{"id":396489,"date":"2026-07-13T12:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T12:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/396489\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T12:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T12:20:09","slug":"too-l-a-by-eve-babitz-review-the-literary-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/396489\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cToo L.A.\u201d by Eve Babitz Review: The Literary Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (but Some Were)<\/a> Eve Babitz\u2019s \u201cmost consequential work\u201d? Lili Anolik, who edited this posthumous collection of mostly unmailed correspondence, suggests it is. In her introduction, Anolik\u2014whose 2019 biography, Hollywood\u2019s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., has played a significant part in Babitz\u2019s ongoing revival\u2014calls it \u201cEve\u2019s second masterpiece.\u201d She continues, \u201cIt\u2019s a West Coast, late twentieth-century Room of One\u2019s Own, a feminist cri de coeur. It\u2019s every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf\u2019s celebrated manifesto.\u201d <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure I agree.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Anolik is incorrect in her description, but I might suggest a more fitting analogue to be Woolf\u2019s diaries, which Babitz invokes more than once. In fact, my favorite section of Too L.A. involves not letters at all but instead a journal, kept between September 1969 and July 1970 and initiated, the author admits, under Woolf\u2019s influence. \u201cThis is the second diary I\u2019ve started in a month,\u201d Babitz begins. \u201cI [started] this because I read Virginia Woolf\u2019s diary and, undaunted, decided, what the hell?\u201d That\u2019s a terrific angle of approach, not least because it encapsulates everything that makes Babitz so vivid and engaging: her sense of presence, her offhanded guilelessness, and her willingness to go toe-to-toe\u2014or sentence-to-sentence\u2014with anyone. Throughout these pages, she writes (and sometimes even sends) missives to, among others, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, and Joseph Cornell. It should come as no surprise that she also sleeps with many of those addressed.<\/p>\n

And yet, as novelist Matthew Specktor argues in his introduction to the 2016 reissue of Slow Days, Fast Company\u2014originally published in 1977 and, as Anolik and I agree, Babitz\u2019s first masterpiece\u2014\u201cto start laying out the names of [her] paramours is to begin building the wall that obscures our view of her work.\u201d What Specktor means is that if the author\u2019s books \u201care nothing if not gossipy,\u201d such gossip is insufficient. It reduces Babitz to a type, a butterfly, the woman who knew everyone, as it were. It leaves her stranded on the surface of her life. That\u2019s too easy, too convenient. It\u2019s why I\u2019m more drawn to the journal, in many ways, than to the letters that surround it. The journal, as journals must, can\u2019t help but trace a larger arc.<\/p>\n

\u201cA diary isn\u2019t a letter, of course,\u201d Anolik acknowledges, \u201cexcept that it\u2019s a letter in disguise. Or, rather, it\u2019s a collection of letters in disguise, each diary entry being a letter written to yourself.\u201d Or maybe it\u2019s the other way around. If, in other words, Anolik\u2019s contention that \u201cthe short essay was Eve\u2019s m\u00e9tier but only because the short essay was the personal letter\u2014Eve\u2019s true true m\u00e9tier\u2014in disguise\u201d is not inaccurate, there is also more at work. The acuity of what let\u2019s call the author\u2019s public writing arises from her ability to take personal material and refract it, somehow, through a wider and more kaleidoscopic lens. I think of the opening sentence of Slow Days, Fast Company: \u201cThis is a love story and I apologize; it was inadvertent.\u201d That inadvertence is less confession than device. Like the letters, the book can drift or appear to do so. That drifting, however, is part of the point.<\/p>\n

