A Woman for Us to Be Until We Figure It Out

‘Sex and Rage’ by Eve Babitz, read at the Chateau Marmont

When I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles in 2008, I had almost no friends and a job transcribing interviews for the Dr. Phil Show — that is to say, I had almost nothing. Every day after work, I’d grab whatever book I was reading and park myself at the end of a bar. I’d arrive around opening at four or five in the afternoon; once it became too loud to hear the book’s words inside my head, I’d head home to my apartment — empty save for the American cockroaches that had colonized my kitchen — and wonder when I was going to figure out what kind of life I wanted to live.

My first year in Los Angeles, reading over a drink was more than an escape into a comforting fantasy world. It was a way to get to know the sprawling summertime city I’d decided to make my home, a yearlong bar crawl that took me from the beaches to the edges of the desert, even over the hills and into the Valley, Sound of Music–style.

I wish I’d known about Eve Babitz that year, but in the late 2000s, she had temporarily fallen through the cracks of the literary world. Her five books of memoir/auto-fiction were all out of print. The woman herself had receded from public life in the late ’90s, following a freak accident in which her flowing skirt caught on fire…