I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz

by Eve Babitz and Molly Lambert

Molly Lambert (Introduction) and Sara Kramer (Editor)

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Book cover for I Used to Be Charming

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Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.

With Eve’s Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Francis Ford Coppola’s short-lived City. Whether profiling Hollywood darlings, getting to the bottom of health crazes like yoga and acupuncture, remembering friends and lovers from her days hobnobbing with rock stars at the Troubadour and art stars at the Ferus Gallery, or writing about her beloved, misunderstood hometown, Los Angeles, Babitz approaches every assignment with an energy and verve that is all her own.

I Used to Be Charming gathers nearly fifty pieces written between 1975 and 1997, including the full text of Babitz’s wry book-length investigation into the pioneering lifestyle brand Fiorucci. The title essay, published here for the first time, recounts the accident that came close to killing her in 1996; it reveals an uncharacteristically vulnerable yet never less than utterly charming Babitz.
  • ISBN10 1681373793
  • ISBN13 9781681373799
  • Publish Date 8 October 2019
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher The New York Review of Books, Inc
  • Imprint NYRB Classics