During these sections, Anolik writes with great insight and restraint. At times, it reads like an annotated oral history ... At other times, Anolik's interventions are vital and clarifying ... Much of what makes the book wonderful in its first half, unfortunately, falls away when the focus is on the more recent years of Babitz's life — she's now 75 — especially in the period where Anolik knows her personally ... Anolik's biography, as a whole, is much more its successes than it is its failures. Down the road, Babitz's readers will surely be treated to a biography of her from a more disinterested party. Until then, they — and anyone interested in Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s — will be more than nourished by Hollywood's Eve.

Anolik now presents the full jaw-dropping drama of Babitz’s on-the-edge life and complicated personality, paired with an account of Anolik’s pursuit of her wily subject. With the recent reissue of Babitz’s books, this radical American writer of stunning verve, candor, and insight is truly a phoenix rising.

Much of the breezily salacious entertainment value in Hollywood’s Eve comes from these descriptions of close encounters with men of Hollywood legend (and women—photographer Annie Leibovitz was a girlfriend for some time). But like Babitz herself, they are only part of what makes the story so compelling ... Nearly any good biography about a writer makes the reader far more curious to skip the secondhand accounts and read the subject’s original prose. In painting a rich and unusual picture of Babitz’s life and work, Anolik succeeds in this mission ... As biographer, Anolik is an unflinching and often excellent writer capable of capturing the strange mystique of her elusive prey, even detailing her own lengthy and frustrating process of cajoling the now-reclusive writer from her darkened apartment via promises of free meals and delivered sweets ... Some passages may pull the modern reader up short, and with good reason. Anolik largely refuses to pass judgment on the sometimes horrifying men of this narrative and their behavior, instead following her subject’s lead when recounting certain abusive incidents ... And now the woman herself will endure as well, in a biography that celebrates her with equally contradictory affection.

When did 'logic' and 'facts' and 'firsthand accounts' get such a bad rap? (Did I miss a memo?) Anolik makes a show of tossing her car’s steering wheel out the window at the first turn. The resulting book is good and bad in almost equal measure. It’s good because Anolik has an instinctive grasp of why Babitz mattered as a writer and because, despite her apparent protestations to the contrary, she’s done her homework. Hollywood’s Eve fills in many of the gaps in our knowledge of Babitz’s life and work. It’s bad because it’s so breezily written, as if willing itself to become a work of what used to be called the New Journalism ... Reading it, you feel you’re taking part in three conversations, two on call-waiting ... Anolik sometimes verges on condescending to Babitz ... But she’s a sensitive reader of her work and owns a sly wit ... Anolik’s book succeeds in its primary mission: It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz.

And like any good, realistic love story, Hollywood’s Eve is complicated, inspiring both elation and outrage, intellectual camaraderie and bitter disagreement. Anolik’s years of research, recorded interviews, and passionate reading and rereading of Babitz’s work give the book its heft, but it’s her overt subjectivity — her uncompromising affection for her subject — that makes Hollywood’s Eve sing ... We come to know [Anolik] through her analysis, and her asides and opinions work to create a conspiratorial bond with her reader. Though heavy authorial intrusion is normally aggravating, here it is both endearing and an apt stylistic homage to Babitz’s own voice and writing style ... However, when Anolik turns on Joan Didion, she loses me... Pages are spent criticizing Didion’s 'dismal view' ... Like the best of Babitz’s own writing, Anolik’s biography shows us Eve in her raw entirety.

Anolik chooses to mythologize Babitz as Babitz mythologizes herself, writing more as a disciple than as a journalist ... Anolik falls at times into a pseudo-emulation of the lyrical and discursive—diverting, even—aspects of Babitz’s prose ... Anolik calls her book a 'love story' about Babitz. There is no pretense of objectivity ... Embraced fully, this sort of biography—a send-up of the absurdity and impossibility of biography itself—is genre of its own. But Anolik verges on idolatry: She even puts off reading Babitz’s Jim Morrison piece lest she find out that she disagrees with her beloved subject. The pitfall here is that though Anolik fills in lively background and context, a more compelling narrative emerges from Babitz’s own memoiristic writing. Anolik too frequently gets waylaid thinking about her own role as Babitz’s interlocutor, and in Babitz’s resurgence ... Anolik’s book includes a lengthy discussion of Babitz versus Joan Didion, a rambling comparison that is only instructive in how it elucidates the frequently tenuous position that Babitz occupied as a writer ... Anolik expresses her odd personal dislike of Didion—her 'homicidal designs' against her own personality and her 'cynical' and 'silly, shallow' novel—because she wants to canonize Babitz as Didion’s replacement.

