Would Eve Babitz really have wanted her unsent letters published?
‘I regard Too L.A. as Eve’s second masterpiece – her first being, of course, Slow Days, Fast Company – and her most consequential work,’ is how the editor Lili Anolik introduces the book she concocted out of the late Eve Babitz’s sent and unsent letters. ‘It’s a West Coast, late 20th-century Room of One’s Own, a feminist cri de coeur.’ This is Anolik’s third book all about Eve. She is Babitz’s Boswell. But Too L.A. reminds me of Helen Fielding more than Virginia Woolf. I can’t say I didn’t relish this book, but by the midpoint I started to feel downright uncomfortable reading it In masterpieces of her own devising, Eve Babitz (persona) is a bona fide sex goddess with Jim Morrison between her thighs.
