Eve Babitz's Letters from “Too L.A.” Read By Gina Gershon

This episode of Private Life is a reading from the forthcoming New York Review Books collection of Eve Babitz’s writing, Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were), edited and with an introduction by Lili Anolik. It is read by the actress and singer Gina Gershon. Gershon is best known for starring in the films Showgirls (1995), Bound (1996), Face/Off (1997), and The Insider (1999). Her book AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs was published earlier this year.  

Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She wrote the essay collections Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), both reissued by NYRB Classics, and the novel Sex and Rage (1979). NYRB also published I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. 

 

This reading accompanies last week's Private Life episode featuring Lili Anolik discussing Eve Babitz’s life and legacy. Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) will be published on June 23, 2026, and will be available at NYRB.com or at a local bookseller.  

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest, and today's episode is a reading from the book, To LA, Letters Never Sent, But Some Were, by Eve Babbitts, which was edited by Lily Analick, and comes out later this month from New York review books. We're including three letters, the first written by Eve Babbitts when she was 18, 1964, to the novelist Joseph Heller. That's followed by a letter to her then friend Joan Didion in 1972, when both were living in Los Angeles. And we finish with another letter to Heller in 1977, at the time of the publication of her book, Slow Days, Fast Company. They are read by the actor Gina Gershon, who herself has out a new book, titled Alpha Pussy, How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs.

Gina Gershon:
Eve Babitz to Joseph Heller. April 14, 1964.
Dear Joseph Heller,
This is an overt fan-letter. I read Catch 22 last year and I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing to you ever since. Then I read an interview with you in The Realist and put it off for another spell. Anyhow, I adore you. I am in one of your situations at the moment, and this week-end it reached such Heller proportions that you won’t have to wait another week for my overt fan-letter.
A very terrible thing happened to me. I was born a girl. It would be O.K. if I were ugly or something or even startlingly unattractive, but as luck would have it, I’m gorgeous, occasionally. Here’s the thing. I wrote this fabulous book and I’m trying to get it published. So, I show it to people, and they say, “Gee, this is a fabulous book! Let’s hop into bed. I can get it published for you.” And that wouldn’t be so bad either only everyone is so old and ugly and untalented. It always winds up with me running out of an apartment, clutching my manuscript to my over-developed chest, screaming obscenities all the way home on the bus, usually in a wet bathing suit.
Oh, Joseph Heller, what do you think I should do? I’m only 20 years old and this has happened 8 times already and pretty soon I’m going to run out of people and agents. I’m poor besides.
Sincerely yours,
Eve Babitz

Eve Babitz to Joan Didion. October 2, 1972.
Dear Joan:
This morning I telephoned and wanted you to read A Room of One’s Own, because it struck me because I was thinking about what you said about Quintana and the sprinklers and I was again remembering this shimmer of accuracy that Virginia Woolf got in The Waves (which you say you haven’t read)...
It’s so hard to get certain things together and especially you and VW because you’re mad at her about her diaries. It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries. It goes with Sacramento. Maybe it’s better that you stay with Sacramento and hate diaries and ignore the fact that every morning when you eye the breakfast table uneasily waiting to get away, back to your typewriter, maybe it’s better that you examine your life in every way except the main one which Sacramento would brush aside but which V. Woolf kept blabbing on about. Maybe it’s about you and Sacramento that you feel it’s undignified, not cricket and bad form to let Art be one of the variables. Art, my God, Joan, I’m embarrassed to mention it in front of you, you know, but you mentioned burning babies in locked cars so I can mention Art...
You said that the only thing you like to do was write. Just think if it were 200 years ago and the only thing you liked to do was write. I know I’m not making sense, but the thing beyond what your article on the women’s movement was about was what A Room of One’s Own is about. The whole women’s thing that is going on now is so stark and obscene most of the time that no wonder one recoils in horror. But for a long, long, long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan.
Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons...Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size. And so what you do, Joan, is live in the pioneer days, a brave survivor of the Donner Pass, putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement and acting as though Art wasn’t in the house and wishing you could go write...
It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a “woman’s novelist” and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art. It’s the only thing that’s real other than murder, I sometimes think—or death. Art’s the fun part, at least for me. It’s the salvation...
Goodbye, morning letter.

