Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent

by Eve Babitz, Lili Anolik (contributor)

Pore over the letters of Eve Babitz—queen of the witty, gossipy, and thoroughly engrossing missive.

Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, Steve Martin, and many others appear in this first-of-its-kind collection.

Letter-writing was the kind of writing Babitz did best. Her missives—fresh and frank, dashing and droll—are irresistible, as highly spirited as they are acutely perceptive. Take, for example, this letter to a friend in 1979:

“I wrote this letter to Leo Lerman, that editor at Vogue who took me out to lunch at the Algonquin when I was in NY.... So I told him how I’d moved to Santa Monica, and what it was like, and the skating and the Rodeo Drive-type stores. And he published the thing as is, or was (it was slightly edited). Now it’s appearing on every newsstand. And since it’s the kind of writing I do best—letters—people are dropping dead all over the place over how wonderful I am.”

People will drop dead all over the place when they get a load of this collection featuring letters to or from some of Babitz' most famous friends, lovers, artistic idols and rivals, like Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, and Steve Martin.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Audiobook, Biography Memoir, Literature

428 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 23, 2026

About the author

Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather.

In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”.

Because of her ideas about sexuality, both in writing and life, much of the press over the years has emphasized her various romantic associations with famous men, including singer/poet Jim Morrison, artists (and brothers) Ed Ruscha and Paul Ruscha, and Hopps, amongst others. Babitz appears in Ed Ruscha’s artist book Five 1965 Girlfriends. Eve Babitz had affairs with comedian/writer Steve Martin, actor Harrison Ford, and writer Dan Wakefield, among others. She has been compared favorably with Edie Sedgwick, the protegee of Andy Warhol at The Factory in New York City.

Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again.

Her articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion.

Babitz died of Huntington's disease at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles on December 17, 2021, at age 78.

Reviews

[makayla]

the worst person you know, also your close personal friend

[Josh]

Wish I could write her a fan letter letting her know how much her writing means to me

[Eliza Stanley]

eve babitz, light of my life sun of my universe muse of all muses!!!! TO ME reading her letters is like if jesus dropped a behind the scenes of the bible

[Nellie Konopka]

I was getting annoyed reading all these letters but now I miss her. She’s my tragic brilliant genius of an idiot!

Lili Anolik as always- added nothing of note except pissing me off which is why I’ll throw this 4 stars instead of 5. Her footnotes were like if your mom tried to make you hold her hand to cross the street when you’re like 15.

[Sophia Eck]

Standout line for me was obviously “If I have a girl, I’m calling her Sophie Sofie.” As a Sophie, in that moment I further knew that she had good taste.

I think the entirety of this collection content wise can be described in words from Babitz herself in regards to her own writing: “Maybe it’s my personality that makes people listen to my stories even though they’re not about anything, [don’t have] any of the old disciplines. Maybe I’m cheating by having glue-on speech patterns and [a] sort of cute delivery. But why can’t my stories be O.K.? I’m not trying to write Oedipus [Rex] or anything. I’m just trying to tell these stories I love and can’t resist. After all, nobody knows about this place or these people.”

It’s her personality that keeps us reading, whether it be her letters, her diaries, her grocery lists, her tea leaves, her lips, etc., though as with Didion, at a certain point in these posthumous releases it begs the question: when should we leave them alone, and when will we?

[Hailey Skinner]

I saw a TikTok that said "RIP Eve Babitz, u would've hated Ozempic," which I appreciated in spirit, but anyone who's read these letters knows Eve would’ve ordered it in bulk, lol.

As an Eve apologist (a necessary title, given her later-in-life turn), having this unfiltered access to her mind was incredible.
That said, I think reading 448 pages worth of anyone’s letters is a test of endurance! Even the most interesting Californian to ever live isn't immune to a few pieces of boring mail.

