictional/semi-autobiographical/ memoir-ish books (Slow Days, Fast Company; Eve’s Hollywood; L.A. Woman), she was also a prolific magazine contributor, publishing in Playgirl, Esquire, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Rolling Stone, and in lesser known or now defunct periodicals such as Smart, LA Style, American Film, womenSports, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. The Fiorucci piece was too long and somewhat repetitive, but the rest of the 49 articles, written between 1975 and 1997, and presented in chronological order, are short, snappy, and fun. Well, perhaps the last entry, the title essay, wasn’t exactly fun, but she manages to make the subject entertaining, long after the fact: an account of an accident that left her with 3rd degree burns requiring months of treatment, which ultimately resulted in her retirement and withdrawal from most social life.
  
  If you think Eve Babitz is shallow, as could be deduced from her breezy style and free-wheeling reputation, you’re missing the point. As she says in “Hippie Heaven,” “Fun is not to be sneezed at.” A great believer in fun, she is also devoted to beauty for its own sake as well as dedicated to enjoying life and defending Los Angeles and Hollywood against clueless detractors from elsewhere.
  
  There is some serious name-dropping going on in most of these pieces. Plugged into the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene of the day, rock and roll, and the movie industry, Eve knew, interviewed or slept with heavy hitters in those fields: Frances Ford Coppola, Linda Ronstadt, Jim Morrison, and artist Ed Rushca, and she famously played chess naked with Marcel Duchamp (her, not him). There are interviews with James Wood, Nicholas Cage, Billy Baldwin and Jackie Collins. She designed album covers for the likes of Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds.
  
  Many of the pieces are place-based, weighted heavily in favor of L.A. or Hollywood, of course, such as “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here,” in which she extols the virtues of Southern California and includes praise for the Chateau Marmont and Pasadena’s Gamble House, with which I heartily concur. She reminisces about childhood trips to Ojai in the 1950s, a magical valley in the mountains of Ventura County, where she attended its annual music festival in its early days. Her father, a studio musician, was one of the original organizers and her godfather, Igor Stravinsky, an early participant. She also writes about New York, Santa Fe, Miami, and San Francisco.
  
  Pull up a front-row seat as Eve people-watches in “Venice, California”, “Honky Tonk Nights” (at the Troubadour night club), and “The Girl from Gold’s Gym,” all from 1979. Other topics covered include movie-making, body image, men and women and romance, ballroom dancing, men’s legs, Ashtanga yoga, Andy Warhol, Patrick Swayze movies, kissing, and perfume.
  
  Eve’s casual, gossipy tone belies the fact there’s some great prose here if you listen for the rhythms in her language, whether she’s talking about the ambiance of all-night supermarkets at 3 a.m., swimming naked in a friend’s bougainvillea-shaded pool overlooking the city, or why she loves Santa Fe in winter.
  
  Most of these articles are in the neighborhood of 3 to 8 pages. Some are a little dated because of the specificity she brings to her observations and stories, but that’s totally fine and only serves to add to the historical record of what a certain portion of Southern California was like in the last quarter of the 20th century.
  
  While I’m thrilled Eve is getting her due, finally, after decades of obscurity, thanks to a 2014 piece in Vanity Fair and the NYRB re-issuing several of her books in the past four years, I feel like I’m giving up a certain exclusivity as an Eve Babitz fan. When I joined Goodreads 9 and ½ years ago, I could only find two other people who were fans (both of whom I’m still in touch with). Our well-kept secret is getting out and I don’t feel nearly as cool as I once did, now that I have to share her. But still, I’m glad she is getting the exposure, recognition, and appreciation she so richly deserves. I used to think one had to love Los Angeles, as Eve does, to appreciate her take on it, but if you don’t love it, it’s possible she could teach you how. As long as you remember, “Fun is not to be sneezed at.”
  
