Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, Her Legacy, and Unsent Letters

In this episode of Private Life, Lili Anolik joins Jarrett Earnest for a conversation about the life and legacy of Eve Babitz, in honor of the publication of New York Review Books’s Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) (2026), a collection of Babitz’s correspondence. Earnest and Anolik discuss Babitz’s captivating persona and the strange course of her life, from New York to Los Angeles and from riotous success to anonymity. Anolik, who has spent over a decade researching and writing about Babitz, talks about the notorious photo of a nude Babitz, age twenty-one, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp; her relationship with Joan Didion, and her artistic legacy captured through letter writing.  

 

Anolik is a writer and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She is the author of both Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and the dual biography Didion & Babitz (2024). She is a writer at large for Air Mail, and her work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among other publications. 

 

Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was a writer and artist from Hollywood, California. She is best known for 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 alsopublished I Used to Be Charming (2019), which brought together decades of her uncollected nonfiction. In addition to her writing, Babitz was a visual artist and created collages for a number of album covers, including LPs by Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt.  

 

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.

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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 your host, Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm talking with Lily Anolik. Lily Anolik is the leading authority-enthusiast on the late writer, Eve Babitz, authoring her biography, Hollywood's Eve in 2019, followed by the dual biography, Didion and Babitz, 2024. That contrasts those two writers' lives and work as they intersected in 1970s Los Angeles. NYRB Classics has reissued Babitz's books, Eve's Hollywood from 1974, and Slow Day's Fast Company, The World, The Flesh, and L.A. From 1977, as well as brought out her collected essays in 2019, titled I Used to Be Charming. And just now, NYRB has brought out a collection of Eve Babitz's letters, titled To LA. Letters never sent, but some were, which was also edited, annotated, and introduced by Lily Anilick. I'm radicalized. I, after having read like in a really intense spurt, these like four books of Eve Babitz's and your dual biography, Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, I'm like... You're a believer. I'm a believer and there's no zeal like the convert. So you have no idea how happy I am to have this conversation.

Lili Anolik: That's beautiful. Thank you. That makes me so happy to hear.

Jarrett Earnest: And I was thinking maybe the way we should start, because the Museum of Modern Art has their big Marcel Duchamp show on right now, many people know an image of Eve Babitz without knowing that it's an image of Eve Babitz, which is the famous photograph of her naked playing chess with Marcel Duchamps at the opening of his retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. And I was wondering if maybe we could start by you just explicating that image because in your biography, I think you call it her first artistic act or something like that. Successful. Successful artistic act.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it's, you know, I always felt like I started with Eve. I think I started chasing her in 2010. And the profile I wrote on her appeared in Vanity Fair in 2014 and that sort of got things going. You know, all the books started to get reissued and she's one of those people that just got missed in her own time. She was getting published for a period by Knopf, which was classy and great, but somehow she just, it just didn't happen for her. And the reason I think it's happened for her in the last 10 years, and it always sounds like I'm bragging, I don't mean this as a brag, it's like that profile in Vanity Fair I think kicked things off because it gave her a persona. She was too careless and I think too committed to the idea of amateurism. Like she felt amateurism was art, that careerism, professionalism was antithetical to being an artist. And so she never kind of created a persona or. Her brand, that hideous word we use now, right? And I always felt that she did it from the jump because so the photo that you just referenced, the famous photo of her playing chess naked with Marcel Duchamp taken by Julian Wasser. Julian was, you know, kind of a gentleman. I mean, he was a rogue but a gentleman and he had taken these photos in which you could see Eve's face and he took a bunch of photos in which Eve's was kind of veiled by her hair. And he told her she could choose to have her face visible or not visible. And she chose to have her face not visible, right? So she's just a body. And so I felt that that seemed to kind of express kind of her attitude toward fame. She wanted all eyes kind of converging on her, but she wanted anonymity too. And of course, kind of the great backstory to the photo, it was Walter Hopps who was the energy, the muscle, the brains behind the Marcel Duchamp retrospective. It was a big thing to get a Marcel Duchamps retrospective and it was that kind of a small, kind of not particularly well known or well regarded Los Angeles art gallery and he got Duchamp. Now he was married to Shirley Hopps, but he was with Eve, Eve was his girlfriend. She was. I think they started up when she was maybe 18. And she was with a lot of guys at that time, but she really liked him. He was one of her favorites. Anyways, he was going to have this big party for the Duchamp retrospective, and he was throwing it with his wife. So he did not invite Eve, right? And she so mad. She was so angry about not being invited. When Julianne Wasser asked her to pose naked, she said yeah. And of course she upstaged Duchamp. I mean, she had, not just a stage to show up, she had staged Walter, because that's the image, that's abiding image associated with that retrospective. But I really felt it was kind of very revealing about her attitude toward being looked at, toward being known, which was, you know, look at me and then, but you can't see me, kind of attitude.

Jarrett Earnest: What I ended up feeling when I was reading her, or when I was reading particularly Ease Hollywood and Slow Days and then I really want to get into this beautiful book of letters that you've put together because it's its own kind of amazing form and I think you you convincingly argue that it's like her true form. Yeah. But when Iwas reading her I just felt like this is an artist that has her priorities absolutely correct and the art, fun, and sex. Yeah. And I thought if you read these books, actually read them and you don't like her and you enjoy them, you might be an asshole.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, or like uptight in an unseemly way. Yeah, you're incapable of joy or something.

Jarrett Earnest: But I bring that up to say, to follow up on your, you make this point beautifully in your biography, which is to say you've done this amazing work advocating for her and bringing her back out into the public, but the real purpose of that is just to get people to read her. And when you actually can read her, then it's self-evident how beautiful the writing is and what she's doing.