I really appreciated the added context before each era of Eve's life, and the footnotes were lifesavers. The only problem is that Eve was a real person with a massive social circle, not a fictional character with a limited cast. A single footnote on page 50 wasn't enough to help me remember who someone was when they reappeared 100 pages later.

Also, I’m pouring one out for every "unidentified person" in the footnotes, because it filled me with absolute existential dread to realize those were real human beings with lives just as complex as Eve's (albeit less thrilling), who are now completely forgotten by the world. (At least I have my youth)

[Lili]

LILI ANOLIK YOU PISS ME OFF!!!!! Although I appreciate the footnotes which (sometimes) explain who everyone is, you inserted wayyyyyy too much of your own bias into them. You are the editor, not the co-author. AND you’re constantly shitting on Eve for her bad spelling but there are HELLA TYPOS in your commentary. Embarrassing.

[charlotte karner]

I can’t rate someone’s letters, but a Substack article is coming

[Tosh]

Here are my thoughts on Eve Babitz's "Too L.A." Read them here: https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Kelsea Denney]

I savored this one, in direct opposition to the way I wanted to tear through it. Picked it up in little pieces and reread and reread and reread passages and quotes to myself, and to anyone that would listen. I don't know that Eve and I would've been friends (or even gotten along, truthfully) but I get something about her and her writing the way I feel about Fitzgerald. Her ability to highlight contradictory human behavior that frustrated her, in the same breath as exercising her deepest professions of love— for a man, for a woman, for LA— inspires me deeply. That, and she's hilarious.

For all the Penny Lane, Daisy Jones apologists: read Eve.

[Hannah]

Reading a 400 page book of (largely unsent) letters has the potential to become very boring very fast but I enjoyed this. It’s been nice to slip into Eve’s reality for a bit, which feels so different from my own (school, lol). However, I will say that I find Lili Anolik to be disturbing, and while it didn’t manage to ruin the experience of reading these letters for me, I think that her ‘work’ is offensive to all forms of scholarship out there, and I can’t really understand her motivation for much of what she has chosen to do with her research, or the portrait she’s attempted to forge of Eve and Joan Didion, in particular.

[k]

babitz is maybe the progenitor of a particular annoying internet personal essay affect but as usual is charming and actually talented. the letters can be uneven but some are stunning (her letters to Joe Heller, her re-drafted break-up letters). Lili Anolik as the gatekeeper to all things Babitz is still annoying (and i find presumptuous).

[iva]

življenje ima končno spet smisel

[Jenna]

I can’t believe it’s over. I’ve dragged this out. Will I get anything else from Eve? I’m so sad that I’ve finished. I’ve laughed, been in love, angry, cried. I said I’d read her shopping list so to be able to read her letters and journal has been a gift. However, when I die, my journals cannot see the light of day. Find them, burn the papers but keep the leather journal cover and get inserts to write in it yourself. I’d be dead and embarrassed if they were set free to the public. I’d rather just be dead

[Rafaela Lucioni]

The problem I had with this book is that I had already read “Slow Days, Fast Company”. And, much like reading a Didion book after “The Year of Magical Thinking” (not to be yet another person comparing the two) this just falls short of any expectations.
Eve Babitz is awesome. She embodies the whole essence and mythology of LA (sex, drugs, and rock & roll) and has this conviction that whatever is happening tonight is probably more important than whatever you are supposed to be doing tomorrow.
BUT, in “Slow Days, Fast Company” she could write about a party, a lover, a restaurant, a drive around LA and make it worthy of it being recorded. In “Too LA” she never quite gives me that same feeling nor do I feel the same intimacy. In both books it’s clear that behind the LA extravaganza there’s a woman trying to find herself through her art, her writing, her lovers, her friends, and even her addiction. But in “Slow Days, Fast Company” we get a reflection afterwards - here, we get mail.

[Jenna A.]

The ultimate good time gal.


