Eve Babitz

A novel about a dreamy young girl moving between the planets of Los Angeles and New York City. We first meet Jacaranda in Los Angeles, a beach bum, part-time painter of surfboards, sun-kissed and beautiful, semi-involved with a married man, glittering among the pretty creatures, blithely drinking Pink Ladies with any number of tycoons, unattached and unworried in the pleasurable mania of California. We follow her as she rises from the mists to the discovery that she's twenty-eight, jobless, with no sense of purpose; that her wild friendships with Gilbert and Max and Etienne might not be as real as they seem. So she pries herself away from this immensely seductive place and moves to New York, to seriousness and work, to meet the agents of her new world.

Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time : a Novel

Sex & Rage

She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?

Jacaranda had once heard that an artist was "any white person over twenty-five without health insurance”

The more someone liked her writing, the fewer clothes she felt she had on. 

She was, after all, a writer and they died earlier than anyone. It was truly simple. 

Besides, everybody knows it’s impossible not to drink in New York. 

And then he was gone and the door closed, but the room was still trembling with unrequited love. 

Sex & Rage quotes

Join the club