Eve Babitz to Joseph Heller. Ca. 1977.
Dear Joe,
I am extremely grateful for the quote you gave me. They couldn’t believe it at Knopf because, my God, I mean, you don’t ever give in, Joe. You’re famous for skirting anything quotable. You might even say that after Something Happened (which I’m rereading) and Catch 22, your greatest genius lies in circumspect dubiousness. I was so positive you were going to say something like, “Not bad for a book of short stories,” that I told Vicky to forget it. When she called me, she said, “Now don’t get excited. I’ve already run up and down the halls screaming.” So I couldn’t even be overjoyed. Vicky had edited me out of the picture entirely. (Sometimes I have a feeling with editors that they view your book as this corpse you’ve brought them, and would you please go away while they dissect it.)
I must say that every single East Coast person so far who’s said anything about [Slow Days] has been loath to say that my life ought to be lived at all, but if anyone’s going to be shameful and callow and shallow enough to actually live it, then I’m actually not that bad a writer [to be] writing about it. It seems as though if only I were writing about, say, a leper colony or a coal mining town, then it’d be O.K. to write about something not in London or New York. Only in London and New York are the people allowed to have money and loll around doing nothing. In L.A. no.
For one thing, no one on the East Coast believes L.A. people are having relationships that are “serious,” and that no “serious”-type-lives are going on [here]. It’s really something. Every time they tell you about writing, they say to write what you know, but all I know is Hollywood and fast company and a certain kind of sensibility. It’s as though I’m not supposed to just go ahead and write about that. I’m supposed to write about how simply horrible everything is all the time. But things aren’t simply horrible, Joe. I mean, you’ve seen me, and you know I simply can’t complain. It wouldn’t be fair, stacked the way I am. Anyway, if things are horrible, I can’t tell.
I’ve thought a long time about what “serious” people would do in L.A., and they’d do the same thing they do other places, only it’s so much more trouble to despair around here. Or it is for me. In other places I despair at the drop of a hat. I think sometimes that if I were really serious, I’d “master my craft,” but I have this overriding feeling that I’m inventing my craft as I go along and that all the Rules about what writing is, the things you told me on [that] postcard—“character, complication, conflict, crisis, climax and resolution”—are perfect, but what if they aren’t in the story I’m telling? Does that make people want to listen to the story any less? Not the people I’m talking to usually, it doesn’t.
Maybe it’s my personality that makes people listen to my stories even though they’re not about anything, [don’t have] any of the old disciplines. Maybe I’m cheating by having glue-on speech patterns and [a] sort of cute delivery. But why can’t my stories be O.K.? I’m not trying to write Oedipus [Rex] or anything. I’m just trying to tell these stories I love and can’t resist. After all, nobody knows about this place or these people. [And] all the people writing good things are so fucking boring no one can stand listening to them. And the people who aren’t boring hate it here. I’m all that stands between L.A. and the same old crap forever and ever.
In your little quote you say that I make “even the shoddiest characters interesting and attractive, and even the dreariest of relationships fascinating and exciting.” But, Joe, I don’t think anyone’s shoddy and I think all my relationships are fascinating and exciting and I want you to think so, too. And you say you do so isn’t that O.K.? I want to know what’s wrong with it. Is it that I don’t find the dreary situations dreary or the shoddy characters shoddy? I find what other people regard as worthwhile dread prisons and what people usually regard as crummy, I sometimes can’t even blink I’m so enchanted. Are my enthusiasms all too shallow for words? Am I on the wrong track so completely that in unison everyone on the East Coast rises up as one and says, “The poor thing’s an idiot but...”
This person Vicky sent my book to named Laurie Colwin said, “I also think someone should give the author a good spanking if this is the sort of life she actually leads. Although if some jerk lived this way, it would strike me as extremely squalid, Miss Babitz makes it sound extremely romantic.” If I can make it sound that way then maybe [Laurie Colwin is] wrong, maybe it’s not extremely squalid. Anyway, what’s squalid? And as for wonderful Larry McMurtry, he wrote this review in the Washington Post, where he’s pissed off because I’m not writing right because [of] “lack of characterization, story and theme.” Now, Joe, if I’m doing “lack” of all those things, I mean, what am I writing? And if without those things I’m no good, how on earth, Joe, am I going to get good? I simply don’t see how to jam all the “old disciplines” into stories I’m telling if they don’t go in when I’m telling the stories. If the stories turn out undisciplined and loose and squalid yet, by some magical feat, are able to make dreary sordid people look glamorous and fascinating, how do I do that? Because most books I read nowadays have dreary sordid people who look downright dreary and sordid, and the only fascinating thing about it is how the writer could have stuck to it all that time.