(Thank you to NYR Books for the ARC <3)

[India]

lili anolik really thinks she’s hot shit huh

[em]

i had fun with this one, slowly filling in the gaps in my knowledge of eve after reading 'slow days, fast company' and lili's 'didion and babitz'.

i think eve is such a character, so her life is inherently interesting, but there wasn't much introspection on eve's part which makes sense since these are (unsent) letters and not diary entries (although there was a whole section of that in the middle and these still did not help me feel what i wanted to feel). at times the constant rotating cast of characters' of eve's life was hard to follow and bogged down my reading a bit.

you can tell lili put a LOT of work into compiling and editing these letters and it's truly a testament to how important she understands these letters to be. if nothing else, it was a great companion piece to lili's other work about eve, but it sadly wasn't my favorite work i've read by/concerning eve. i'll always love her, though. she's the embodiment of la and the ultimateeee IT girl.

"i came, i saw, i ate 2 brownies, i left. - eve"

[kate lagatta]

What makes Eve Babitz work intrinsically as an author is her charm. These letters, scattered across decades, ooze her charm, whether she’s writing to a lover, friend, or fellow creative (often all three). Babitz is delightful. She is witty. She throws joy and rage at the page, writing effortlessly and entirely because her words are a deep reflection of her soul. Babitz is simply great because she never entertained any notion that she was not.

[ella]

If I ever become a well known but slightly obscure writer and you take my group chat texts and print them on paper from gods green earth and sell them for money at least have the decency to not make it FOUR HUNDRED PAGES.

[mia]

some boring many funny some stunning Lots of me nodding and laughing

[Meg McClellan]

There’s something about the summer that always leads me back to Eve Babitz. Dare I say her magnum opus.

[claire]

lili anolik pmo beyond measure but this is fun :D

[Jackie]

Like I finished a good meal, I went for a walk after I finished TOO LA. To gratify Eve's soul, I will equate her letters to enchiladas rancheras from La Esperanza at Olvera Street. I went for a walk because it was greasy, good, and there was much to digest.

Taking on this tome of rambling, charming, angry, hopeful, hilarious, vulnerable letters is opening yourself up to the world that is Eve Babitz. She is intoxicating. There are lots of fast company, lots to keep tabs on. "In every young man's life, there is an Eve Babitz. It is usually Eve." There is so much lore about her life, and idol-worship towards her, but at the end of the day she was also a talented writer and artist. She is like Bob Dylan. You can try to just study her word for word, but odds are you will get hungry for more, and start googling for photos, stories, podcasts about this legend. Her image and her life were tied up in her work. I think it's interesting that Mirandi, Eve's sister, went on to become a psychotherapist, because I think Eve also chose a career path of people-study in her own way. She loved people so much, and I think she understood herself best through her relationships.

Her letters tell many gossipy stories within themselves but also tell a larger, inadvertent story of Eve that is strewn across time. A good one was Eve's journey from: "How I ever talked anyone into the idea that I was a writer is one of the minor hoaxes of our times," to Eve's understanding of her genre as "spurts," and knowing herself accurately as a "gossip storyteller who likes LA rather than hates it," and knowing what she wrote well "my memoirs, and little stories and things." Of course her money troubles prevailed and her self-doubt caused her to frequently throw around a fantasy of moving to Phoenix, and then Pismo, and becoming a waitress. But this is Eve Babitz, in TOO LA. This is as open as Eve ever got, inside of letters that maybe became a bit too vulnerable to be sent. Or maybe she didn't have a postage stamp.

Thank you Lili Anolik for discovering Eve Babitz. I'm jealous it wasn't me (and I think many people are) but I'm grateful the world has Eve Babitz "under the B's at the library" and that the last copies of her books weren't fed into the AI machine and shredded into mortality.

Lastly, can I become an Eve Babitz scholar?

Gems:
"I miss you-- I wish you'd appear in real life instead of in my head like a suitcase."

"The only people I can talk to at all these days are strangers and true friends. All the in-betweens make me feel like I'm wasting my time."