Lili Anolik: Well, it's like, actually, my feeling about her writing is complicated. I think when she is good, she is great. I mean, I think Slow Days Fast Company is just a masterpiece, you know, an L.A. Masterpiece. But I think a lot of her writing is not good. You know, really, like, I don't think L. A. Woman is good. I don't really care for sex and rage. I really only love Slow Days, Fast Company. And I felt she also needed the right editor. I thought that Vicki Wilson at Knopf did a beautiful job with her work. And I also do really, of course I really love Eve's Hollywood, but it's an imperfect book and I feel like it could have been cut. You know? And so I felt like Eve needed to be on just the right drugs, fucking just the right guy, like having the right muse. Like everything had to, she had to have kind of, like her chops had to be at a certain level, but she can't have gotten stale yet. It's just everything had come together for her, for her to write something great, you know? Because she didn't have She didn't have like just the day-to-day discipline, kind of the dead-eyed craftsmanship of a Joan Didion who had a more, you know, had a sustained career. The level was higher consistently. Though I think, of course, I think Slow Days is the best book either of them wrote. But I do have a complicated feelings about her body of work.

Jarrett Earnest: You say this thing in Diddy and Babitz's about Eve's Hollywood, which is that it takes about a quarter of the book to really start rolling. And I would say that's pretty much my experience. Where you kind of get through the beginning and you think, this is likable, this cool. And like a lot of the writing reminded me of Cookie Mueller, who was like a writer that was like my Bible when I was in my early 20s with my friends. And then I was like, oh, maybe this is Cookie Mueller for like more, slightly more normal people. But then once you get into the book, it opens up and the whole last, you know, as you said, two, three quarters of the book. It's just so fun and really touching. Yeah, really good.

Lili Anolik: No, and the sheik is just great and the piece on Cary Grant, which is one line, is great. No, it's great. But she needed things to line up in a certain way, I think, to really be effective. That's my feeling, you know?

Jarrett Earnest: That sets the stage for talking about how you came to edit this letters book, which you tell the story without actually getting into making the step to editing a book of letters. But in Didion Babitz's, you talk about having written Eve's Hollywood and then getting a call from her sister that in fact, there are these boxes of letters and they're now being given to an archive. And that when you, and I think that my understanding is that you basically wrote Didion Babitz's because of those letters.

Lili Anolik: Yes, no, no. This book was, I did not intend to write this book. I just feel like, ethically, morally, I felt I had to do right by Eve. And when I, it was not a happy call. I mean, I was not happy when Miranda told me about these letters. First of all, Evie lived in squalor beyond all imagining, right? Like, she had Huntington's at the end. She was a naturally kind of pig pen type person. But the filth and chaos she lived is just, I can't do justice. The only way I can like, the smell when you walked in there and it was just packed wall-to-wall stuff, just the stench, something that had been alive was dead in there. Like it was a cat, it was something, something was dead. It was an awful rotting smell. She accidentally lit herself on fire in the middle 90s. It was catastrophic, right? I think 50% of her body, third degree burns, she barely lived through it. But she had wounds that never healed. Like she had a huge wound on her stomach. It was like an open wound. Like There was just a rotting, stinking stench in that apartment. And I always think Jewish family services came to clean it at a certain point, and they had to wear hazmat suits. It was crazy. So the idea that letters would survive her papers, there was no way on earth. But what had happened was her mother, who was an artist, had put together these boxes of Eve's correspondence and papers. But she put so much masking tape on them and Evie's hands had gotten damaged in the fire and they also shook because of Huntington's. So I had imagined she just got too frustrated to open them. Like they were hard to open, they were really hard to opened. So that's the only reason all these papers survived. But when I found out about them, as I said, it was not happy news because I felt I had spent half a dozen years on Eve and I had done my best by her with my book on her, Eve's Hollywood, and I knew. This meant I had to go back in, you know, I was on to other projects. I was under contract to write another book. And when I went to Eve's memorials, she died in, I think Christmas 2021, right, right into the new year. And when it went in January of 2022 to her memorial, you know, her sister, Miranda, with whom I was very close, asked me to take a look at the boxes, right? And I did so with dread. And the first letter I pulled out was the letter that Eve wrote to Joan Didion in 1972. Could you write what you write, Joan, if you weren't so tiny, right? And it was this, it was like Eve's dropping on a lover's quarrel, right. It completely opened up Eve to me. And so I remember going through all the letters and I was just going to revise Eve's Hollywood. I was gonna spend six weeks revising and I gonna write a long piece for Vanity Fair on that letter to Joan, slap it at the front as like a new forward or whatever, and just be done with it. But then as I got into it, I was... Rewriting the book basically from scratch. And then at a certain point, I realized I was writing a shadow book on Joan Didion. And so that's how the book came to be. But I absolutely did not intend it. But the letters were dynamite, right?

Jarrett Earnest: It might be worth thinking about some aspects of her writing really closely about what makes the two books that you talk about as being really wonderful work and the novels not work and then how the letters play a role there because in your introduction you say this wonderful thing that the letters are her true form and that the writing is almost the best when it's as close to just being a letter.

Lili Anolik: She says it about herself. She's writing her friend Sarah Kernikin, and she had written a letter to an editor at Vogue telling him she had just moved to Santa Monica, Venice. And she wrote him a letter about the boardwalk, and he just published it in Vogue with very minor edits. And she said, well, letter writing, the kind of writing I do best. There's something about the spontaneity and the casualness and the offhandedness of letters as a form that would be very appealing to her. Well, first of all, you can kind of see the stories in embryonic form in the letters. She's using the letters kind of as a workshop. But the letters are also, because she had basically no formal education. She graduated early from Hollywood High and that was that, right? There were a few classes at LACC, but I always think about this because I think about how much time I wasted in college and stuff. She just said her father, who was kind of a classically trained violinist. Used to say that college was for people who didn't know what they wanted to do, you know. Anyway, so she does not bother much with formal education, so obviously she wasn't in writing workshops. I don't even know if they had those in the 60s and 70s. But she's writing letters to kind of stir her imagination. It's to start writing, you know. There's something about the spontaneity of these kind of first drafts that are thrilling to read. And also letters are seductions, and she was such a deeply seductive person. But I think we also have to say, these letters... Part of what's so interesting about them is their letters never sent, right? That's what these boxes of letters were. They were Janet Malcolm is really great on this genre of the unsent letter. She talks about it in her book on Sylvia Plath and she says that they're particularly significant because they're letters that we Everybody writes letters that they reject that they throw away that they ball up or you know emails They delete but if you save it, it's like you think it's too valuable too important too profound to be trusted to the recipient. And so you're kind of writing it to posterity, right? And so that's sort of what these letters were. And so they're these wonderfully talking letters, but it's stuff she's not, maybe isn't quite ready to say to the person, right. So, and I also found them just totally fascinating because Evie, even in her most incoherent, even when she was really pretty crazy from the Huntington's, she was always a charming person, right, and charm is its own kind of barrier, right, because you don't want to ever be not charming, which means. Anything you might think could be construed as crybaby, or whining, or talking about your troubles. She just doesn't really do that. But that's part of life, right? So these letters, there's psychological suffering in them. There's desolate emotion, right, there's anguish in these letters which she would never show you in her books or in person. So these letter were particularly throwing, right to your voyeur self, right. You really felt you were seeing something very intimate.

