Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

ANY WRITER may be in or out of step with his or her time, but a great one is inextricably bound to place.

a party girl spattered with genius instead of (this distinction seems important) an actual genius who just happened to, y’know, like to party.

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it.

In France, they more or less lay their cards on the table and ennoble love affairs for the creative adventures they are, because for most people, these are the only creative adventures they’ll ever have. The only chance they’ll ever get to touch the face of heaven.

Since I’ve started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I’ve had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has saved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt. Men don’t work like that as far as I’ve been able to judge.