I’m living my own type of 1960s, 1970s escapades — in the moonlight and rain everyone dances and kisses. Somehow I am in conversation with twenty people, going on about avant-garde pop music and complimenting any beauty I see. To myself I internally admit my intelligence and looks, I am who I wanted to be three years ago at Binghamton.

Eve wrote about what it is to be a woman, what it is to spin that good life for oneself. Starting in the 1960s, she crafted sharp, lyrical, and blunt essays about Los Angeles. Her life was a collection of escapades, which are all documented -ornamented with fiction sometimes – that sing with youth and California sun.

She passed away in December 2021, however, she lived to see her very own revival around 2015 when the New York Review of Books reprinted two of her long out-of-print books. Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company finally shone in the hands of bright women again. Her precise grasp of the emotions around her as well as the chronicling of her own whims still grow in her resurgence, especially because she recently passed. Known for her many lovers, including Jim Morrison and Harrison Ford, Babitz is unabashedly sexy. And very smart.

Eve’s charm is a shimmer we can all have — after reading her words, I splashed into a new place, waltzing into rooms with glimmering intentions. My big green eyes. Eve lets you know that she is beautiful. She knows it, uses it, and writes with a hot confidence. 

A hesitant girl unravels as the pages turn. Eve imbues me with this confidence of a hot smart brunette, and I attempted to take on her role as an ‘adventuress.’ Experimentation for experimentation’s sake, greeting people and widening my life. Saying yes more often, not staying home with a book.

“Shawn…was drawn to whatever burned hottest, which is usually me.” 

from: Slow Days, Fast Company, 1977 

Lines like “Joy tingled through my eyes,” and “I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm,” enchant me and imbue me with the youthful fervor of simply existing. There is such a control, an incandescence, and somehow a thoughtful thoughtlessness to her descriptions of her escapades. It’s similar to the inner aquarium one feels when in company of fun-loving, eccentric minds. It makes everything feel quick and silky; on a rushing walk down Manhattan streets not knowing what warm, perfectly dim bar you and your friends will choose to revel in tonight. She can even write about something as prosaic as smoking marijuana and watching TV in New York City with an enchanting sweep.

“I met  him one morning as he was walking by with a day-old pumpkin pie he’d bought for 15 cents. He insisted I come with him and eat it, so I did in spite of the fact that he had a dog and I hate dogs. The next day I moved in.” Eve’s Hollywood 1974

She often writes about this fear of missing “a grandiose carnival in the sky”. The image of the unmissable sunset captures her restlessness but also her devotion to collecting moments and experiences. I’ve been the type of person to say that ‘next time, I’ll go! (But I’m okay lounging here, in the familiar).’ Reading Eve Babitz unlocked a part of my mind that was incredibly shy, and asked me why I kept declining all of these opportunities. Stay in a new city with a friend you hardly know, approach anyone you find intriguing, just go out! And I listened. Once I was open, Epicurean joy surrounded me. 

“But I knew if I didn’t dance with this man that it would be one of those missed chances that puncture your life.” SDFC 1977

From my journal: October 25th 2021, Ithaca, NY:

reading tales of the adventuress eve babitz pivots me into considering anything. a thread that may guide me to a hot new place, wisps of young chance.

Later on that October night I reacquainted with my ex-boyfriend, president of the student record label, quiet, handsome music guy (long story, far too boring), but all you should know is that I had quite an adventure in the radio station after midnight. And if not for Eve, I’d have stayed home, under my purple string lights with a book in hand. 

“you’re a real dreamboat of an ex-girlfriend”

a text from my friend Sam, October 26th, 2021

She also slips in small bits of advice into an essay; it adds to the story, never detracting from the narrative. It’s a small candy unwrapped, popped, and melted, and you’re back in the story. One lovely moment is about the act of waiting when somebody is fifteen minutes late. As a punctual woman, Eve used to grow paralyzed with anger, yet she realized that amongst most people, there’s a fifteen minute grace period. “Since I’ve started carrying a book everywhere..and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.” Slow Days dazzles with these little trinkets, little miniature life discoveries. There is a quality to her writing that I can only describe as “having a wink.” 

Her writing sings with gratitude for being alive, specifically in L.A.. She is ever-present, tuned-in, open for any outing. Saying yes to going to Palm Springs on a whim or taking a trip to a vineyard in Bakersfield. Going out with what she calls ‘fast company’ is not a frivolous activity but a way to open oneself to serendipity. Eve paints ‘fast company’ like an impressionist; small instances gathered into a week-long stay at Palm Springs, with people she hardly knew, yet over the trip, was wrapped closely within. She captures, almost like Didion, portraits of people and their idiosyncrasies. Nikki, a woman with whom she stayed with at the house in Palm Springs, was prone to migraines, yet a fastidious spinner of gossip, with her weaknesses and strengths on the page, up close to the reader. 

“The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.”

She has an infectious self-worth and a pure understanding of her glow, both intelligence and looks. One of her many lovers, Ed Ruscha explained that she would wake early, make coffee, and tell him to leave. Or sometimes she’d show him her writing from the previous day, and if the critiques were good, she’d let him stay, and if they were bad, she’d shove him out. In the way she is described by Ruscha, she is an eloquent, feral, clumsy, and smart woman. She’d break dozens of glasses or accidentally set a garage on fire by putting a fur coat (bought by Ruscha) on a little space heater.  

Her writing is pearly and cheeky enough to carry an entire essay about the absolute brilliance of taquitos. She has a food-writer’s touch and the Didionesque precision to take you with her to the taquito stand. Anyone else besides Eve could not convey the sheer pleasure of eating exactly what one is craving, and almost writing it in a ritualistic, urgent way. 

There is one lengthy video interview of Eve Babitz from 2012, speaking about L.A., wearing a slapdash outfit with a severely short haircut. In 1997, attempting to light a cherry-flavored cigarillo whilst driving, she lit herself on fire, pantyhose melding to skin, and had third-degree burns all over her lower body and almost didn’t live. She declines in the interview to speak about it, and even through giggles and old stories, there is something changed about her. She was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease a few years later, and sadly passed away from it in December 2021. She had stopped writing almost entirely after her accident and became a recluse. But her writings will always continue to burn in the minds of women like me. She left an indelible legacy for women, and was well ahead of her time when she lived so brightly. 

What I find bemusing is how many publications refer to her as Eve throughout their articles, as if her writing was so intimate that all of us know her on a first-name basis. In the absurdly long dedications for Eve’s Hollywood, one of the dedications is awarded to “The Didion-Dunnes, for having to be who I am not.” 

I adore books from the 1960s and 1970s because there is an odd similarity to the vastly different world today; authors like Babitz paint the picture of a freer, more meandering way of living. Perhaps she and Didion were successful writers, living comfortably, but the aura from the essays engenders a diamond feeling of living and soaking in every moment. 

Without the hard drugs and impossibility of a mostly technology-free existence, there are still many ways to pop a morsel of Eve Babitz to decorate one’s life from the inside out. The flirtatiousness, the wit, the pleasure-seeking adventuress magic, is all ready to be soaked up by a young and restless person. Begin with Slow Days, Fast Company. Then, travel to Eve’s Hollywood. Continue with Sex & Rage. Soon, the word ‘adventuress’ will be swimming in your mind.