"I can never go anyplace, walk down any street, do anything alone without some man trying to infringe on my consciousness. They honk horns, say obscene things on the streets, create down my neck in movies, say things in the laundromat. At first I would walk by, "ignoring" them. Now I say "Fuck you, you stupid pig, get the fuck out of my way and shut up!" I figure if they're going to break in on my train of thought, I'm going to bust their [faces.] I'm thinking of taking up karate. It's not fair and I won't [stand for it.]"

"Como esta from the eye of the beholder? (That's my latest discovery--Hollywood is in the eye of the beholder.)”

"I have money now, so the things that used to go through my head all the time when I was around millionaires (like--why don't they give me half?) is gone, and it's really simple."

"Dear Jury Department, I am self-employed which means that I am the only one who can do what I do: [be] a freelance journalist and book writer."

[Becca Malkin]

Editor Lili Anolik (who published Eve’s letters posthumously, of course) is someone with whom I have one-sided beef and cannot stand — morally, as a writer, and ‘some secret third thing’ (to be determined) — but I simply cannot get enough of Eve. My spiritual connection to her feels electric now that I live a few doors down from her childhood home in Hollywood (our street name, she references in a few essays much to my giddy fangirl delight). As long as I don’t have to read Lili’s own writing (think Didion & Babitz) which is riddled with weirdo parasocial opinions and conspiracy theories that she pawns off as truth… I’m down. Before I dive in, my forewarning for potential readers: Take notes. I seriously wish I had created a map of names because this lengthy compilation became a nearly untamable puzzle of countless parties. While Anolik’s footnotes were aplenty, they were not helpful in this regard. The web grew complex.

But I digress… the letters themselves range from juicy gossip to diaristic logs of love, sex, ambition, failure, success, despair, insecurity, and vanity. You become privy to her profound innermost thoughts and her most frivolous ramblings… but most interesting of all, some letters serve as blueprints for her most beloved essays and novels. Only this time, the names aren’t aliases. We revere Eve for her unfiltered, unabashed, passionate, and romanticized insider stories of 60s-70s LA literary, modern art, and rock-n-roll scenes. The letters lend a behind the scenes look at the stories we know and love, and accentuate her already relished authenticity.

The allure of this collection?: Witnessing Eve hone her unique voice/writing over the decades; confronting her honest, often brutal but always entertaining opinions/judgments of nearly everything and everyone; and guiltily stealing an “I shouldn’t be here…” look at her moments of severe humility and low lows, rivaled by her infectious outbursts of untapped confidence with the ambition and talent to match. The collection is overall a joy to read and I highly recommend it to those who cannot get enough of Eve. However, it could have been cut down by at least a third (though we all know obsessee Lili Anolik could never….)

P.S. I’m inspired by Eve’s self-professed horrible spelling, lack of professional training or education, and ability to string words together with reckless abandon for syntax, diction, and sometimes, sense. She speaks a language entirely her own — not quite lyrical, definitely whimsical, and undoubtedly iconic. This, I feel, is my grand takeaway from the letters, as inspiration to a budding writer developing their voice: To thine own self be true, or whatever bullshit those sanctimonious artists try to shove down your throat when you just want to make something beautiful and be noticed for something other than your breasts or legs. (This last sentence lovingly attempted to be written in the style of Eve Babitz, though none could ever compare.)

[Babs Ray]

While I loved this book, it did feel like getting a peak at your hero’s morning routine, and not in a good way. Hey, she’s human. Sure. The day-to-day Eve, though. Maybe I prefer my heroes on a pedestal. I love Eve’s writing for its poetry and alchemy in a phrase, and I wanted, selfishly, to see more of that on the page. Instead, the letters became a cheat-sheet for naming names in her books. That said, sparks of that poetry did emerge, like this:

“When you come I shall take you to the seashore in a ratty bar on the Santa Monica Pier. It is a thrilling adventure to drink on that pier. There’s a merry-go-round right next door, and the sun does its best to entertain one, setting in a burst of cornball, calendar-art delight. And we shall drink something to do with temporary insanity like a Kahlua whip.”

