Eve Babitz Books in Order

If you want the classic entry point: Eve's Hollywood → Slow Days, Fast Company
If you want dreamy Los Angeles fiction: Sex & Rage → L.A. Woman → Black Swans
If you want essays and journalism: I Used to Be Charming → Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent
If you want fashion and nightlife nonfiction: Fiorucci, The Book → Two By Two

Eve Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, on May 13, 1943, and grew up in Los Angeles in a family where music, art, and conversation were part of daily life. Her father, Sol Babitz, was a violinist and musicologist. Her mother, Mae Babitz, was an artist. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather, and the house was full of musicians, writers, and friends from the city’s bohemian circles. She attended Hollywood High, later spent some time at Los Angeles City College, and kept Los Angeles at the center of her imagination for the rest of her life.

Los Angeles was never just a backdrop for her.

Before she was known as an author, Babitz worked as an artist and moved easily through the city’s music and art scenes. In the late 1960s she designed album covers for acts including Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt. She also became part of California lore through the famous photograph of her playing chess nude with Marcel Duchamp. In 1972, after years around musicians, painters, and magazines, she started writing seriously.

Her first book, Eve's Hollywood, arrived in 1974 and made clear that she was not interested in a neat, official memoir. Instead she wrote in vivid scenes, half social history, half personal myth, always alert to beauty, appetite, boredom, class, and weather. She liked forms that let fact and fiction lean against each other. The book moves through Hollywood High, family memories, parties, crushes, meals, and street corners, and readers still love how alive it feels. Even when she sounds casual, she is paying close attention.

Then came Slow Days, Fast Company, one of the books that best shows what she could do. In ten loose, sunlit sketches, she writes about movie stars, bad romances, Palm Springs weekends, Orange County, and long afternoons in Southern California. Readers often come to Babitz for the pleasure of the voice, but they stay because she can make a dinner, a drive, or a passing conversation say something real about a whole city.

She cared about glamour, but she was never only writing about glamour.

Her fiction kept playing with drift, desire, and reinvention. Sex & Rage follows Jacaranda, a dreamy young woman moving between Los Angeles and New York, trying to turn aimlessness into a life. L.A. Woman braids together Sophie and Lola, women from different eras, to show how the city changes and stays itself at the same time. Later, Black Swans brought a slightly older, tougher perspective, with stories about love affairs, sobriety, dance, and the quiet panic that comes with time passing.

Babitz was also a working journalist for years. She wrote for magazines and newspapers including Rolling Stone, Vogue, Esquire, and Ms. Her pieces ranged from celebrity profiles to reflections on health crazes, friends, lovers, and the local rituals of eating, dressing, and going out. That side of her shows up in I Used to Be Charming, a collection of essays and profiles, and in books like Fiorucci, The Book and Two By Two, which turn fashion and nightlife into something close to social reporting.

A fire in 1997 left her with severe burns and changed her life. After that, she lived much more privately. In the last part of her life, her books were reissued and found a new generation of readers.

She died in Los Angeles on December 17, 2021. What lasts is the way her books make the city feel specific and inhabited, full of sunlight, hunger, style, foolishness, luck, and people trying to invent themselves before the night runs out.