Name: a book for lovers and beautiful women + notes on the Didion/Babitz comparison game
Item: Eve's Hollywood
Author: jankbirkin

Eve's Hollywood →

by Eve Babitz

a book for lovers and beautiful women + notes on the Didion/Babitz comparison game

jankbirkin

Aug 07, 2024

This text is essential for women who are beautiful, smart, and romantic.

I know this website is red scare podcast adjacent, wherein the hosts (among many others) are guilty of always comparing Babitz and Didion. It's become a boring conversation, entertained only because they were women writers at the same time. Didion is an all-time great— what they say about her is true— she captured her milieu in perfect prose with her hawk-eye, but it was just that: a bird's-eye view.

Babitz WAS her milieu. She captures it from the inside. If Didion was observing from above, Babitz was at eye-level with 60's Hollywood. She was a truth-teller in her own right, and her prose is lovely as well. We cannot forget while reading her that she lived in an era defined by an awakening of passion and sensuality. She was soft; not only unashamed to love but seemingly dedicated to it.

Babitz is at her best here. I tried to read Sex and Rage and found it to be missing something (if I'm being uncharitable: it was maybe juvenile, maybe underdeveloped). I decided that she is a woman who must tell the truth. Her intuition, memories, and spirit are so strong that her best stories come from her own experiences. This is partly why I am confounded by the centrality of Babitz/Didion comparisons to conversations about either of them. Is it not obvious when you pick up , with a picture of her beautiful, soft, feminine body on the cover, that it is not going to be some grand socio-cultural analysis of the 60's? This is not her value as a writer, and this does not mean she was "a party girl with an occasional stroke of genius". She was a party girl who carried her genius there and back. This is a necessary qualification. Women do not need to be anal freaks to be genius. [Still, I love genius anal freaks like Didion].

I started writing this review and forgot that I cannot consult the book as I have leant it to the teenage daughter of a woman my father is seeing. I've watched this (very fiery) girl fight with her (not much better) mother about sneaking out to parties an hour outside of town, dressing scantily, and seeing too many boys. The girl showed me her poetry recently. I realised that she is beautiful and a lover, with a keen eye too. She needs guidance and solidarity. I gave her my copy of Eve's Hollywood.

L D+1

2 comments

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jbfletcher1 year ago

Well said. It makes me sad that she ended up a shut-in hoarder after accidentally lighting herself on fire while driving. Such a bummer ending for someone who lived so magically. I guess at least she had more fun than most in her younger years.

jankbirkin1 year ago

Thank you. She was in love with the beauty of body, flesh, youth..... it would be awful to face the burns, hospitalization, even just losing vitality with age. There is maybe solace, as you said, in knowing she had her fun before and was able to share it with us: "Death is the last word in people having fun without you." (Or perhaps a cautionary tale in the value of earthly or physical attachments...)