In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sibling’s spunky request. Their mother said no.
But she cushioned the blow by offering to get her a leopard print swimsuit instead. “There’s a picture of her wearing it reading Elinor Glyn,” Mirandi continues. “I mean, there you go,” she chuckles.
“That’s what she gravitated to.” British novelist Glyn, though largely forgotten today, scandalised the public in the early 20th century with her erotic fiction. She also to denote something that “draws all others with magnetic force”.
How better to describe Babitz? “I didn’t want a vine-covered cottage, stability, children, a college degree or a dog,” Babitz wrote in Eve’s Hollywood, her coming-of-age memoir – which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Babitz described her California odyssey as a “confessional novel”, but this seems too limited a category for the author’s syncopated melodies: part memoir, part fiction, and essayistic in form. Perhaps we need a new genre tag to encapsulate what Babitz was doing in 1974.
Mirandi calls Eve’s Hollywood “a collection of stories”. The New York Review of Books (who republished her work for a new generation in 2015) likens it to “an album” – a description that seems in keeping wit.