Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)

Pore over the letters of Eve Babitz—queen of the witty, gossipy, and thoroughly engrossing missive.

Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, Steve Martin, and many others appear in this first-of-its-kind collection.

Eve Babitz was a pure product of Los Angeles. The goddaughter of the avant-garde composer Igor Stravinsky, she made the scene of just about every midcentury California scene there was: from the artists of the Ferus Gallery forging a wholly West Coast art, to the genre-creating rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s and '70s, to the literary-cum-Hollywood crowd orbiting Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In between the partying, the drugs, the love affairs, the "squalid overboogie" of it all, Babitz made time to chronicle the world as she saw it in works like Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; and Sex and Rage. Modest successes in their time, these books have found their audience in the twenty-first century, establishing themselves as the final word in literary cool.
Babitz considered her letters "the kind of writing I do best," calling them "practically a diary," and rarely depositing them into a mailbox. Her missives to friends like Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, and Steve Martin—fresh and frank, dashing and droll-are irresistible, as highly spirited as they are acutely perceptive.
These unsent letters constitute an alternate body of Eve Babitz's work, one that might have been lost had not her sister, Mirandi, found them after her death, packed in unremarkable file boxes taped securely decades before. In Too L.A., Babitz's biographer, Lili Anolik, has performed a remarkable feat, not only raising these letters from the tomb but accompanying them with informative and irreverent commentary, guiding the reader through the uproarious lifelong party that was Eve Babitz's real masterpiece.

Eve Babitz (1943–2021) was the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for a variety of publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. New York Review publishes Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, I Used to Be Charming, andToo L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were).

Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a writer at large for Air Mail. Her work has also appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and The Paris Review, among other publications. She is the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College. Her most recent books are Hollywood's Eve and Didion & Babitz. She is the editor of Eve Babitz's Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were).