Slow Days, Fast Company

Few figures embodied the allure and excess of Los Angeles quite like Eve Babitz, whose beauty, charisma, and unapologetic appetite for life made her a magnetic presence in the city’s cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Surrounded by artists, actors, and socialites, she seemed to captivate everyone, except, perhaps, the one man who inspired her to do what she did best: write.

Slow Days, Fast Company moves far beyond its flirtatious premise, offering a lush, sun-drenched portrait of a vanished Southern California. Across a series of sharply observed sketches, Babitz captures a world of restless glamour: film stars uneasy with their own fame, partygoers disappearing into days-long excess at the Chateau Marmont, television actors anxiously awaiting their fictional fates, and unforgettable women who rival Babitz herself in intrigue.

Her gaze occasionally drifts beyond Los Angeles, to the polished quiet of Orange County suburbia, the laboring fields of the Central Valley, and the desert haze of Palm Springs, where romance falters and solace is found in literature.