After reading Eve Babitz’s semi-autobiographical novel Eve’s Hollywood last year, I wrote:

I’m glad her books are being reprinted. I’m looking forward to reading her second novel, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A., and a collection of her journalism, I Used To Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz. There are much worse ways a person could spend their time.

Slow Days, Fast Company, like her first novel, is a series of vignettes written in the first-person. “Eve” visits Bakersfield, Palm Springs and Laguna Beach. She is taken to a Dodgers game. She writes about Los Angeles when it’s windy and when it’s rainy. She hangs out with friends and lovers, none of whom are as interesting as “Eve” says they are.

The impression I got was that Eve or “Eve” exaggerates a lot. If Babitz used elements from her life, I bet she made them sound more glamorous or exciting than they were. If she made things up, she laid on too much glamour and excitement.

Slow Days was first published in 1977. This is from the back cover of the 2016 paperback edition:

Slow Days, Fast Compay is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California…. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind-swept sketches, [Babitz] seduces us.

I Used To Be Charming, the collection of her journalism, might be better than Slow Days, but I bet she exaggerated there too. This time around, Eve failed to seduce.