Too L.A.

Eve Babitz was Los Angeles in human form. Goddaughter of the composer Igor Stravinsky, she moved through nearly every midcentury California scene worth naming: the Ferus Gallery artists building a distinctly West Coast art, the rock bands of the 1960s and '70s that defined their genres, and the mix of writers and Hollywood figures who gathered around Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Between the parties, the drugs and the love affairs, she wrote books including Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. They sold modestly at first, but readers in the twenty-first century have embraced them as the last word in literary cool.

Babitz thought letters were the kind of writing she did best, and she described them as practically a diary. She rarely mailed them. The ones collected here were written to friends such as Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha and Steve Martin, and they are frank, funny, quick and sharply observant. Other names that turn up include Joan Didion, Anne Rice and more.

These unsent pages amount to a second body of work, and it might have been lost entirely. After Babitz died, her sister Mirandi found the letters in plain file boxes that had been taped shut decades earlier. Lili Anolik, Babitz's biographer, has now brought them into print and added commentary that is informative and irreverent, walking the reader through the long, uproarious party that Anolik treats as Babitz's true masterpiece.