“something outrageous and grandiose”

That’s what Eve Babitz was craving at 15.

Since reading Deborah Shapiro’s review of Eve’s Hollywood at The Second Pass I’ve been combing the internet for a copy of the “out-of-print 1974 commingling of fiction and memoir that chronicles the adventures of a young woman growing up and living in Los Angeles.” Shapiro’s account of Eve Babitz’s first book, which apparently includes an 8-page dedication, makes for its own tantalizing read and left me imagining the Hollywood novel as told by Bambi Lake.

Halfway through the review, when I was already sucked in by the promise of gossip and decadence, Shapiro cites one of Eve’s visits to The Luau (a “ratty Tahitian place in Beverly Hills with blue lagoons and a gardenia in the drinks”) and things get even more interesting:

It’s worth noting that The Luau and its gardenias – its seedy decadence – coincidentally make an appearance in “The White Album,” Joan Didion’s masterful essay on the excess and incomprehensibility of the late ’60s, particularly in L.A. It’s instructive to read Babitz in relation to Didion because they wrote of the same time and place (recall the dedication, above), yet the contrast between them is stark. Where Didion is clipped and edgy, on the verge of collapse, Babitz is looser, discursive, funny. For Didion, for a time, life became illegible and narratives stopped making sense. Babitz, you suspect, never much relied on narrative sense in the first place.

I particularly appreciated Babitz’s thoughts on getting the story–or whatever it is–to the page:

In her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company, she wrote: “I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge.”

You can find used and new copies of Slow Days, Fast Company (subtitled The World, the Flesh, and L.A.) here.