 by Eve Babitz)
In 1961, 18-year-old Eve Babitz began a lively, decades-long correspondence with Catch-22 author Joseph Heller. Her introductory letter consisted of just two sentences: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” Even in its brevity, it anticipates the precocious sexuality, wit and irreverence that would characterise the modern classics this “Henry James-loving party girl” would later write – the greatest of which are undoubtedly Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve’s Hollywood, and Sex and Rage.
A much lengthier letter she wrote to Heller in 1977 appears in the new book Too LA: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) – a collection of posthumously discovered, mostly unsent correspondence. In the eyes of the book’s editor, Babitz biographer Lili Anolik, this particular letter – which she dubs a “West Coast Room of One’s Own for the late 20th century” – is a perfect morsel. In it, Babitz unleashes frustrations about her situation as a woman writer, the criticism of her work, sexual politics and fears over the hereditary disease that she rightly suspects will kill her. “I can’t even put my nose to the typewriter unless my creatures slink around in lamé pyjamas. That’s probably my trouble. Even I can see it’s a sign of shallowness. Shit. But what I want to know is, if I tell everyone about my disease, Huntington’s […], and about my grandma dying of cancer next door, and the cat kicking the bucket in my closet and how horrible it is being in love with a man who supposedly prefers men […], then do you think people will like me better?” she asks Heller. “One of the things I’m starting to think about is that ‘serious’ people just don’t think that gossip – the spécialité de ma maison – is ‘serious’,” she continues. “I think that’s because it’s always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick […]. Only how are people like me – women, they’re called – supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the VIP room?”
A hedonistic foil to her more austere Los Angeles contemporary Joan Didion, Babitz presents in her memoiristic prose as a picaresque heroine artfully navigating the high life and low life of Los Angeles’s cultural milieu in the 1960s and 70s. Her charm never falters. But the letters, while uniquely compelling and characteristically arch, read as a more unguarded and less cultivated expression of her life. “Dear friend,” begins one letter to an unidentified lover, “sorry I was such a cunt but I couldn’t resist.” It’s acerbic and beautifully composed – it’s still demonstrably her voice – but more nakedly openhearted, more direct.
Below, we talk with Lili Anolik about the discovery of this never-before-published correspondence, the special allure of the unsent letter as a genre and her own personal memories of Babitz.
Emily Dinsdale: In your introduction, you describe the letter as being the ideal vehicle for Babitz’s style of writing. Can you elaborate on that?
Lili Anolik: Yes, it’s the casualness, the off-the-cuff quality of letter writing. And, because she had no training, letter writing is almost like a workshop. It gave her an audience, and she could see what was working and what wasn’t. But there’s something about Eve where she resists careerism or professionalism as antithetical to art, so the loose and relaxed, low-pressure form of the letter would be so appealing to her.
ED: But I wondered if it also fosters a slight affectation on her part. Her letters suggest a certain off-the-cuff casualness and intimacy, but is her easy style actually carefully honed?
LA: I mean, she really needed to be edited, I can tell you that. Writing letters was almost like foreplay for her. It’s also how she stirred her mind for serious writing. So many of the letters are [her stories from her books] in embryo. It was like a testing ground. I had really wanted to call the book The Real Sex and Rage, because the letters fall into two categories: almost uniformly she’s either trying to seduce somebody or keep a love affair going – the sex – or she’s fucking tearing someone a new one – rage. So it was like a warm-up, stirring her. And of course you know that these letters weren’t sent, or very few, right? So they are also like a diary.
ED: Why is the idea of an unsent letter so beguiling? Maybe more so than a sent letter?
LA: One of my favourite books is The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm. It’s her book about Sylvia Plath, but she talks about the whole genre of the unsent letter. It’s not a discarded letter or a letter you reject as unworthy – it’s a letter you think is so important or revealing you don’t trust the recipient with it, so you’re saving it. You’re basically sending it to posterity or sending it to the future for the proper reader who will understand it. So it’s maybe the most revealing of all documents.
“She was an artist before she was anything else, and this was some of her very best work – she’d want it out there” – Lili Anolik
ED: You mentioned posterity. Someone like David Bowie had a meticulous eye on posterity. He kept everything, knowing it’d be worthy of interest. But what about Babitz? Tell us about why and how she preserved these letters.
