The New York Times Book Review - Bonnie Johnson
In I Used to Be Charming, a compilation of her magazine pieces, Babitz may sneak up on readers who are unfamiliar with her work. Fans of her books, like Slow Days, Fast Company, will find a trove of delights here…This collection ought to cement her place among contemporaries like Joan Didion, an early champion of her work, and Pauline Kael, of whom Babitz was a fan…Babitz declares, "I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps." Still, this collection comes close.
Publishers Weekly
08/26/2019
Novelist and journalist Babitz’s one-of-a-kind voice and sharp, observational eye make for a singular, often exhilarating, ride in this assemblage of her articles from the 1970s through the ’90s. Their through line is provided by Babitz’s clear-eyed but loving evocation of her native city, Los Angeles. It’s filled with a starry cast of characters, including Glenn Frey, Jim Morrison, and Linda Ronstadt, and with alternately glamorous and gritty locales, from the famous Troubadour club to a diner seemingly unchanged since the ’30s, which is “sort of the only place in L.A. you can go without accidentally bumping into an alfalfa sprout.” Else-where, she comically but cannily discusses the “physical insanity” of the exercise craze she partakes in, wryly muses on the relations of men to her large breasts (“no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me he was a leg man”), and analyzes the joys of ballroom dancing. In one particularly memorable essay, she recounts how she ended up in the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked young woman. And despite the title’s implication, Babitz’s writing remains, in fact, charming, as well as funny and insightful, throughout this fabulous collection. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"One of the truly original writers of 20th-century Los Angeles." —Kevin Dettmar, The Atlantic
"There’s something divine about Babitz’s vision of the world, mixed with some incandescent undercurrent of delusion—sordid, surreal, and alienated from reality. . . . Every essay lurches as unpredictably as Babitz’s prose, toggling rapidly between sneering and leering. But even when Babitz leers, it’s like the Pope waving through the glass of his Popemobile: her leering conveys a blessing.” —Heather Havrilevsky, Air Mail
“Zesty essays by a sly observer . . . [Babitz] gathers nearly 40 personal essays, book reviews, travel pieces, and celebrity profiles, published between 1976 and 1997, that give ebullient testimony to her colorful, star-studded past . . . A spirited, entertaining collection.” —Kirkus
"As clearly as a great snapshot, [Babitz’s] best passages capture fleeting sensations, particularly pleasurable ones. . . . The [title] essay wryly tracks these surges of pleasure and desire, even as pain threatens to overwhelm every other feeling. As in the best of Babitz’s earlier work, you can almost feel the agony of her physical therapy and almost taste the tuna sandwich that is the first food she truly craves after surgery.”—Megan Marz, The Times Literary Supplement
"After all these years it seems Babitz is finally the literary ‘It' girl she always thought herself to be.”—Merle Ginsberg, Los Angeles Magazine
"Eve Babitz has done as much as anyone (except maybe the very different Joan Didion) to define an L.A. state of mind. She’s fun to read and her essays stay with you for weeks after you read them, teasing your mind with insight after indelible insight.” —Michael Silverblatt, KCRW, “Best of 2019: Books"
“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.” —Tosh Berman
“The most charming writer I’ve read in years.” —Geoff Dyer, The Threepenny Review
“A writer who’s given a steep amount of pleasure over the past year. That writer is the Los Angeles–born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz, whose prose reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.” —Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“If her books are any indication, she seems to have known more about life at an early age than most of us figure out before we die.” —Holly Brubach, The New York Times
“One of the best writers about LA in American literature.” —Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
“Her writing took multiple forms, from romans à clef to essayistic cultural commentaries to reviews to urban-life vignettes to short stories. But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl.” —Naomi Fry, The New Republic
“Babitz thought she’d die at thirty; she’s now 78 and witnessing her own resurrection. Youth was not wasted on her, and she crammed her life into her sentences. . . . She made showing off a sort of politeness—an obligation to give the reader a good time.” —Lucie Elven, London Review of Books
Kirkus Reviews
2019-07-15
Zesty essays by a sly observer.
Journalist and novelist Babitz (Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night, 1999, etc.) gathers nearly 40 personal essays, book reviews, travel pieces, and celebrity profiles, published between 1976 and 1997, that give ebullient testimony to her colorful, star-studded past. "I have always loved scenes," she writes, "bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance." And she loved parties, too: "Nothing makes me feel worse than knowing I'm missing the right party." She recounts parties galore: in Los Angeles, Hollywood, Miami, and New York; in swanky apartments, mansions, and nightclubs; attended by the rich, famous, and soon-to-be-famous—e.g., pre-Doors Jim Morrison. Babitz met Morrison at a Sunset Strip club when she was 22 and "propositioned him in three minutes, even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing." He was sexy, seductive, and, she soon discovered, self-destructive: "Jim drank, got drunk, and wanted to be shown the way to the Next Whiskey Bar." Sex, drugs, and rock and roll characterized "an entire generation" that became "dazzled by a drug with the density, force, and newness of LSD," recoiled at images of napalm bombings, and surged together "As One waiting for the next Beatles album to come out." But the generation learned a crucial lesson, as well: "that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." The collection includes a charming recollection of posing nude with Marcel Duchamp; sympathetic portraits of actors James Woods, Nicholas Cage, and Billy Baldwin; and a paean to her friend Linda Ronstadt, whose voice was "opulent with happiness and excellence." Babitz muses on body-building gym culture; her efforts to lose weight with the help of "diet, amphetamines, and the gentle augmentation of cocaine"; the pain of yoga; and, in a particularly endearing piece, the unexpected pleasure of ballroom dancing. The title essay, never before published, recounts a 1997 accident that resulted in devastating third-degree burns.
A spirited, entertaining collection.
