Eve's Hollywood

De: Eve Babitz

Narrado por: Mia Barron

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own.

Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz's prose might appear careening, she's in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito to the corner of La Brea and Sunset, where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This "daughter of the wasteland" is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds - and every bit as seductive as she is.

©1972, 1974 Eve Babitz (P)2016 Recorded Books

Eve, you are experiencing a richly deserved moment, characterized by your epigrammatic nature and velvety language.

What wit glad I discovered Eve, the voice of LA. Crispy, as you, where there

A fun read!

All of my friends just started reading Eve Babitz, and I was told that this was a good place to start. I also chose this book based on the narrator's voice in the sample. It was a nice light read that still had its somber and insightful moments. This book is a series of nonfiction stories in which Babitz recounts memories with various Hollywood oddballs. It starts off a little trite, but it gets better towards the end. She has a wonderful way of capturing the sad and beautiful feeling of California. Plus, the narrator really brought this to life!

YOUTH

“Eve’s Hollywood” is Eve Babitz’s memoir of life in southern California. Some names are undoubtedly changed to protect the not-so innocent. Babitz’s picture of Hollywood and her recalled life seems like a fantasy. Her story is filled with the glamour of life when young–with the 60s’ experiences of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.

Babitz story is of her life in Hollywood among women coveted for looks more than brains by predominantly male rainmakers. The irony is their brains, not their beauty, were the source of their success. Good looks opened doors but being a good Hollywood actor or writer required brains.

Each sex wishes for equal opportunity in their pursuit for money, power, or prestige (hopefully within the boundaries of rule-of-law). Coming to grips with the consequence of men and women being equal is a hard subject for men to accept. Babitz memoir may or may not help men understand that women’s ambitions and capabilities are no different than men's.

White Privilege Galore

In her first vignette, “Daughters of the Wasteland,” the author, Eve Babitz attempts to establish herself as a legitimate observer and reporter of Los Angeles culture. Rather than offer a cohesive story, she lists her glamorous childhood experiences to garner street cred. One after the other, her loose comments pretentiously retort, “I know what’s up because I was born into a cultured family in LA,” into my (most likely) biased ears.


But the shallow tone persists throughout the work and further morphs into a flippant, hedonistic and careless attitude only white privilege can afford. Her glorification and admiration of the tumultuous, gritty, and exciting lives she imagines the tough Mexican pachucos live is a superficial and insulting view of an entire community. As she desires to immerse herself in their “real lives” she glamorizes the violent life she imagines they live only because her privileged status allows her to fancy such disturbing dreams.

Scores of literary millennial women love Eve Babitz. Eve Babitz is unapologetically sexual, beautiful, literary, and witty. She is an enticing free spirit. Her attitude is one young women breaking barriers yearn to adopt. But not all women are free to adopt Eve’s philosophy of life. Intersectionality exists.

This is the part that terrifies me the most: in a moment in our American history where systematic oppression is finally being unearthed, Eve Babitz is who struck a cord amongst women of my generation. Why?

Eve’s funny- maybe this is whole book is one big joke I don’t get.

About as boring and irrelevant as it comes. so self-indulgent. i

What is the point of this book? It has no point. Except perhaps for family members of the author