Or this:

“See I can’t even put my nose to the typewriter unless my creatures slink around in platinum lamé pajamas.”

Her despair at slights and lovers is movie quality. I can only imagine the actual fights she had with people, since the self-edited version in the letters still reeks of anger. And her bewilderment at not being taken seriously as an artist is so raw. “They take one look at my tits and think I’ve got it made and am shallow and don’t know what’s what and about characterization. I am the character.” (She was writing auto-fiction before it became a word.)

In the end, to see her wither alone was too tragic. Her overboogie coupled with the tell-all books left her alone, marked down, moved to the discount rack, remaindered. What about her made everyone discard her? Was she just too much? Was she too too?

[Glen Helfand]

For those of us who grew up in LA when it was still viewed as a backwater, before its art scene took on a world class sheen, Eve Babitz captured it's bohemian glamour. She traversed ex-pat Hollywood through lineage, sex, drugs, rock and roll-- and literature. It's been exciting to see the rediscovery of her work, as those of us who knew her work back when were aware of her appeal. So the posthumous publication of her letters comes as a gift. It's a generous tome, and fascinating in how it illuminates someone who engaged in a form of autofiction to present herself unmasked. Babitz admits that letters are what she was best at (and notable that many of these letters were never sent), and the book reveals the material at its source. She comes across as precocious, fun-loving, ambitious, wacky, weight-conscious, and sometimes a little unhinged. It's amazing to read of her interactions with such famous folks, and how many of them she slept with. The annotations, by Babitz champion Lili Anolik, are well-researched but doled out more conversationally. They provide an engaging context that also points to the pleasures of scholarship, you can picture Anolik actively poring through this cache of letters which were discovered after the writer had passed. While it may be a little too much material, you can never be too LA. Babitz just is.

[Becky Christina]

Eve is more fun than most, more honest than all, and as terrible as you.
Technically a collection of letters, this reads like all the best bits of a journal. Expect a fascinating time capsule that reveals the universal in the particular.

🥃Pairs well with tequila and taquitos

🎙️The intimacy and diary-esque nature of the [sent and unsent] letters is beautifully captured in Rachel Yong’s narration. Her tone captures the mood of each letter, and changes in drafts. Narration is enjoyable, clear, and well paced.
I appreciated the light editing touch by Lili Anolik, and was pleasantly surprised by how the footnotes were presented on audio. Miraculously, they were never confusing and only inserted to offer clarification and occasionally light context.

I think this would be a really interesting collection to read in conversation with Lena Dunham’s ‘Famesick’.

With thanks to Tantor Media for the gifted ALC via NetGalley in exchange for providing an honest review.

[kimberly]

Too L.A. let's readers in closer to Eve Babitz than they have ever been before; more, even, than her intimate recounts published in her essays. It's the Eve we have come to know and love—witty, biting, fierce, not always likable but always honest. Reading through these letters was like reading a letter from your closest friend and what a joy it was. Similar to the rest of Babitz' work, this collection is a love letter to Los Angeles, to womanhood, and to the messy bits of a life well lived.

Thank you to NYRB, to whom I owe my first born child, for an early copy of this book ❤️‍🔥 Out June 23rd

[olivia]

3.75/5: it’s hard to rate someone’s (mostly) unsent letters. the love i have for this compilation is linked to my love of eve. letters are so personal and at time of writing, not meant for thousands of adoring, private eyes. these letter are quintessentially eve and offer a glimpse into midcentury los angeles life. though i consumed this book via audiobook, and therefore could not account for eve’s spelling errors or keep track of the rotating characters in the book’s marginalia, i found it an enjoyable listening experience (even if i did have to rewind 15 seconds at time to catch something, which i don’t often do).

thank you netgalley for my ARC!