Jarrett Earnest: The title essay of the collection that New York Review Books brought out, I used to be charming, about her experience of being lit on fire and then the really horrific kind of treatments, it's really painful to read because it is not her subject matter and she tries to keep it light every time it gets, she says something that's just devastating, It's always with a joke and you think like, oh, what a relief, but also it's like.

Lili Anolik: You can't, it's not funny. It's not fun. No, it was, it wasn't, it's no funny and I remember reading those pages. I think Sarah Kramer did a really wonderful job editing those pages into a story. But I remember being at the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles and her sister gave me those pages and it was unbearable to me to read them. I mean, it, it so grotesque what she went through and it so stupid. It was just an accident. She, she was a klutzy person, right? And she just dropped the match and set herself on fire. But you're right, like the tone of that piece just does not match the subject matter. She just couldn't deal with it. But the letter that's to me the greatest letter in that collection, I mean, I love the Didion letter. I love The Didion Letter. So it's equal. The Didian Letter and the second letter to Joseph Heller, the one from 77. Her relationship with Heller. She kind of wrote him a mash note as a very young person when she wrote her first kind of a piece of juvenileia called Travel Broadens. And she just wrote him somewhere between a mash note and a fan note, asking him to read her novel. It's super charming. It's in the book.

Jarrett Earnest: It's like, oh, I had this horrible thing happen to me. I'm a girl and that wouldn't be so bad except for I'm really beautiful. Yeah, that's right, that' right. And I'm like. I have huge boobs. I have a huge.

Lili Anolik: I'm like a wet bathing suit, the whole thing. It's like, it's a total, it a total come on, right? It's a totally come on. And he, he helped, of course they had an affair. He helped her and she, her best book, Slow Days Fast Company, coming out from Knopf and he gave her a blurb and it's a condescending blurb. And she's writing him about this blurb, never sent the letter. And it's just, it the pain of being what she is, which is kind of like the Marilyn Monroe of the literary set, which means You are an artist, but you're mistaken for a bimbo, and just what it's like, what it is like to be her. And to me it's as profound as a rim of one's own. It's really, it's a total knockout. But she was willing to talk in those ways to him because she wasn't going to send this letter. But it also reveals kind of a darker personality and a more anguished personality, but she's a more ambitious person than she would ever admit in her books or in person. It was just fascinating to me.

Jarrett Earnest: You know, you have a quote somewhere where she's where she has a reference to her unsent letters as being essentially like her diary Yeah, and I wonder how you think that Eve regarded this writing because it does represent a certain amount of of Care to have saved these things and that they exist at all not just for her but her mother Yeah, where do you how do you situate these letters as a collection within her body of work?

Lili Anolik: I mean, to me, I think it's her second best book. I mean I think this is really up there. I think these letters in which she's talking to other people but she's really talking to herself, I just think it represents some of her very best work. I think its connected to the idea that we were talking about before of amateurism. Staying an amateur meant staying an artist, right? And that was I think whatever situation she got in with Joan Didion and when Joan Didian was editing Eve's Hollywood, which was very generous of Joan, right. But it didn't work. Eve quote unquote fired Joan. That's how she would say it. Joan of course didn't actually work for her, but she didn't want Joan touching her work. Even though Joan had been kind of, it was Joan who got her published. Joan kind of recommended her to Rolling Stone when she wrote that great piece on Hollywood High. And Joan kind also wrote a letter of recommendation to Seymour Lawrence, who became her publisher at Dell. He had an imprint at Dell, none of this would have happened without Joan. You know, Jen was enormously helpful to you. But Eve felt the need to kind of turn on Joan. I think it was like her deepest self. Joan advocated professionalism, working certain number of hours a day. She told Eve to read more Graham Greene, basically was telling Eve to shape up. And Eve just, it's just antithetical to her being and it's antithetic to her idea of what an artist is. And there's something about letters, which are just hyper casual. It's like the art has to be made incidentally for it to be real to Eve. So it was something about the form. Just released what was best in Eve, and I also felt the novels are total failures, and that is when, not on the advice of Joan, it was just Eve feeling whatever pressure she was feeling or whatever self-doubt she was felling. You know, I think any real book, the writer is reinventing the wheel. Certainly true of writers we admire, like Dave Hickey or Peter Sheldahl. They are reinventing wheel, and Eve kind of reinvented the wheel with Slow Days Fast Company. Did it with Eve's Hollywood as well. She was writing kind of fragmented novels, this, that, and the other, but when she tried to toe the line and write what serious writers wrote, which was novels, to me they became completely dead. To me they were completely dead, I don't know how you felt about that.

Jarrett Earnest: Feeling about that has to do with the distance from life and the relationship between fiction and nonfiction. And so I respond to the originality of Eve's Hollywood and Slow Day's Fast Company as being this thing that it's so intoxicating to me, which is someone writing in the first person about their life. The only question I would have is that she changed people's names. Yeah, that's it. In which she said that because she didn't want to get sued, but I just wish that.

Lili Anolik: So I wouldn't get sued!

