Last week, I cried outside a Venice restaurant when Martha texted me the news: Eve Babitz was gone. The tears fell quickly, a cathartic, pure kind of weeping I’ve mastered lately. It wasn’t a shock; she never seemed to recover from the 1997 incident. There was a dress. It caught fire, movie stars came to save the day. She’s always been a pill and booze kind of gal; we were lucky to have her as long as we did. Eve had all the restraint of a forest fire; you never expect those kinds of people to live to a hundred. But when I received an identical text (Martha’s much more online than I am) thirty minutes ago, I couldn’t cry.
Not that it’s much consolation but I bought and will read a Joan Didion book I’ve never read after reading this article. Thank you.