I Used to Be Charming
The Rest of Eve Babitz
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.
With Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Francis Ford Coppola’s short-lived City. Whether profiling Hollywood darlings, getting to the bottom of health crazes like yoga and acupuncture, remembering friends and lovers from her days hobnobbing with rock stars at the Troubadour and art stars at the Ferus Gallery, or writing about her beloved, misunderstood hometown, Los Angeles, Babitz approaches every assignment with an energy and verve that is all her own.
I Used to Be Charming gathers nearly fifty pieces written between 1975 and 1997, including the full text of Babitz’s wry book-length investigation into the pioneering lifestyle brand Fiorucci. The title essay, published here for the first time, recounts the accident that came close to killing her in 1996; it reveals an uncharacteristically vulnerable yet never less than utterly charming Babitz.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and journalist Babitz's one-of-a-kind voice and sharp, observational eye make for a singular, often exhilarating, ride in this assemblage of her articles from the 1970s through the '90s. Their through line is provided by Babitz's clear-eyed but loving evocation of her native city, Los Angeles. It's filled with a starry cast of characters, including Glenn Frey, Jim Morrison, and Linda Ronstadt, and with alternately glamorous and gritty locales, from the famous Troubadour club to a diner seemingly unchanged since the '30s, which is "sort of the only place in L.A. you can go without accidentally bumping into an alfalfa sprout." Else-where, she comically but cannily discusses the "physical insanity" of the exercise craze she partakes in, wryly muses on the relations of men to her large breasts ("no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me he was a leg man"), and analyzes the joys of ballroom dancing. In one particularly memorable essay, she recounts how she ended up in the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked young woman. And despite the title's implication, Babitz's writing remains, in fact, charming, as well as funny and insightful, throughout this fabulous collection.