See, I can’t even put my nose to the typewriter unless my creatures slink around in platinum lamé pajamas. That’s probably my trouble. Even I can see it’s a sign of shallowness. Shit. What I want to know is, if I tell everyone about my disease, Huntington’s, that’s the name of it (I’m inheriting it from my grandfather, who gave it to my father, and I can tell I’m going to get it—I’m the image of my father), and about my grandma dying of cancer next door, and the cat kicking the bucket in my closet, and how horrible it is being in love with a man who supposedly prefers men, and how ghastly and terrible it is watching my mother succumb to everyone dying around her, and what a show stopper it is every time my sister gets cunt cancer, then do you think people will like me better?
No. They’ll take one look at my tits and think I’ve got it made and am shallow and don’t know what’s what and about characterization. I am the character. I keep feeling as though nobody knows about a person like me and that I’m original and that I ought to be explained before anyone lets me out to do book reviews or otherwise prance forth into the public arena. I mean, what if some poor author on the East Coast heard me sneer at how square and musty he or she is, and the poor author took it personal without knowing [about the] promiscuous fox coming in from the beach to toss off the review before returning, once more, to her shallow life?
You’re not going to get mad at me, Joe. Please don’t think I’m some kind of bizarre ingrate who doesn’t know which side her bread is buttered on. I do know which side my bread is buttered on. I want more butter, too, which is how come I’m asking, how on earth I’m going to [get] good? [Do] you think I’m going to have to stay stuck here, writing like I write, and hope for the best? The new book, Vicky says, is a novel. And, as I told you, I wrote it in one voom of 18 days—an outburst of post alcoholic euphoria. (It turns out, when you quit drinking, you suffer from a special euphoria—[this is] supposed to be a medical fact.)
One of the things I’m starting to think about is that “serious” people just don’t think that gossip, the spécialité de ma maison, is “serious”...I think that’s because it’s always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick, some shallow callow shameful way of grasping situations without being in on the top conferences with the “serious” men, the idea of gossip has always been considered tsk tsk. Only how are people like me—women they’re called—supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room? And, anyway, I can’t stand meetings, I’d much rather figure things out from gossip.
Of course I’ve never pitted myself against The State and taken seriously the idea of ambition and earning a living. Because whenever I have gone to work, it’s always been filing in alphabetical order, filing and filing and filing—the Mc’s before the M’s. I can type numbers with the same lightning speed I can type misspelled words. I’ve never made money in my life, and I never imagined for one moment that I had to make money because I always supposed that someone would be delighted to take care of me, and someone usually has been.
Remember when I lived in New York and had that horrible job uptown typing and being the receptionist, and I had to go to work on the subway every day, and I had LSD relapses in the Pan Am Bldg [where] I went deaf, and all the visuals looked cardboard flat? Do you think people would think I was more serious if I built, brick by brick, a house of my grim New York City sojourn? A guy sat on my back and woke me up one morning there, in N.Y., Joe, with his hand over my mouth, and his voice telling me, “Don’t scream.” Me being shallow me, I said, “Why not?” And he was so de-romanticized, he finally grumbled, “Oh, O.K., shit...” and swung his legs off me and departed back out the fire escape.
