WHEN EVE BABITZ WAS A YOUNG LOS ANGELES socialite, dropping LSD with Yoko Ono at a party thrown by Andy Warhol, writing for Rolling Stone, sleeping with Jim Morrison and, once, playing chess in the nude across from Marcel Duchamp, she was sure she would die before 30. For Babitz, the point of life was to fill it with as much pleasure as possible. “Death, to me, has always been the last word in people having fun without you,” she wrote in her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, a collection of short stories published in 1974. Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A. (1977) and Sex and Rage (1979) followed.
After the intoxication of the ’60s and ’70s came the sobriety of the ’80s and ’90s, and Babitz,…
