Fun. Flirty. Fabulous.

As I’ve discussed before in these reviews, the line between memoir and autofiction is somehow both infinitesimally thin and wide as galaxies. Or, to put it in jazz terms, the specifics you choose not to share can tell you almost as much as the ones you do share. That is both the power of a good story and a good storyteller. In the right hands, you don’t care about the supposed truth of the tale because you just want to be entertained. Sure, you don’t want to be lied to, but if the author makes no claims about accuracy, then all that matters is whether or not you enjoyed the book.

And that’s why Eve’s Hollywood is a remarkable artistic achievement. One of the “it girls” of midcentury Los Angeles, Eve Babitz provides a rollicking set of reflections on her early life before she started dating Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, and more. Published by New York Review of Books, it’s a sprawling collection of essays, short fiction, musings, and remembrances that feel like half-tossed memories while also possessing electric energy. Her prose is unrefined yet unbelievably authentic, as she delivers a nigh-unstoppable string of stinging zingers that had me cackling in my living room.

She discusses adolescent hormones with a pointed precision that I found magnificent and realistic. Imagine Happy Days free of its saccharine naivete or American Graffiti taken to its logical narrative endpoints – but from the perspective of a whip-smart woman born to two artists. Babitz describes herself, her family, her friends, her school, and her native Los Angeles with an unfettered glee that reminds me of a truly unbridled diary. She exults in being catty and petty, while somehow never pointing fingers, naming names, or divulging details. It’s the opposite of a gossip blog or tell-all memoir in that she tells her side of the story without dipping into obsequious drama.

The story is what matters, and Babitz knows it. By the end of the book, I realized that the entire thing somehow spanned the gamut from exacting biography to the purest of fictions, and that made me love it even more. She has a particular capacity for cutting remarks and dizzying turns of phrase, and her talents leap off the page from the opening triptych of “Dear Reader,” “Dedication,” and “Daughters of the Wasteland.” Moreover, her love for Los Angeles – its people, cultures, institutions, highways, byways, weather, and more – serve as the main character, including brilliant pieces about high school, the beach, the buses, her classmates, her post-graduation travels, and the perfect taquito.

If you’ve ever seen words like “ingenue” or “muse” applied to Eve Babitz, such descriptions denigrate her abilities, insult her talents, and remove her agency. She might have bandied about with famous people for her entire life, but she possessed personality and skills that rivaled or superseded those of her contemporaries.