Jarrett Earnest: But I think that's my only qualm is it's like, and it reminds me of like Renata Adler's Speedboat. It reminds me Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. It's this very specific form that really came into its own in the 70s with a lot of women writers that we would now call auto fiction. And I think, that's also one of the reasons why Babitz's emerges as such a hugely suddenly present figure for people because it anticipates so much that it's like really

Lili Anolik: That's totally right and you know, but it's like I feel like she did it in a harder way than they did because Renata like Renata was like Yale or like yeah lost I know that was later Yale Law School, but she was like she worked at the New Yorker early on She was connected in the right ways. Do you know like she came on as serious? I mean, she's great This is not a this is not put down a brought a she's speed boats really excellent But you knew to take her seriously they somehow come up, right? You know, like they come up properly and the way Joan Didion managed her career properly Right and Evie just was some person out in California with big tits Who fucked around a lot had a great sex resume and referred in a way that Madden's me even now would call herself She would refer to herself as a groupie She expects people to be hip enough to understand that she's sort of saying that tongue and cheek But people are not by and large hip, you know, and I can say this because I was on this from the ground floor So like when I was doing that profile for Vanity Fair, which I did from like 2012 to 2014 for various reasons. It took a long period. Half the people I interviewed, maybe more than half, could not believe that I was writing a profile of a bimbo in their mind, a bimbot. I heard that over and over again. What are you doing? What are doing? This person who they regarded as just a groupie with a typewriter, right? They just didn't take her seriously. And she, I always felt that Joan Didion picking as her model Hemingway and Eve picking as her model, Marilyn Monroe. It's like, you're asking for trouble if you pick Marilyn Monroe as your model. As it turns out, there's no bigger figure in the 20th century than Marilyn Monroe. You know what I mean? She's massive. There's no fatigue in her legend, right? Everybody knows who Marilyn Monroe is. But her whole life, she got kind of sneered at and condescended to, right. So it's like Eve knew that that was going to be her fate, you know. And it just seems to me weirdly like, suicidal to choose that as your fate in a way. So what I'm saying is you're absolutely right, she was of the time in all those ways. I think Pauline Kale too, who I think turned movie reviews into kind of personal essays too. But somehow she did it in the way guaranteed to cause her the most pain.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, first of all, being from Los Angeles at that time, period, no matter what artist you are, and being super involved in that scene. So much about the writing and the energy in the writing is this reclamation from the condescension, the cultural condescention of intellectuals and artists in other places. And to say, actually, I'm not apologizing because I'm from LA, like, LA is incredible. And like, Igor Stravinsky is my godfather, like I'm like, I... I have a pretty impeachable sense of what art is, and it's amazing here.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, no, and she, of course, she's fully right. And like really, Pauline, Sontag, and Didion are all California girls. But somehow they make the transition to the East Coast. But of course Eve comes, it's like Eve's higher than New York, in a sense, or higher than East Coast America. She's really, it' European. It's all displaced European geniuses who are in her living room, right? Her father. Does the violin fingering for Stravinsky, that's why Stravinski is her godfather, but he's also first violin on the 20th Century Fox Orchestra. And he's, also his other very close friend was Bernard Herrmann, if I'm saying that right, Hitchcock's music guy. And so you can hear her dad, he's the violin on those great shower scenes in Psycho. But so it's all high-low. It's like, you know, so but she's really high and you know really low in Hollywood. So she's in a lot of ways kind of the most sophisticated of the bunch, just in terms of her origins. But somehow she chooses to identify, I went to Hollywood High. I don't think she led with My Godfather with Stravinsky. It was, well, I went Hollywood High, right? So it's like something about, she was, I think, a deeply serious person, but she had to kind of lead with her lack of seriousness or her pop qualities.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, it must have done something for her in terms of protected, giving her space to be free to do what she wanted to do.

Lili Anolik: Yes, because she's flying under the radar, right? Of course. But what the letters show is the pain, like the price she paid for that. And she did it in a self-aware way, and it caused her pain. It was just something about seeing the pain it caused her, or that letter to Joan when she says, could you write what you write, Joan, if you weren't so tiny. She's writing to Joan after Joan wrote, it's actually a piece of Joan's I love. It's a controversial piece. It's Joan's piece on the women's movement, which I find like bitchy in a way I find hilarious and great. I mean, it's like great performance for me. And i think you who had real had her own problem with them and as i mean and just i just think she objected to the style of it you know you know if that if we see had had problems with it but she she knew they had a point right she knew the women's movement had a point and john with it was refusing to acknowledge that and that women's with the peace i'm just going to figure out how to get around how to how to maneuver in a man's world and how to be the one woman who was kind of lead into the big writers club right meaning which is the mail club She had figured all that out. And kind of Eve was kind of calling her an Uncle Tom about Los Angeles and about the women's movement. It's a great and passion letter. I mean, I think they both have their points. I mean I love that letter and I do love that piece on the women movement. But where I'm going with this is, she knew she was not playing the game right. Like even Joan's slenderness where Joan's like sexuality isn't, Joan's pretty, like Joan always has the photo on her books and you can see she's got good features. She's a good looking person. But she's like, you know, has no. Nobody to speak of, right? She weighs something like under a hundred pounds. And Eve, it's just, what are you going to do? It's double D's, right. It's just like, so I always just found the kind of the dialog they were in, that I don't even think Joan was paying attention to, not after a certain point, but that Joan was in her head forever. You know, it was completely fascinating to me. And that dialog really plays out in the letters, not just in the letter she wrote to Joan, but in the letter she went to Heller or to her boyfriend, Paul Ruscha. It's, that's kind of my favorite drama in the in the Letters book.

Jarrett Earnest: In the book of essays, which has some really wonderful essays in it, I used to be charming. She's also working in some spaces for writing some kinds of magazine writing that's also less reputable, which is kind of the intersection of celebrity journalism and like rock and writing and there's there's

Lili Anolik: In just women's essays, like on her tits.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah, totally. On makeup. For Playboy. Yes, of course. And in my head, I think a lot about essays that I want to write are almost like there's like a structure and I'm like waiting for the right thing that can let me write that kind of essay. And one of the kind of essays I've always wanted to write is about being on set while people are making a movie and like that essay about The Godfather, part two. Right. Is so wonderful. When I read it, I was like, this is the exact essay I wanted to write, but it's more fun than I would have written it because she gives herself permission to just like talk at length about her own, you know, like going to the producer's house or sitting in the in the hotel and waiting for him. And like, Are you waiting for Fred Roos? Yes.

