The six delightful stories, told from six different perspectives, take Eve from that cross-country train trip to just before the snapping of that celebrity photograph. And to the Tartuffo con panna on the via Buffalo or the Piazza Navona where you think at last you're getting enough chocolate. The book she’s referring to, her first, Eve’s Hollywood, was originally published in 1974, when she was in her 30s. Eve, I think, always knew we were in a Greek myth, only in her view, Hades wasn’t a place to which she’d been forcibly consigned, but voluntarily retreated.

I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. Eve's Hollywood*—her first book, originally published in the 70s and to be reissued next month from New York Review Books Classics—was billed as a "novel" but is clearly a memoir, and her voice on the page is no less mesmerizing than her presence in a room. Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink.Here’s the story I’d been telling myself: Eve and I were in a romance—not a physical one, obviously, but of the minds—a far-fetched flirtation, a screwball comedy for bookworms. Culturally, LA has always been a humid jungle alive with seething LA projects that I guess people from other places can’t see. On top of the stack that Miss Ross was straightening at that very moment was a motion to dismiss—which had presumably begun its journey as a tree.

She became so addicted to cocaine that in the early 1980s a friend would remember her apartment floor covered in blood and Kleenex. Breaking his silence four decades after ghostwriting the book, Wayne Lawson sets the record straight about who did what to whom. I could smell what was inside, though, and it was the same smell I smelled in the cab, except much, much stronger—a stench, really—of filth, of decay, of squalor, and it hit me like a physical blow. Eve was trying to get back at her boyfriend, Walter Hopps, who’d scored a curatorial coup when Duchamp consented to a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, where Hopps was director.

She’s on her way home to Chicago but at the last minute decides to stay on the train and continue on to Hollywood and another adventure begins. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. Mirandi and Laurie were also there, only in the case of Laurie, not yet—traffic; and in the case of Mirandi, yet, but not at that particular second—bathroom. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives.