Ms. Babitz’s paramours were legion — Harrison Ford, Stephen Stills, Jim Morrison, Annie Leibovitz and Mr. Martin, to name a few. “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,” Earl McGrath, the record executive, famously said. “It’s usually Eve Babitz.”
At 23, she spent a year in New York, made miserable by its shabby grayness, working for a time at an alternative Village paper. She also introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí and worked as a secretary for a Madison Avenue ad salesman.
Ms. Babitz would go on to write five more books — autobiographical novels like “Sex and Rage” (1979) and “L.A. Woman” (1982), featuring her alter-egos, the lovelorn Jacaranda and Sophie — and essay collections like “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A.” (1977), as well as countless magazine articles. The books sold modestly. Yet the misadventures they recounted, delivered in Ms. Babitz’s luxurious, undulating prose, were required reading for those who had a taste for deeply personal writing by female authors like her peers Nora Ephron, Cynthia Heimel and Laurie Colwin.
Writing in The New York Times, Dwight Garner said her work “reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila.”
This part must have been difficult for the Times include in her obit:
Holed up with her cat in her West Hollywood apartment, Ms. Babitz became a recluse — and a pugnacious conservative, converted by the talk radio that became the backbeat to her new life.
Related: ‘Rest in power, white ladies’: Gawker troll memorializes late author Joan Didion [and Babitz] by mocking white women and boasting about her own ignorance.