Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and LA
Eve Babitz is equal parts hot girl-sad girl in this fictionalized collection of essays that say as much about the relationship between the sexes as it does about LA
Eve Babitz is a new author to me. I’ve long been interested in the Joan Didions of the world: cool girls who have lots to say about California and the culture. As a woman from rural Maine, the California of these essays seem a world away, a fantasy fever dreamscape that only exists on the pages of these books. And for that, they are captivating.
In this book, Babitz casually drops complete writing gems like
Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.
Hell yeah, Eve Babitz. Agreed. Another astute observation:
Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you're reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he'll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it's a shame to let it all go for one person.
Completely off the cuff here, but reading this particular quote felt like an actual smack in the face. A smack for which I was grateful, as it happens. You see, it’s so easy to feel like the only person on the face of the earth who experiences a certain thing, because we aren’t exactly encouraged to open about those experiences.
And for me, that experience is the idea that I, willingly, at one point overextended myself for a man. More than one point, more than one man, probably, but the one who I am thinking of actually read Virginia Woolf so I was particularly weak to him. I digress. Bringing it back. This man — I too had to work hard to get this man’s attention, I had to be sparklingly funny, well kept, sunshiney, kaleidoscopic and wonderful and it was a shame to let all the happen for just one person.
Eve Babitz uses the sense of place of LA, that fever dream-y land where nothing ever changes, and yet nothing remains the same, as a backdrop for relationships between hetero (presumably) men and women. Which I found fascinating, even as a happily married suburban mom. The fact that it’s the same in the 2020s as it was in the 70s — brilliant, beautiful women competing for acknowledgement from men who may not even deserve it. That men use their inventions, chivalry and preventing financial independence come up in this book as examples, to keep women in this space of performing. This never ending, fever dream, smog-filled space of hoping for, vying for attention.
Hollywood does to aspiring artists what many men do to women: their acceptance, love, adulation, success, everything is kept just slightly out of reach. To paraphrase Babitz, you only get “everything,” from Hollywood if you’re confused, vulnerable, sad and lonely. And that leaves you with very few friends.
This book is not just fodder for being a hot-girl-cool-girl-thought-daughter-online but I think it would do particularly well with that crowd. I fully recommend it to everyone though, and especially to those of us who want to haunt our lovers. :)