Lili Anolik: Who she was fucking.

Jarrett Earnest: Right. Well, I mean, I think the subtext of all the writing is that that's how that's the access.

Lili Anolik: That's the act.

Jarrett Earnest: But she doesn't actually have to dwell on it and it's not complicated for her.

Lili Anolik: No, no, it's not. She's great. She is just great that way. No, she's, no, you're, you are totally right. But I always wonder, I mean, particularly after doing this letters book, which I like, I kind of had a heavy hand like I was like, and I would have, were it not for Sarah Kramer, I would've had a heavier hand, you know, it really, I just, cause I feel like she's so good, like she is so good off the cuff, but she needs someone to step in too. Like I, I, just would be curious to see that, that piece in its embryonic form. You know, I'd be curious. No. She's so great. And like, She's so exciting because she would say silly things sometimes, but they were always her silly things. She never thought in cliches. There was something about having, I was pregnant when I met her. I was six weeks pregnant with my first kid. And there was something with having a kid at the time I was dealing with her. She had that thing where there was an uncorrupted quality to her where she just, it was like she was feral. Like she was an autodidact. She wasn't middle-class. She like certain ways of thinking she just didn't allow to be imposed on on her, which is a source of like her freshness and originality, but also she will have real structuring problems. I mean, I don't mean this like in a jerky way. She just, she would have structuring problem. She had a novelist eye, like she would say startling things about people and places and then they'd just be a bunch of bullshit, like, like just like run on stuff. Right. And now I'm getting into just the making of the book, which I don't mean to get into, but it's like, she did need that. She did, she required someone to rein her in at some level. Or not rein her in because you wanted her to be free, but you needed to... She had no sense of structure. I know what you're saying about that piece. It's true. It's a clever way in, but I felt like I could really see what Vicki Wilson did with Slow Days Fast Company, and it was so many more pieces, and Vicki picked where they went so that it had a momentum and it built. Do you get what I'm saying?

Jarrett Earnest: By the end of Slow Days Fast Company, it's incredibly moving.

Lili Anolik: Incredibly moving!

Jarrett Earnest: And the way that that happens with something that is so light and so fun, and you're laughing, laughing, moving so quickly, and then suddenly you're crying. And the only way that happens is a structure, is like a very deep, unconscious structure.

Lili Anolik: Yes. And also Vicky was the one who suggested that she write it to Paul, to an unidentified lover who was Paul Ruscha. It just gives the, it gives the book just a structuring principle. You're absolutely right.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, that makes it like a letter.

Lili Anolik: Makes it like a letter. She's addressing it to somebody. Right. So that's why I felt like slow days and this book are her best books. I felt like you could have also called this book. So to L.A. Was one of the titles she considered Eaves Hollywood her first book. One of the working titles was to L A. To L. A. And it's such a great title for a letters book because to L a write the plan words. But I also felt it was also like the real sex and rage because all her letters basically fall in one of categories. She's either seducing somebody, right, sex, or she's letting someone have it, you know, and just tearing the lid off her temper and letting them have it. So they have this kind of natural drama, but I feel like people keep trying to wanting to make movies of her books. I just I know it's like you need someone very clever to figure out how to do it because the books have no plot, right? I always feel like the plot of Slow Days Fast Company, a masterpiece, I keep saying I think a masterpiece. It's really it's the drama of her sustained boredom. And her machinations and orchestrations, social, sexual, chemical, to keep the boredom at bay. That's the drama of those books.

Jarrett Earnest: Right the reason why it also Can't really be turned into a movie is Because of the voice is what's so special

Lili Anolik: It's everything.

Jarrett Earnest: And when you said that she had a novelist's eye, I've been thinking about it slightly differently because she originally was making visual art and she was in the art world. It's so visual. And one of my favorite things that's very rare in books, and I'm extremely attentive to it when it's there, are people that deal with colors and in very sophisticated subtle ways. And her description. What she loves is beauty, and the way things look are really important. And she describes them so beautifully, especially in color relationships and understands that color is not just a visual phenomenon, but it's a visual phenomena that's linked to every other social and emotional and psychic aspect of description. And so for instance, that piece in Eve's Hollywood where she's talking about the she went to school with Carolyn and she says she had the colors.

Lili Anolik: I love that.

Jarrett Earnest: Hazel hair. And it meant that... Hazel Hair. Do you remember that? I love that. Because it was shifting. And that when you saw her, all the things around her looked slightly dulled out because she had the colors.

Lili Anolik: She had the colors. No, and it would be a while. And she was so romantic, you know, and how she looked at things. Because I was able to get a picture of, Carolyn was a girl named Rosalind Frank. And from one of Rosalyn's friends at Hollywood High, I got a picture Rosaline. And she's very pretty. She's cute, for sure. But nothing is going to match that description, right? No girl is going match that that description.

Jarrett Earnest: I was thinking about it also at the end of Slow Days Fast Company when she's describing the effect of a particular kind of lilac eye shadow and how it fades imperceptibly into the tan of this girl's. Like she's so attuned to what it means for women to look beautiful in ways that only other women are paying attention to. And it's really, I was like, oh, she's like a painter.

Lili Anolik: You're completely right. And that was her first love. And it just didn't work out for her. It's hard. Everything is hard. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's all so hard. No, she had that eye. I'm working on a project about Courtney Love and Paula Fox. And funnily, Courtney has a romantic way of looking at things. It's a certain way of describing. I'm obviously really drawn to it, just the romance. You capture the romance, I think. Because I think that's, Evie captured, of course, for me, the romance of Los Angeles. You know, and. When you would talk to the people, you would read the book she described. Nothing was as good as she described it. She just, it was that eye. It's an artist's eye. You're right, that's what it is. It's a artist's, not a novelist's eye

Jarrett Earnest: Well, she made that world for herself. Yeah. That was her art.