LA: I mean, the shock and miracle of those letters surviving … because she lived in crazy chaos and filth. Her mother had packed up the letters and other stuff in boxes and sealed them with a ton of really heavy-duty packing tape. It’s so thick you can’t rip it. And I know how Eve is – by the end, everything in her apartment was destroyed. But because her hands were injured, she just couldn’t get inside these boxes. So that’s really why they’re here. It’s just a stroke of luck.
ED: Tell us what else was in the boxes.
LA: Tons of Chinese takeout menus. And her address books and a journal from the fall of ’69 until late spring of 1970. That was quite a wild time. It opens with the Manson murders. It’s a remarkable document – she’s talking about hanging out at the Troubadour and people making dark jokes about who killed Sharon Tate. They still didn’t know who had done it in the fall, right? We imagine they got Manson so quick, but it wasn’t like that. As a contemporaneous document, it’s a marvel.
ED: Can you tell us about some of your favourite letters you found?
LA: There’s a letter to Joseph Heller that’s my favourite. It’s the best letter in there. It’s just totally knockout; a manifesto – a West Coast Room of One’s Own for the late 20th century. At one point she tells him, “I’m going to get what my father has. I’m the spitting image of my father.” So she always knew she would get Huntington’s disease. By the time I knew Eve, she had Huntington’s but she was a charming person, and her idea of being charming did not involve whining. Anything she regarded as morose or depressing, she wouldn’t cop to. Charm can be a sort of armour. But in these letters, particularly that letter to Heller, she just unloads: her situation as a writer and as an artist; how she felt she was perceived; how she was reviewed and not reviewed; how she was spoken about, not being taken seriously. She gives you her philosophy of what she thinks an artist should be, or how she thinks a woman artist should be. All of it, you get all of it – her speaking very directly about things you thought she either was oblivious to or wouldn’t countenance, you know? [That she] wouldn’t think worthy of speaking about because she didn’t deem it charming.
“I got to know her, but I knew a disintegrated version of her – she was somewhere between alive and dead. When I read the letters, I really felt like I was meeting her” – Lili Anolik
ED: It’s easy to be lulled into thinking of Babitz as an open book – the messy, promiscuous counterpoint to Joan Didion’s prim precision and frigidity. But it’s such a trick – a function of her charm – because she’s actually quite reserved or guarded.
LA: She’s evasive! We talked all the time but there was so much I didn’t know. I mean, she would answer any question, but you had to know the right question to ask. I have this very strong memory of being – do you know the Whole Foods in West Hollywood, on Santa Monica? I was there with her and I was trying to make conversation. I’d had dinner the night before with Bret Easton Ellis. I was trying to keep the conversation going, and I was telling Eve that Bret had gone to school with Quintana [Didion’s late daughter], and that he’d said that Joan was almost like a mother to him. And I just remember her saying to me, “Too many people died on her watch.” It was so striking. I remember blinking in the sunlight and just looking at her, I didn’t even know what to do with it.
Retrospectively, I should have known that there was turmoil around her relationship with Joan just from that one remark. What I’m saying is, she would never say, “Oh, that’s private.” She would never not answer a question, but if you didn’t have the background, she wasn’t going to provide it so you had to know what to ask. It was like being in a fairy tale almost, speaking to a little gnome or something. They know everything you need, but you have to ask right or you won’t find out.
ED: Was there any ambivalence around the idea of publishing these letters? After all, she didn’t send them.
LA: Never. I never even considered the ethics of publishing them versus not publishing them. She was an artist before she was anything else, and this was some of her very best work – she’d want it out there.
Her best book by far is Slow Days, Fast Company, and that’s comedy – there’s an undertone of real melancholy, but it’s light and it’s charming. Whereas in the letters, you get direct expressions of rage, disappointment or pain. I got to know her, but I knew a disintegrated version of her – she was somewhere between alive and dead. When I read the letters, I really felt like I was meeting her.
Too LA: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were) is published by Atlantic Books and is available in the UK from 3 September 2026.