  BTW, NYRB is having a sale for a couple of days on Fast Days, Slow Company, which Larry McMurtry called “Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place.”
  www.nyrb.com
  
  Just saying . . .
• 
  Allison Floyd

  Nothing, in my opinion, is better than incisive commentary and virtuosic prose masquerading as juicy gossip and frothy fun. Thank the maker for Eve Babitz.
• 
  emma

  pretty high up in my Best Title rankings
• 
  Elyse Walters

  Audiobook….read by Eve Babitz, Sara Kramer, Editor, Molly Lambert -introduction
  ….14 hours and 41 minutes
  
  The blurb perfectly describes
  “I Used To Be Charming”….
  The Rest of Eve Babitz
  
  …Hollywood It Girl
  …Eve Babitz knew everyone: Jim Morrison, Nicolas Cage, many other celebrities—
  …She knew men!
  …She knew what men!
  …She had something to say about fashions, drugs, sex, music, rock n’ roll, movies, books, photography, weight loss, ballroom dancing
  …And unfortunately she knew about a tragic accident that compelled her to leave the spotlight forever.
  
  I’m losing track of how many books I’ve read now by the late — wonderful Eve Babitz —
  I enjoy her sharp, sassy, and entertaining storytelling.
  
  Terrific collection of essays by an author who died to young — but lived like her life mattered!
  
  I love her!!!
• 
  Wamia

  Oh Eve, you‘ll forever be my role model
• 
  AB

  She probably would have kept silent forever except that she took an overdose of drugs recently and was in the hospital for a month or so and when she was all better, she knew the world need no longer go on in ignorance. She decided to tell all.
  
  I love Eve Babitz and loved this book. That being said, this book has a different feel to it from the other two published by NYRB. Unlike the other two books, this is an editor compiled collection of Babitz's uncollected works. Several of the stories are short magazine articles (especially fashion and travel related) and I feel that a lot of those lacked the Babitz style that I love. That being said, there are still plenty of great pieces in here (including those fashion and travel related articles), many that are incredibly charming and autobiographical. I especially loved the flashbacks to the Ferus Gallery and the L.A art scene.
  
  Or my navy wide-leg sailor pants with the thirteen-button front (giving sailors thirteen chances to change their minds, was the idea-- not that I ever did)
• 
  Peter Landau

  I’m drawn to Eve like Adam, and such as that character I feel an equal mix of temptation and unease. She is an entertaining writer and a hoot to share the page with, yet often I find her interests as shallow as a puddle that I’ve annoyingly stepped in. But that’s me. She’s not here for my approval and I appreciate her strength and vulnerability. It’s weird, this is the second book of hers I’ve read with a similar response from me. I might be a stick in the mud, but I’ll likely be reading another one of her tomes in time.
• 
  mackenzie

  effortlessly charming and witty as always, thank god for eve babitz!!
• 
  Julia

  Finished this on my first day in Palm Springs!! There is no greater combo than Eve and California :’)
• 
  Alvin

  Babitz is a conscientious objector to the cult of seriousness. Freed from the vulgar compulsion to grasp for gravitas, she traipses through her essays (even when she's writing about getting burned half-to-death!) with an appealing lightness. Make no mistake, though, she's a magnificent prose stylist and - with the exception of her celebrity profiles - can't go more than a few pages without sharing some brilliant aperçu. Most of her essays are perfectly pithy, but (be forewarned!) the final piece on the avant garde/populist fashion label Fiorucci is 60 pages long and should've been half that. All the same I read every word because even at her worst, Babitz is pretty delightful.
• 
  hannah ferg

  highlights include a behind-the-scenes piece on the godfather part 2 , a brief but savage portrait of steve martin being a normie at the Troubadour (where the Eagles played backup for Linda Ronstadt), and the titular essay, in which, after surviving a near-fatal accident where her nylons caught fire while trying to light a cigar, she tells the nurse "you know, i used to be charming"
  
• 
  Nicholas Beck

  Oh Eve, irrepressible even when relating her near death caused by trying to light a cigar in her car! It's a collection of mostly magazine articles and the rating reflects that rather than her writing which is amusing and giveth rather than taketh. Indeed as many have said she manages to describe the "real" LA, the city and it's people and environs, a place so much more than it's "driving to stay still" freeways. I've only visited LA, Eve lived it and wrote about it with a judiciously loving yet critical eye.
  