Lili Anolik: That was her art. No, in everything she did, she was an artist, you know? It's funny, because I always feel like, like, when I get, like I sometimes I get you know, I get hate mail over that Diddy and Mabbitt's book sometimes, and everyone- Wait, what? I'm sort of teasing. You know, but mostly it's pretty nice, but sometimes I- People are mad.

Jarrett Earnest: People are mad that you're unfair to Joan Diddy.

Lili Anolik: That's what they always feel. And I'm like, well, I'm actually quite hard on Eve. I basically say, I like one book, you know, one and a half books. I'm quite rough on her. Um, but you know. I just loved who and what she was too. I mean, I love, love slow days and parts of Hollywood's Eve. And I really liked that Jim Morrison piece, but yeah, it's who and she was, was also just so, I mean she's a, she's literally heroin of course, but she's the cultural heroin too. It's something about how she inhabited the world.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the things I thought was really effective about Diddy and Babitz's, which I thought it was extremely shrewd and really beautifully done on a number of levels.

Lili Anolik: Thank you, Jarrett.

Jarrett Earnest: Of course I have, I'm sympathetic for the sexy fuck up who like self-taught sexy fuck up. Yeah, sexy autodidact. It's really hard to identify with like the perfect like thin, cold, I think it also relates to esthetic value of our culture. And you will never go broke betting on cold as the esthetic that people like.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, no, never.

Jarrett Earnest: Because it's more sophisticated and because put that in fucking quotes Right. No, you know what I mean though, but the hat my heart is really hot the esthetics are hot But oh you were gonna say what your hate mail is

Lili Anolik: That was it. It was just when people will be like, oh, you know, you're just so biased toward Eve. And I'm like, but I give her so much. She wrote many books. I'm just saying one is good. You know, I'm not, I'm actually being that gentle on her, but there's something about, in terms of running a career, nobody did it better than Joan. Nobody. I mean Fitzgerald Hemingway did Ian did Ian, you know, and maybe Truman Capote, like they somehow understood that the persona had to match the work. Like you had to be, you had, to be a character you could have written. All that sort of And I feel like Joan just understood her prose is famished, her body is famish, the big sunglasses, right? Like all of that just, it hit for people. But this was another way of being and that kind of walk on the wild side way of being is pretty fucking great too. And obviously it's what I prefer.

Jarrett Earnest: Also, the work that you're doing with writing Eve's Hollywood, Diddy and Babitz's, editing these letters, writing the profile, talking about Eve Babitz for I don't know how many years. Right. That is a particular kind of cultural work that you were doing a kind of advocacy work. It was like a rescue mission.

Lili Anolik: It was, but I really don't think of it that way. I mean, it was self-interest. I mean there's a purity to it too because I always feel the need to do right by her. That's why I did this second book. I was really onto other stuff. I was supposed to be writing this book on Bennington College, class of 86, the writers of that class, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Leatham, Donna Tartt. And I was engaged by that. And I feel like I actually do that kind of stuff for Brett as well. He's somebody I'm also very into and I thought was kind of misread or undervalued. Another Californian, right? And you know, I feel like I'm doing it again with Courtney, so I like all of that.

Jarrett Earnest: You like the misunderstood.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, or like the people are just not hip enough to see, right? Like the people who will really go for a Joan Didion. I mean, to me, that's just like it's like there's something just faux about that to me. I mean she is really good. She is really Good, but there's Something just she's easy. I don't know. There's something humorless about it to me too.

Jarrett Earnest: You made the point so devastatingly in Diddy and Babitz's where you listed all the celebrities tweeting like crying emojis after Joan of Arc died and it's like, we know you're not reading this.

Lili Anolik: No, they like the image or it's like they're buying into something else which is kind of hilarious and kind of great in its own way. But give me a break. I mean the girls who like Babitz now, I don't know how many of them are really reading it, but it's another way of being female in the culture, another way how to be a woman artist. I think we're probably interested in how should an artist be, right? And I guess it's my own distrust of like if the New York Times likes it, fuck and forget it, right. Do you know what I mean? And if you're getting extolled by these certain Like I was so like if you won an Oscar forget it that movies Stinks like it's just so obvious to me like so it's always the people who are kind of on the outsider who hit but don't get Respect there they always end up being more interesting right and part of I'm sure why I love how Hickey writes Dave Hicke writes I love How Peter Sheldell writes their artists to me. They write great. They right great, right? And I think both are kind poets. They just write beautifully, but they loved pop and they loved weird shit, right They loved outsider like disreputable stuff, and that seems to me so self-evidently where it's at. I can't even believe I have to say it, you know? I blush for people when they care what the Times said, or they... You know what I mean? Like it just seems so humiliating to me. Don't pay attention to that. But where I was going with this is I don't consider it advocacy work. I mean, because I was always... I love her. I love who and what she is, but I just... It just... I wanted to write about her. I mean I wasn't really doing it as my good deed.

Jarrett Earnest: Let's open this up a little bit, because you brought in Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman, which is one of the great masterpieces of all time. The best. And that book is such a brilliant dissection of the unconscious motivations of biographers. I love it. Estates, gatekeepers, people who are the keepers of the flame, a particular people, and the unacknowledged way that someone who's writing about a dead person, or in any form, another person, that they're acting out something about themselves, and it's a deeply creepy thing to do. Oh, totally creepy. So having spent so much of your life thinking and talking about Eve Babitz.

Lili Anolik: No for it's a creepy thing. I always think about this because well, I wanted to say one other thing that book is a touchstone for me

Jarrett Earnest: That's a masterpiece.

Lili Anolik: It's a masterpiece. And it's such a sweet spot. She is my favorite. You know, maybe. That book is like my favorite, but there's a weird psychological component that's kind of unspoken in that book, which is she is fighting with Sylvia over Ted. Janet is. She finds him very sexy.

