L.A.WOMAN [Paperback]

Soon to be a TV show on Hulu

Eve Babitz is a writer like no other—she “is to prose what Chet Baker is to jazz” (Vanity Fair)—and she has influenced a generation of writers and readers with her sophisticated, witty, and delightful work.L.A. Womanis quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a twenty-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A. and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the twenties to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and Rudolph Valentino are the essence of life.

Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga know that while L.A. is constantly changing it is essentially eternal; through their eyes we see the mixture of high culture and low, the promises of youth and the fulfillment of nostalgia, the pink sunsets and the palm trees thatareL.A. And through this fantastic tale, Babitz shares what it is to be a woman in what she convinces us is the capital of civilization.L.A.WOMAN
ONE SUMMER MORNING while I was still a virgin though my virginity was on its last legs, I woke up and didn’t want to go to New Jersey. It wasn’t fair that they wanted me to go to New Jersey; I didn’t want to go—I was seventeen and no seventeen-year-old L.A. woman would go to New Jersey if she could get out of it, especially a seventeen-year-old with a boyfriend like mine—a dream-boat who was twenty-five, was under contract to Fox as a leading man, black wavy hair and blue eyes, his father a French leading man who’d once starred in a tearjerker with my Great Aunt Golda and made a million dollars which he lost on a misadventure. Anybody who went to New Jersey just to visit Aunt Helen, I supposed with outraged sensibillók