  Goodness know what Eve must have been like in real life, one can only get a taste from a distance by reading about her life in these articles but one can hope that meeting Eve would have been as charming as this collection of articles was.
  
• 
  Raquel

  Wildly uneven! Some of these pieces it seemed like Babitz just did for the money and read as tossed-off and silly. But others are mini-masterpieces: her essay about Jim Morrison is just perfection. I really like when Evie writes about clothes (her pieces for Vogue are scrumptious little bon bons) and especially art (she has such a wonderful eye and such a direct honest fresh approach - she should be an art critic).
• 
  Lindsey

  Loved this collection. These essays are primarily about LA in the 70s and 80s when Eve was an "it girl." There are stories about her years hanging out at the Troubadour, essays about her love of Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, essays about boobs. Babitz even finds wonderment in hanging out with a friend at Gold Gym's. The voice I would most compare her to is our national treasure E Jean Carroll, but less effusive. Looking forward to reading her short fiction.
• 
  idiomatic

  it's insane that this was her professional work. people would just throw her dollars to say shit and they were RIGHT to do so; absolutely nobody else has this voice and there's an eve for every mood.
• 
  Ursula

  I've tried my best, but it's just impossible to not rave about this book.
  
  My first Eve is
  Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.: Tales, ostentatiously a collection of short stories (if not Eve's own life stories). I find her immensely funny, witty, and undoubtedly charming. She is that popular blond girl, but definitely not dumb.
  I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz is a testament of her wide knowledge and deep views of art, society, and Los Angeles, her hometown.
  
  It's a compilation of Eve's published columns in numerous prestigious magazines (Vogue, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker), lesser-known publications (Francis Ford Coppola's short-lived City), and two unpublished (long) pieces about her recovery days and Fiorucci the brand. Eve is that "no bullshit" writer, she puts her unfiltered thoughts into sentences. Like this one time when she encountered Coppola's Chinese business manager, which according to Fred Roos, often threw everyone off in meetings.
  
  

  Amateur theatricals, I thought to myself, even in business.

  
  
  Obviously, this book is peppered with writings about Hollywood along with everyone and everything in it. But instead of boring ass travel pieces, Eve extrapolates LA to different social topics. That one time when she filled her 36DD bra and men started paying attention to her. Or when she tried acupuncture. There was also that moment when she lost weight and people gushed about her "good look". Talking about looks could be tricky, considering the preconception of Hollywood girls being superficial and self-obsessed. But not Eve, not my Eve.
  
  She never considered herself fat. Just wasn't perfect. And that's not a problem.
  
  

  But I was never dumb enough to think I was Fat; because I wasn't, I just wasn't perfect. And I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.

  
  
  Then her wits. Oh my god, her dry sense of humour, like when she called her therapist "mental cleaning lady."
  
  Ah, going back to travel waiting. It's quite rare to see her write about cities that are not LA. A dutiful observant, Eve surely took mental notes of the people and culture she encountered there.
  
  And this review would be incomplete without mentioning her recovery reflection. Eve suffered third-degree burns over half her body, which turned her increasingly reclusive. What happened to her after that? After years of silence, we got to hear about the enigmatic period, in Eve's words.
  
  Reading this book is such a delight, like reading your cool aunt's diary. I wish she would write more, as, unlike the book's title , Eve Babitz is still as charming as ever.
• 
  JacquiWine

  I’ve written before about Eve Babitz, the American writer, journalist and album cover designer who died last December. Her 1974 collection, Eve’s Hollywood, could be described as autofiction or maybe a semi-fictionalised memoir. Either way, it’s a luminous book – like a series of shimmering vignettes on bohemian life in LA.
  
  Slow Days, Fast Company followed in 1977, cementing Babitz’s reputation as a leading documenter of the Californian lifestyle/counterculture. Both books are currently in print with NRYB Classics, along with a third volume of Babitz’s work, I Used to be Charming – The Rest of Eve Babitz, compiled in 2019.
  