Jarrett Earnest: She said, I'm on his side because I'm on the side of the living.

Lili Anolik: But that's not it. She's on the side of the sexy, right? She finds him, totals it, and she says... She was seduced. She was the seduced, and funnily, she acknowledges it in this way. I'm sure she knew what she was doing. I can't imagine she was not totally self-aware. But she said, Sylvia Plath isn't my type, right. Physically, she was no Janet Malcolm's type. This is a love triangle we are witnessing, and that's what gives that book, it's like, it's just, it gets compulsory. You cannot stop. Because it's got that weird gothic quality to it.

Jarrett Earnest: I love the moment in that book where she's confronting Jacqueline Rose and saying like, this woman's really smart. She's like a worthy adversary and I would really like her except for we happen to be on opposite sides of this.

Lili Anolik: I don't think she likes her either, by the way. That was not my feeling.

Jarrett Earnest: But I love the acknowledgement of the kind of her own territorial position and inability to engage with this other person's brilliant but like non-contradictory world.

Lili Anolik: Yeah, it's combative with hers. No, she does that. I feel like what she does, and I feel like this is what I would say I ripped off from her, is they always try to turn this stuff, cultural history, into true crime, into noir. That's what Journalist and the Murderer is, and that is most assuredly what Silent Woman is. So she acknowledges all the dark and creepy feelings. And what I did with Eve, what I did with Brett, or what I'm attempting to do with Courtney and Paula Fox, It is. It is weird, it's like I'm violating somebody psychologically, right, like I know this, it's not right, I know it's just not a wholesome activity, but I don't know how you can do it right if you don't have that kind of mindset. And it probably, I find it the most interesting with Brett because Evie was intermittently, I was almost working with posthumous Eve. She was there, sometimes she was great and present, but a lot of the time she really wasn't. So I was doing something to somebody, or I was... Writing this stuff with somebody who was participating with me and was, I had consent in the terms of today, but she wasn't totally with it, right? Whereas with Brett, someone who's been written about a lot and who finds the cultivation of his own persona, I think interesting, right, and he knows we hang out socially a lot. I don't drink. He drinks a ton. He knows I'm going to remember everything, and it's always kind of a, it gives the a kind of exciting quality which... I don't think he'd normally would find, I don't think he really likes to pay attention to women that much, apart from Didion, but I know like, he'll like kind of let me hang around with him a lot, because I know he likes that tension. I mean, I don't know if he would acknowledge that he likes the tension, but I knew he does.

Jarrett Earnest: We are also very glamorous and fun, and gay guys like that. I'm here to attest, yeah.

Lili Anolik: But I know it's like it's that weird it's not kink that is also appealing to him

Jarrett Earnest: But my question is, just to go back, because I think part of the success of Diddy and Babitz is the way that you acknowledge your own stakes, your own participation. You say, I'm on Eve's side, this is the why I feel. And I think it makes sense that you're a deep reader of The Silent Woman, because you avoid a lot of the pitfalls of people who do this kind of work. Right, thank you for saying. But still, I just wanna feel something a little under that, which is, what is it for you? Like where does this because in a way your name as a writer has been made in relation to other people. Not just in relation, to other people, but in this work with Babitz itself is extremely transformative for how you have come into the world as a writer yourself.

Lili Anolik: That is completely true. And I would also say that the first book on Eve did OK, but Diddy and MBabitz's did much better. I think it's a much better book, my own personal opinion. And I was able to spend much more time. The deeper I get in, the better. And I had way more time, and then kind of as your profile rises a little bit, you get more access. So I really had access with this book. And it was on the Diddian side as well. I mean, Noel Parmentel, various people in Diddians Circle. The Noel Parimentel was really big. But where I was gonna go with this is, I really feel like I wasn't getting, like I feel like things worked out better for me. So the first thing, I had done this long piece for Esquire on the Writers of Bennington College, class of 86, and then it got turned into a podcast. And Donna Tartt wasn't happy and tried to get it taken off the air, right? And she sort of, I guess in a way, like legally took a swing at me. It got in the post. And that was helpful. So the antagonism between us, even though, you know, I love secret history, but there's an antagonism, and then I felt like fighting with Joan, even though I'm like acknowledging how important and great Joan is. Even if, temperamentally, she's not my type. She's not type in the way that Sylvia wasn't Janet Malcolm's type. That's just how it is, right? But I'm not saying she wasn't great and kind of a monumental figure. I'm saying all that. But it's combative, right, and I think people like blood sport, too. And I don't know. I'm not, I'm mild in my. Personal life. I really don't fight with people that I'm not related to or having sex with. I just don't. But somehow I'm combative in my writing. And I feel like it was being, I guess, on Eve's side, but I also think that the tension with Joan was appealing to people, even if they would also get angry about it.

Jarrett Earnest: There's an idea, there's a question in here for me, because it's something that I have thought about a lot in my own work. I was thinking about in Eve's work, particularly in her essays, in which it's the difference between, I guess, a book like Slow Days, Fast Company and like the essays which are written for magazines is that Eve as the writer of the essay is on the hook for the things that Eve is saying socially in the world. Do that one more time. If she is writing about being in the editing room with Francis Ford Coppola, the reader is like, okay, this is Eve Babitz's, this really happened. And if she says things that are not flattering, it's like there's a real world implication. Like names are not changed to protect the innocent.

Lili Anolik: Right, right, right. Meaning she might have hurt Coppola's feelings.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, apparently he loved it. I mean, the other genius thing about her essay writing is that she's so lovable because she has such a great heart that even if she's saying something that's not super flattering, you kind of know where it's coming from. And it's situated. And I think that it lets you as a reader really trust her because she's being honest. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I think that's something that is vanishingly rare in contemporary writing, especially around access.

Lili Anolik: Oh, well, that's that's nobody's fault. I mean, it's the world's fault, right? Because if you don't get axed, it gets awful.

Jarrett Earnest: I just want to know like how you navigate that for yourself in terms of like being the persona of

Lili Anolik: It's painful because it's like you really get people really angry with you. I mean you do, you know, it's not fun, but it's, like, I guess it's I don't know if I could have written these books as a, you need to get a certain level of craft, a certain level of skill to write a book, but I don t know if psychologically I could've written these books a young person because it s like people really get upset.

