Black Swans: Stories

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as dispensed as Babitz's people try to be, they never are far from their fears and insecurities--and her wisecracking, ain't-it-the-truth-honey voice is just about perfect in illuminating the fact. Every now and then you come across a story that makes you evaluate your own life and I think that's what makes for excellent art.

Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L. 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. The object should create a strong reaction in the character, strong enough to change the course of their trajectory within the scene you have placed them in and act as a conduit to reveal something meaningful to both the protagonist and the reader.

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. Originally published in 1993, Babitz’s story collection Black Swans is arguably her best work for its matured narrative voice.

Yet as dispensed as Babitz's people try to be, they never are far from their fears and insecurities—and her wisecracking, ain't-it-the-truth-honey voice is just about perfect in illuminating the fact. This April, Counterpoint Press released Black Swans (1993), a wistful collection of nine autobiographical tales from the 1980s and ’90s. I love that it’s almost the opposite of SEX AND RAGE as it’s a more mellow and sober Eve, but still captures her amazing effervescent, humorous, and intensely personal style. If you are struggling for inspiration try developing a story combining a character from one of your story ideas with a predicament or setting from another. Her takes on conspicuous consumption, marriage for money, self-enchanted stars, and so on are somehow both lacerating and indulgent, which I guess rather suits such topics.

But Coco “was trying desperately to fix herself in a setting where she wasn’t the worst one,” and Babitz notes that, for Angelenos, “it’s very difficult to find a milieu where people in their forties can feel like everyone else is worse than they are. Babitz is an acquired taste: her slewing style, bad-girl postures, and sad-funny takes on hedonism can be deliciously shocking. A., but it really takes one to know one, and Babitz, (the wise Hollywood High grad), is sly, wry and sometimes surprisingly vulnerable. Whatever my personality might be, I had no idea, and as far as I was concerned, if I wasn’t on Ritalin at least, my reply to the world was ‘no one is home. is an acquired taste: her slewing style, bad-girl postures, and sad-funny takes on hedonism can be deliciously shocking but don't always blend-up right .