... a bumptious book-length profile ... This grandiose style works well—or can work well—for a text in the five-thousand-word range; it exhausts and exasperates when deployed in a book close to three hundred pages (I was depleted after the first paragraph). It is also jarringly at odds with that of the writer being lionized ... This straightforward reporting arrives as balm, both dishy insight into Eve’s rarefied circles and a welcome respite from Anolik’s excitable neo–New Journalist tics ... [In one passage, Anolik] is narrow-minded, condescending, and sanctimonious.

Hollywood’s Eve is only partially a biography of a fascinating and unusual subject; it is a reflection on why the author finds Babitz so interesting that she wanted to spend several years writing a book about her—sort of like a self-conscious New Journalistic exploration into the era of self-conscious New Journalism. But at the heart of this book beats the hard, strong pulse of Babitz’s life and prose, one funny, erratic and unabashed sentence after another. It still rewards a good listen. So do it. Go listen.

...[a] blushlessly adoring paean ... Anolik is at her best when sending herself up as she attempts to barter free lunches for spicy revelations, with Babitz munching speechlessly on until a nod indicates her wish to be driven home ... Witty and self-parodying though Babitz is as a writer, Anolik does her no favours with comparisons to Proust (and, yes, Colette) or by denigrating every other writer on LA — from Didion to Nathanael West — in an effort to enshrine her heroine ... Still, Hollywood’s Eve offers a perversely enjoyable introduction to a stylish writer and a West Coast way of life that should have ended — but didn’t — that ominous night in 1969, when Charles Manson’s acolytes broke into a secluded mansion on Cielo Drive and slaughtered the inhabitants.

Reading Eve’s Hollywood is like going on a bender with your smartest, sexiest friend and listening to her dish nonstop until you both collapse into glittering, gleeful exhaustion ... But readers looking for new revelations about Babitz’s famously fractious life will have to wait ... too much of the [book] is padding, some of it written in a style that embarrassingly apes Babitz’s. Anolik skims over Babitz’s post-9/11 turn to conservatism and seems oddly uncritical of the ’70s groupie culture that normalized relationships between older men and teenage girls. Babitz’s rape as an 18-year-old gets only a fleeting mention. Yet the sections on Babitz’s younger sister, Mirandi, are surprisingly compelling, with Mirandi—prettier and sweeter-natured than Eve but also prone to her addictive demons—providing a different, often darker, perspective on her older sister. But ultimately, the only writer who could do justice to this brilliant, unruly life story is Babitz herself.

Anolik has now written a smart, fast-paced meditation on Babitz in Hollywood’s Eve ... Anolik’s own writing is jazzy and insightful, and her quest to find Babitz—both physically and psychologically—is an integral part of the book.

Ms. Anolik retailed all these details with aplomb in her original Vanity Fair profile, showing an aptitude for witty compression. But the expansion of her article into book length shows some strain ... While her emotionalism is often touching, there are too many moments when Ms. Anolik’s ardor for her subject overwhelms and distracts from the narrative.

Anolik admiringly looks at Babitz’s life, even while revealing careless accidents, such as incurring third-degree burns trying to light a cigar while driving. Perfect for fans of Hollywood in its glory years, this is a biography energetically told.

Hero worship meets compelling biography ... as with any dishy tale, there are times when the narrative gets caught in its own name-dropping cyclone and feels just as shallow as some of the stars it portrays. Fortunately, the author counters this problem with a poignant rendering of Babitz’s tragedy: a freak fire that destroyed her once-renowned beauty—but not her chutzpah ... Come for the LA intrigue; stay for the surprising moral of the story.