I Used to Be Charming

The Rest of Eve Babitz

By: Eve Babitz, Sara Kramer - Editor, Molly Lambert - introduction

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.

Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.

All previously uncollected, these pieces range from sharp personal essays on body image and the male gaze to playful meditations on everything from ballroom dancing to kissing to perfume. There are breathtaking celebrity profiles, too. In one, Nicholas Cage takes her for a ride in his ’67 Stingray and in another she dishes about dragging Jim Morrison to bed before the Doors had even settled on a band name (“Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him,” she writes). In another essay, the author ponders her earliest days in the spotlight, posing nude with Marcel Duchamp, and in another, the never-before-published title essay, she writes about the tragic accident that compelled her to leave that spotlight behind forever.

©2019 Eve Babitz (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Introduction © 2019 by Molly Lambert.

Narrator Destroys Narrative

The self-congratulatory, wry tone of this performer’s voice is unnecessary and wrecks the writer’s writing voice. This narrator also knows nothing of the place or the time and thus makes mistakes when speaking the names of areas and products. If I could see, I would have read the book but I can’t and I wanted to know the content of these Babitz pieces so I endured.

Only Thing Wrong - the Narrator

Some of the most popular narrators on Audible.com can really blow it when reading personal essays. The author, Eve Babitz, has a wry wit and off-hand way of describing perverse events in her life. The narrator here reads along, punching up dialogue with stunning tone-deafness. Tolerable at best. I gave up and bought the book to read.

A Snicker Salad

I enjoyed remembering roller skates, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a first encounter with little green capers, shopping at Ralph’s and other stuff circa 1976. And the author’s brush with death is stunning - though oddly treated like nothing more than a brief chapter in a book rather than a serious event without long lasting physical and mental consequences. The superficial romp through several decades of popular culture is kind of fun. But I think it’s a shame to meet so many interesting people and find so little of real substance to write about any of them. And I think the breathless rant and rave promotion of the Fioricci label near the last of the book is a good spot to double the playback speed. It struck me as one massive commercial interruption. Babitz and I are roughly the same age. And I spent most of my life in California. It follows, this book rang my bell a few times. And oral presentation captured a bit of suitable snark. Nevertheless, I regret wasting a credit on this one.