I actually have no idea who eve babitz is
whoooooop but lets do our due diligence
you see, last week I wrote a piece on Joan Didion,
and a few people were like, yes do eve babitz next! because I mentioned that joan and eve babz almost always come up in the same sentence. almost like they’re interchangeable. and I did mention her—but, like, mostly to make myself look interesting because I had no idea who she was (is?)?? I guess we’ll find out.
so if you’re here and looking to learn about her, just know: I love stuff being explained to me like I’m dumb. so I hope you enjoy being taught like a preschooler in this piece, which attempts to answer the following:
who is eve babitz?
what did she do?
what did she write?
why is she an icon?
her life, her work
didion & babitz—why do they go together?
who is eve babitz?
eve babitz was a certified it girl of 1970s los angeles. part party girl, part genius. born in hollywood in 1943, she was the daughter of a classical violinist and the goddaughter of igor stravinsky, so she came out the womb artsy. she basically wasla—like if a sunset boulevard billboard could talk and flirt.
what did she do?
honestly, what didn’t she do? she was an artist, a writer, a muse, a socialite, and a total scene-stealer. she designed album covers (including buffalo springfield’s first album), slept with rockstars (plural), posed nude in an art performance chess game with duchamp (google it), and basically treated life like a sexy memoir. eventually, she started writing actual memoirs. which I hear are amazing so shall we add it to our reading list?
what did she write?
most famously:
eve’s hollywood (1974): part memoir, part fiction, part love letter to la. imagine a diary written by a hungover genius in heart-shaped sunglasses.
slow days, fast company (1977): messy, hot, addictive essays about la, men, drugs, sex, and the wayward 70s.
sex and rage, la woman, black swans… all kind of in the same vein: witty, wild, glamorous but grounded. think: if cher from clueless had joan didion’s vocabulary and a cigarette.
why is she an icon?
because no one captured los angeles like eve. not the influencers. not the screenwriters. not even the directors. she was the city—its beauty, its tragedy, its contradictions. she wasn’t trying to be profound but accidentally was. she made being a smart girl look hot and being a hot girl look smart.
also: she refused to move to new york. and I love that for her because I too, would never move to New York. that alone is award winning.
her life, her work
eve lived big. partied hard. loved harder. and wrote like she was whispering secrets to you from across the pool at chateau marmont (which if you have seen or read ANYTHING about LA, you know how that reads).
in the late 90s, she suffered severe burns in a fire, and for a while disappeared from the public eye. then, around 2010–2018, there was a renaissance. her books got reissued. people remembered. girls on the internet started quoting her again. and the rest is cool girl literary history.
didion & babitz—why do they go together?
okay so,
joan didion = california’s brain
eve babitz = california’s body
(that’s it, that’s the tweet.)
didion was the cool, detached observer of california—writing with surgical precision. babitz was the messy participant—writing with lipstick smudged on the page. they weren’t the same, but they reflected the same place, through completely different moods. joan is the cigarette before the breakdown. eve is the joint after the party. together? the full spectrum of california womanhood.
but their actual relationship? far from simple.
they weren’t enemies, but they weren’t friends either—not for long, at least. didion helped babitz get her start. then things got… weird. editorial tension, opposing views on feminism, and wildly different personalities turned admiration into estrangement.
when babitz died, she left behind boxes of unsent letters—one of which was addressed to didion. it was 1972, and the letter was part love, part fury. in it, babitz questioned everything from joan’s physicality (“could you write what you do if you weren’t so tiny, joan?”) to her marriage dynamic with john gregory dunne. she called out didion’s disdain for virginia woolf’s diaries, chalking it up to internalized misogyny:
“you prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose.”
the letter—never sent, but now infamous—was discovered by lili anolik, babitz’s biographer. it’s now the centerpiece of didion and babitz, a dual biography that dives into what it really takes for a woman to become a famous writer.
spoiler: not just talent.
it explores how didion’s cold literary perfectionism and babitz’s glitter-drenched messiness represented two radically different survival strategies in a world that was still run by men.
in the end, they weren’t rivals. they were mirrors—reflecting all the ways women writers are allowed to exist, or punished when they don’t play the game.
so no, I didn’t know who eve babitz was. but now I do. and now you do too. and if nothing else, may we all write like we’re poolside, sunburnt, and a little pissed off.