Black Swans: Stories

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Breaking up over the phone after a hot-shot editor chooses her piece over her established boyfriend’s, his parting shot is painfully juvenile: “Why couldn’t you have gotten into Mademoiselle?

Still, it is hard not to fall for Los Angeles through Babitz’s eyes: even the hot and heavy fling of a lifetime has its ups and downs.By then, Babitz's tidal pull--sumptuous prose organized into vignettes of hedonism without the weight of moral consequence--had lassoed the attention of bookish women, and, seemingly, everyone else too . Her illustrations have graced the covers of albums for the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt and she has written many pieces of fiction and non fiction, including pieces in Esquire. Here, though, as the narrator of these nine story/essays approaches middle-age--after all the drugs, booze, groupie sex, and wild passionate flings--the sense of brakes applied turns Babitz's voice sage as well as outrageous.

Everything is fine and everyone is supposed to be happy if HE cheats, but if SHE does it she is a hoe! Taken aback by the court’s loose definitions of what constituted “undue force,” Babitz muses on the ways in which her generation dropped the ball. Here, though, as the narrator of these nine story/essays approaches middle-age-after all the drugs, booze, groupie sex, and wild passionate flings-the sense of brakes applied turns Babitz's voice sage as well as outrageous.According to Babitz's sister, "When I told Eve that The Huntington was very interested in her archive, she said, 'I would love to be with Blue Boy and Pinkie again, like when we were kids. Didion’s Los Angeles is filled with pestilence — freeways that inspire nervous breakdowns, raging fires, the moan of the Santa Anas setting everyone on murderous edge — whereas Babitz presents a lush, playful landscape full of movie stars and intellectual European émigrés, a city where the party never seems to end. If anything her abilities only sharpened, her ways of linking certain self-obsessions with the wider world growing exponentially.