Letters carry a different valence. They need to be considered in a different light. This is especially the case, I think, with those that remain unsent. What is a letter, after all, but an intimate communication? It has been composed for an audience of one. To read a book of letters, then, is to eavesdrop. But if, like so much of Too L.A., the letters have not been shared with their intended recipients, where does that leave us? More in the realm of the notebook, of the workbook, of the raw material of art. \u201cReading these letters,\u201d Anolik observes, \u201cyou\u2019ll come across passages that will reappear, in only slightly altered form, in her published writing.\u2026 And there\u2019s something exciting about finding the seed\u2014the sketch, the anecdote, the fleeting impression\u2014from which stories and books will sprout.\u201d <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why, for me, the journals are compelling\u2014because they are written by Babitz for Babitz alone. It may seem paradoxical, but this is also how it is to write a book. We sit in a room and tell ourselves stories first. Only later do we consider audience. Take the entry from January 7, 1970, in which Babitz encounters a young man with a broken rib. \u201cYesterday,\u201d she writes, \u201cI went to Echo Park and took 4 rolls of film of the palm trees. A guy came up to me while I was doing it. He looked exactly like one of those Midwestern murderers. He was about 28 and had curly clean auburn hair and one of those vitamin deficient faces\u2014thin and unhappy and containing bravado.\u201d Thin and unhappy and containing bravado. An entire personality is contained in those six words. It is, perhaps, why this young man makes Babitz unhappy. She begs him to seek treatment, but he will not leave her alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen,\u201d she demands at last, in exasperation. \u201cPlease go to a doctor. I can\u2019t stand to have you near me.\u201d It is only afterward, once Babitz has had the space to reflect on the experience, that she turns that vexation back upon herself. \u201cOh, how horrible I am,\u201d she laments. \u201cWhen I see what I did, written in black and white, I just could die. I\u2019m no better than all the people I despise because they don\u2019t care about anything. Oh, what a grim pig I am indeed.\u201d <\/p>\n

This is not to suggest that such intimacy is absent from the letters. Most notable is a 1977 note to Heller, a brilliant bit of indirection that begins by thanking him for blurbing Slow Days, Fast Company before veering into something more like self-defense. Previous letters have already traced the arc of their relationship, in which Heller\u2019s offers of assistance are tempered by all that he expects, and receives, in return. The letter, then, is the last bit of fuse in a 13-year slow burn, and Babitz has a lot to say. \u201cI know I\u2019m not a major important serious author who\u2019ll be forever under the B\u2019s at the library,\u201d she writes. \u201cI\u2019m a gossip story teller who likes L.A. rather than hates it, and my personality and many charms have brooked impossible roadblocks because they aren\u2019t impossible\u2014or at least they don\u2019t look that way to me.\u201d <\/p>\n

There it is again, that word gossip. But how can gossip exist if it isn\u2019t shared? That, for me, remains the essential challenge at the heart of Too L.A., which is, as such collections often are, something of a mixed bag, bound by its status as a book of sketches and snapshots, without the cohesion of Babitz\u2019s most fully rendered work.\u2022<\/p>\n

TOO L.A.: LETTERS NEVER SENT (BUT SOME WERE), BY EVE BABITZ, EDITED BY LILI ANOLIK\"<i><b>TOO<\/a>TOO L.A.: LETTERS NEVER SENT (BUT SOME WERE), BY EVE BABITZ, EDITED BY LILI ANOLIKCredit: New York Review Books\"Headshot<\/p>\n

David L Ulin is a contributing editor to Alta Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (but Some Were) Eve Babitz\u2019s \u201cmost consequential work\u201d? Lili Anolik, who edited…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[119643,159370,159374,159367,32787,159373,159364,1743,159372,48,52,51,159362,159366,47,50,159365,159369,49,159361,159363,159371,159368],"class_list":["post-396489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-book-review","tag-california-literary-culture","tag-california-literary-nonfiction","tag-echo-park-literary-history","tag-eve-babitz","tag-eve-babitz-journal","tag-eve-babitz-letters","tag-hollywood","tag-joseph-heller-correspondence","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-letters-never-sent-but-some-were","tag-lili-anolik-editor","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-literary-nonfiction","tag-los-angeles-memoir","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-too-l-a","tag-too-l-a-book","tag-virginia-woolf-influence","tag-west-coast-feminism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}