  Charming comprises some fifty articles/essays, mostly published in magazines between 1975 and 1997. Far from being a collection of odds and ends, Charming contains some of the very best of Babitz’s writing – the titular essay, recounting her recovery from life-threatening third-degree burns, is worth the cover price alone. It’s a searingly honest yet funny piece, conveyed in Babitz’s thoroughly engaging style. Also of particular note is a sixty-page essay on the ethos of Fiorucci, the pioneering Italian fashion brand based. Much to my surprise, I found this absolutely fascinating and immersive!
  
  As in the earlier books, Babitz turns her eye to various topics here – mostly related to California with the occasional sojourn to New York. She writes beautifully about men, relationships, actors, musicians, locations, fashion, body image and various personal experiences. Her style is naturally breezy – conversational, almost – both easy-going and whip-smart. It’s a tricky blend to pull off, but to Babitz it seems intuitive, as in this 1979 piece titled Gotta Dance.
  
  To read the rest of my piece, please visit:
  
  
  https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2022...
  
• 
  Taylor

  As with any book of essays it’s impossible to love them all, but you’ll definitely learn a thing or two. Eve’s voice is bold, witty and dare I say it, FUN (a word she loves). Hate to make this comment but it’s hard for me not to compare her with Joan Didion though. They’re completely different in terms of style but the subject matter and the insider’s perspective on a complicated era - LA in the 60s - is the same. It’s no competition but I couldn’t help thinking that I prefer Joan’s distant insightfulness, which is a balm against the supposed “glam” of Hollywood. This kind of veers in the opposite direction and I always felt very aware that I was reading a magazine article.
  
  Maybe that was part of the reason I didn’t totally love Eve’s work AS much as I wanted to? Some essays were phenomenal, essential reads in my opinion - Hippie Haven, Honky Tonk Nights, Skin Deep, Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood (which does an amazing job of humanizing him), I Was a Naked Pawn for Art - and enjoyable too of course. But there’s a shallowness there in her work sometimes too that I didn’t enjoy. The Fiorucci piece was a total slog, had to push myself to finish that one.
  
  Maybe I am “too New York” for this…that being said I want to read more of her writing, particularly her novels.
• 
  Robert Morgan Fisher

  I've searched for years to find the essay Eve wrote about the Troubadour that was published in RS. It's here--though somewhat bowdlerized (probably by Eve as she finalized the book). Never met her but love the IDEA of Eve Babitz. So many fine pieces here by a true renegade who experienced a tragic fall in the autumn of life when she was gruesomely burned by a flammable dress. As a burn victim myself, I read that penultimate essay with heavy heart.
  
  The final piece in the book is a 60-page novella gushing about Fiorucci in 1980. On the one hand--do we need that? On the other hand, yes. This is vintage Babitz and underscores so much of what she did well and her indulgences. I even recognized somebody I knew.
  
  She wrote fiction too, and has a story about everybody. More than a name-dropper, Babitz looked at everything with an electron microscope while at the same time wisecracking in the shallowest and clever of ways. There was simply nobody like her. Everything she wrote was sexy and seductive in some way. Eve knew who she was and what she wanted and that's enviable. If you had to own one book by Eve, it's this one. Sail on, you tastemaker/critic/genius. Eve Babitz is the best evidence that the pure products of America do indeed go crazy.
• 
  Mary Mav

  I've said it once and i will say it again. I'm willing to samelessly read Eve Babitz's grocery list. She's one of my favourite authors ever, the original IT-girl/nepo baby/influencer having lived a thousand lives whereas most of us have only lived one. She name drops like crazy, but they are part of this complex and compelling storyterlling that everyone is part of sth bigger and nothing she does is ever boring or mundane.
  Alas, it took me absolutely forever to finish this book and although I regret nothing, please spare me.
• 
  Nat

  This collection was so enjoyable that while reading it I barely noticed a 12-hour set of post-Thanksgiving flights and delays and layovers and turbulence.
  