Things just don’t happen wretched to me, Joe. I escape not only with my sense of humor, but with my sense of humor uncorrupted by physical seriousness. The worst thing about that gullible “rapist” was that I had a brand new kitten which I was positive he’d thrown out the window because it was obnoxious and mewed all the time. I went looking out all the windows and into the street in the 13° weather in my bathrobe with a butcher knife ([for] if he showed up again, but really to give me proof that I’d just escaped a classic horror of all time—as usual), and the kitten was nowhere, not in the garbage cans, not out any windows, just nowhere. I finally had to come inside and there the stupid cat had been inside the bedsprings throughout the entire Harlem-meets-L.A.-bloodbath encounter. She hadn’t woken up. Of course the guy and I did keep our voices down, not wanting to disturb anybody. Do you think I could doctor that up and make it luridly serious?
Joe, if everyone I knew died tomorrow, and I was left penniless in a strange city where I didn’t speak the language, do you think I’d be penniless and friendless very long? I just have too intense a personality to ever be one of those lonely strangers sitting hopelessly, watching their days dribble by, unable to poke out from the layer of sad anonymity. I’m not that kind of a person. I mean, I consider it fucking sport to go places alone and spend evenings figuring out what’s going on cold. Being at giant events by myself, going alone to parties where I don’t know anyone—all that stuff, restaurants alone—I love being virginal and pure [and] alone [because] the anticipation of cracking the thing open and finding out everything is such fun. (I know I’m not supposed to think things are fun, it’s not “serious” enough. Everyone in New York will say, “See! She did it again!”) Even starting out, when I was about 20 and writing the greatest author in America, is not the act of a normal anybody. And it’s not the act of a 20 year old to be blatantly determined enough to demand and get your attention. Especially you, Joe, who’s the least promiscuous, most private, and absolutely number one determined genius to keep himself free from jerks.
I know I’m not a major important serious author who’ll be forever under the B’s at the library. I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L.A. rather than hates it, and my personality and many charms have brooked impossible roadblocks because they aren’t impossible—or at least they don’t look that way to me. They look fun. You always looked like such fun to me. When I first read Catch 22 and it saved my life in horrible Heidelberg, I thought, “Well, shit, that man will love hearing from a peculiar girl like me. I’m going to sit right down and tell him how much I love him.” People don’t tell wonderful people the right things, or else how on earth could I have captured your imagination and not let it go all this time, despite how I think things are wonderful that aren’t? If I were a normal writer and person, [I would] have written you a whisper about “how much I enjoyed...” Who wants to hear a whisper? Who can hear [a whisper]? (For that matter...)
Whenever I think about all those things, about how the “old disciplines” have to be observed—“character, complication, conflict, crisis, climax, and resolution”—it scares me so much, Joe. How am I going to do all that? Can’t I make up my own disciplines and [make] distinguished-sounding reasons about why I’m right? Can’t I make up some new kind of book where the person who’s telling the story gets to tell it if they can keep people awake? Why do my [characters] strike everyone as tsk tsk and “all right if you like that sort of thing,” when I’m just telling about what I think is wonderful? And if I can’t do this anymore, Joe, would you please tell me how to get real serious fast so I can get it over with and plunge into [the “old disciplines”] without thinking it looks like Death Row and a cement mixer combined?
I love you and yearn for you tragically,
Eve Tappman
P.S. Or is everyone just jealous because they’re all freezing and I’m writing about being bored in 110°?
P.P.S. Sitting around watching your father die of what you’re going to die of is a hell of a strain on my shallow nature. I feel like an upstream salmon, determined to reach the shallow water, no matter how fast the river is running the other way...
P.P.P.S. I remember when I first began writing to you 9 million years ago, you told me real grimly that you hated short stories and only liked novels. And, the thing is, I can’t even write real short stories. What am I going to do? I am not NOT going to copy out Ernest Hemingway novels by hand to “learn” how to write novels. (Am I?) Maybe I’ll have to get so mad, SO MAD, at everyone that my next novel is a masterpiece and then I can go back to writing meanderings and people will leave me alone. Maybe I could invent a new form of storytelling and I know just what to call it: spurts.

Jarrett Earnest: You can buy copies of Eve Babitz’s: books, Eve's Hollywood, Slow Day's Fast Company, I Used to Be Charming, and the new one that these letters are from, To LA, from NYRB.com or from your favorite bookseller. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Earnest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited by Tyler Hill, the music is by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.