Jarrett Earnest: You know because you're dealing with not only their real lives if you're like people that are in the books But you're deal with their fantasies. Yep. Yeah about who they want to be in relationship to it

Lili Anolik: Yeah. No, no, no. That's exactly right. So it's just like you have to be hardened because a lot of this is like, I think this is exactly like love affairs. Like for me with my subjects, like I am really like into this, like this is what I love, right? This is something I love. But I feel like I'm, I have a cold eye too. So I, you know, like I I'm in love, but I'm looking, I'm really looking and I'm going to say what I think. And I just remember when the first printing, what do you call it? The galley is in Eve's sister saw it. I'm really close with Randy. And she said, I'm going to murder you, or basically. Like, you know, because it's not, you're kind of being rough, too. But it's like, it's complicated, because it's just like a love affair for me in the sense that I have to be completely into it, totally passionate. And I know it's probably going to end badly, because people are not going to like what I say, right, at some level, you now? So I just feel like that's like a occupational hazard. But it is a source of pain, but it does not stop me, I guess.

Jarrett Earnest: My last thought is a question about Eve's subject matter. When you read, kind of setting aside the novels, with the acknowledgement that the novels kind of recast and retread the same material of the earlier two books, and that her essays also, when she started writing again in the 90s for Esquire, it was still the same time period that she was talking about, drawing from the same well of experiences. And I wonder if there's something about how you think about her relationship to that period of like late 60s, 70s LA and as as like who she was then and how she who she who had enabled her to be as a writer that couldn't sustain that later path that later part of her life.

Lili Anolik: That's a really shrewd observation. That's right. I mean, I really I really feel she was a casualty of the 70s. I don't believe she survived the 70's. Right. Now I'm saying posthumous post-fire because physically I think it was posthumsous like the hunting. So she's burnt up in the late 90's and then Huntington's I think sets in around 2001. So it's posthuminous Eve from then on in the sense that she's kind of not in her right mind. But I do not think she survived. The 70s I don't think she did. I don't think she ever did really good writing after that. I mean, I do love the Jim Morrison piece in Esquire, but it's not at the level of Sode's Fast Company. I don't know. So I dont think she Did. I mean I don, you know, she was a casualty of that decade to me.

Jarrett Earnest: You know, I guess I was wondering about how much her writing is about Beauty and youth and freedom, right and how hard it is to sustain that

Lili Anolik: You can't, right? You can, right, and you can be at the center. I mean, I felt like one of the things I found kind of great about her, her commitment and kind of her courage, she felt, I mean everybody who does this seriously is trying to get what's inside out, right. Try to get the best, how do you exploit yourself so you can get the work out of yourself. And so, you know, there was Joan who was a an observer, she was on all the right scenes and she was an observer on those scenes. And Evie was on those all those scenes and was a participant.

Jarrett Earnest: An actor, yeah.

Lili Anolik: Yeah!

Jarrett Earnest: She was part of it.

Lili Anolik: She was a part of it, but that really eats you up, like all those drugs, all those guys. You know, it's just, it is not sustainable. It's like she burned herself up before she burned her self up. And I think she knew that. I think that she understood that and I think accepted that. And look, a writer is kind of blessedly lucky to get one hot streak, you know, right? And so she did. She got it. And I, I think, because I think was an artist before she was anything else, I think she would have happily made that trade. But it's hard. Cause you still have to live a life, right? And the wife didn't really work. It doesn't really for anybody really. You know what I mean? Like it's one in a million where it actually works out, but like really didn't. Like there was no contingency plan at all. You know, no husband, no kids, no, no stable situation where she had like a house. There was just, everything was improvisatory. Everything was kind of on the, on the fly, you know, and she paid the price. So yeah, you're absolutely right. It was, she needed to be able to be the person It was. Fucking Jim Morrison, who is taking all the coke, right? Like taking all of the Quayle, she needed to be that person and it's kind of over by middle age, it's over. So that's it, right, if it is, it's like kind of it, Right? Well.

Jarrett Earnest: It made me so grateful that she wrote what she did because it's like it's enough.

Lili Anolik: It's enough, no, to get a master, it's a fucking miracle. She did great, she did a beautiful job. And she did get it out of herself. And I do feel like most of the letters really are from that period. Almost all the letters are from the period where she is on a hot streak. So you get to see the human cost, which I think is pretty, kind of the bargains she had to make to get this out of her self. You get to all of that, which I find, I don't know, I just find, I love to know that stuff.

Jarrett Earnest: I know you're just entering a publicity cycle for a new book on eBabitz, but do you think you can let go? Yeah, I'm done, man, I am done. You want out.

Lili Anolik: I went out, I feel like this book came out, I feel this is an important book, and I felt I had to do this, right? That this had to be done right, like I wanted to do right by her, and I actually think it adds to the Eve oeuvre as opposed to like, you know, her sister and I would have these kind of conversations and I feel right after the Vanity Fair piece came out in 2014 and New York Review of Books, which was so exciting, wanted to redo Eve's Hollywood, and I was like, New York review of books has really good taste. So they did. East Hollywood, and they did Slow Days, right? Those were perfect choices. And I would always try, I was like, don't let them reissue the other ones, you know? But I think, that's not proper of me, right, but you know, I guess all of the work should be available, but like, I just wanted the best of her out there, and I do feel like this adds to the best of her, like it's important. But yeah, I've absolutely moved on. I'm deep in this Courtney Love Paula Fox project. I have new people to torture, new people to torture me, you now?

Jarrett Earnest: You can buy copies of all these Eve Babitz's books. Eve's Hollywood, Slow Day's Fast Company, I Used To Be Charming, and To LA from nyrb.com or from your favorite bookseller. Next week's episode will be a reading from some of Eve Babitz letters that we discuss collected in her new book To LA and will be read by the actor Gina Gershon. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Earnest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill, the music is by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.