  In these essays Babitz has two aesthetic categories: cute and fun, categories which are more attention-holding than Kant's the beautiful and the sublime.
• 
  Spiros

  A scintillating miscellany of occasional, Absolutely Fabulous journalism by our Eve, every bit as entertaining as her short stories; I'm even willing to cut the last segment, a "book" about Italian fashion designer Fiorucci (never heard of him or his emporium) some slack: while it sometimes feels that she is working to a word count, it is nevertheless pretty entertaining.
• 
  Barbara

  I remember reading her novel, Slow Days, Fast Company, long ago and loving it. I've only read a few of these essays. "Losing Weight Made Me A New Person" was wonderful, her voice, the story, and made me remember why I loved her stuff back when. Now I'm reading the title essay, "I Used to Be Charming." I'll report back.
  
  She's been compared to Didion. Stop it. Babitz is her own person.
• 
  Elise

  Really enjoy her early essays...later stuff, not so much. Her other collection 'Slow Days, Fast Company' was much stronger
• 
  Zosia Kubaszewska

  I would very much like to gatekeep this
• 
  Adeline

  I'm very bummed out I didn't enjoy this book more, but it really lives up to its "the rest of" title -- literally bits of writing gathered from Babitz's career and that read very uneven and flat. And I never thought I'd use the word 'flat' to describe anything by Babitz.
  
  All but 2 (I think?) of the pieces were published in places like LA Times, Vogue, Ms. or Esquire, but -- maybe as a direct result -- they read to me like an exercise in style. The personality profiles or more reportage-like essays still retain an element of her voice, but which feels diluted by the effort of fitting into a magazine or journalistic style.
  
  I really missed her long, hyperbolic, messy sentences that read like something she's just jotted down and incredibly beautiful at the same time (we know it takes one hell of a good writer to make that kind of effortless-looking text). My favorite part of Babitz's work is her funny, unapologetic lust for life that reads incredibly alive and feminine; it's what made Eve's Hollywood and Black Swans unforgettable books to me, and what I found really lacking here.
  
  There is a handful of essays that still fit in this category: 'Sunday, Blue Pool Sunday' and the Jim Morrison piece for instance are both staggeringly beautiful, poignant, and retain her characteristic wit and sarcasm. The title essay about her accident was equally remarkable and sobering. For most of the rest I struggle to keep my interest, and doubt I'll read again.
  
  All in all it's not the book I would recommend if you're new to Babitz, and is better kept for the fans who are running out of things to read (again with the exception of those few good pieces I mentioned above).
  
  I'd also be really curious to know if anyone else found the intro by Molly Lambert downright appalling. Obviously a big part of Babitz is her promiscuity, especially with now famous folks -- but it's also her carefree approach to sex and writing about sex that makes her work so unique and refreshing. Did Lambert really have to detail the Harrison Ford and Steve Martin blowjobs? Rather than presenting Babitz as a gifted writer who only recently gained more more popular, vastly deserved credit, Lambert's text just shoves her back in the unfair box of "woman only worth reading for cheap salacious gossip". Perhaps the NYRB editor could have picked a better person to do Babitz real literary justice.
• 
  Claudia Cutter

  This is a collection of odds and ends of Babitz's work, mostly magazine articles from the '60s through the '90s. As with any collection, there are some pieces that really shine and some that don't. To me, the strongest articles were the ones where Babitz seemed most personal, grounded, and genuine: those about gender and misogyny, women's sexuality, her childhood, and her accident. I disliked the more self-aggrandizing tone of her pieces about things like the art world and the ~glamour of Hollywood~ or whatever. Regardless of the subject matter though, Babitz has a voice that is funny, interesting, and fun to read.
  
  I especially appreciated her viewpoints on women and sexuality: she criticizes sexism in a way that's very ahead of her time while still making sex sound fun. One of my favorite things about her writing is that she objectifies men so poetically, talking about men the way that male authors usually describe women.
  
  I've seen a lot of reviews saying this is the worst collection of Babitz's work, so I'll definitely check out her memoirs and novels.