Babitz’s winking embrace of clichés provides ideal cover for an intellect suffering no fools ... Babitz may sneak up on readers who are unfamiliar with her work. Fans of her books, like Slow Days, Fast Company, will find a trove of delights here ... This collection ought to cement her place among contemporaries like Joan Didion, an early champion of her work, and Pauline Kael, of whom Babitz was a fan ... Babitz declares, 'I have never liked perfect things, they give me the creeps.' Still, this collection comes close.

... we are lucky enough to have more of Babitz’s writing to read ... Babitz is at home anywhere, and everywhere she goes she finds the most interesting person, the weirdest place, the funniest throwaway detail. She makes writing seem effortless and fun, which any writer can tell you is the hardest trick of all ... this collection shows Babitz to have been insanely prolific while also attending every good party in the LA hills and many long nights at the Chateau Marmont. The parties are part of her process, just like those long drives to the beach she recommends ... gossip is part of her reporting style, because so much of gossip is news that powerful men don’t want made public; it reveals them as silly, or petty, or cruel. Babitz can’t help but make important men look as silly as they really are. But she isn’t gratuitously cruel. Just as she doesn’t shy away from recording men at their most ridiculous, she doesn’t shy away from objectifying beautiful men (and she does it so much better than anyone else). She’s nobody’s sycophant, and that commands a certain kind of respect from her subjects, who’ve grown used to being sucked up to ... Babitz writes like someone who lives life to its limits ... To read Eve Babitz is to feel like her passenger, cruising down long Hollywood streets through a painted-backdrop sunset toward eternal waves.

Such is the paradox of Eve Babitz: When she’s not gossiping, bragging, or showering on praise worthy of a press release, she’s issuing unrepentant verdicts on widely beloved icons ... Babitz embraces an unself-conscious high-is-low/low-is-high perspective that places her well ahead of her time ... I Used to Be Charming might offer an uneven ride, swinging from thoughtful pop-culture analysis to extended bouts of name-dropping to frothy musings about which types of man legs are the sexiest, but it’s never the least bit boring. There’s something divine about Babitz’s vision of the world, mixed with some incandescent undercurrent of delusion—sordid, surreal, and alienated from reality ... Every essay lurches as unpredictably as Babitz’s prose, toggling rapidly between sneering and leering. But even when Babitz leers, it’s like the Pope waving through the glass of his Popemobile: her leering conveys a blessing.

Eve Babitz’s talent for description is so otherworldly that she doesn’t even need to describe a perfume’s aroma to convey its essence ... On the page, [Babitz] is consistently self-referential yet never myopic, occupying the marginal space between fiction and nonfiction with panache ... In examining the quotidian moments of the rich and famous with wit and levity, Babitz opens her reader’s minds to simple truths lurking in plain sight. Her choice of topics showcases the ingenuity of her observations. Babitz may embrace pop culture, but she doesn’t forsake the classics, mixing allusions to Colette, Igor Stravinsky and Henry James with Jim Morrison, Rudolph Valentino and Arthur Murray. Flattening the hierarchy between highbrow and lowbrow, Babitz harks back to an earlier tradition of decadence without shame, while asserting that style, entertainment and intelligence are not mutually exclusive ... There’s a freedom in these pieces that sends readers flipping to the end to double-check that, yes, these were crafted as articles destined for newspapers and magazines. Babitz dances freely from what is strictly business to the kind of personal scenes and candid asides that never seem to make it into print nowadays ... her talent for composing humorous work with airy asides makes it easy for the casual reader to dismiss her strength. Despite her near constant name-dropping and appreciation for insider antics, there is sincerity at the core of everything she describes.

... alluring, descriptive prose. That Babitz's work is not more widely read is surprising ... She channels the glamour and enthusiasm of an online influencer, with a slight hint of disaffection that an influencer would blather about on their second channel. Babitz doesn't seem to have a second channel, or a backstage, except for maybe a faux backstage where she admits to things like feeling she could lose a bit of weight. But then she does, she claims, by eating only fruit and endlessly complaining to friends about it over the phone, only to emerge into the alluring LA scene, ten days later and 12 pounds lighter ... Babitz is more than a child of the '60s. She is also '50s glamour and '70s glam, reflecting on the decades with her sharp eye on cultural trends and transformations. A writer's legacy, for good or bad, is that what they have written holds a particular moment in time. In this way, Eve Babitz is always charming. This collection does not preserve her work as a thing of the past but rather invites her influence to contemporary readers and writers alike.

Novelist and journalist Babitz’s one-of-a-kind voice and sharp, observational eye make for a singular, often exhilarating, ride ... despite the title’s implication, Babitz’s writing remains, in fact, charming, as well as funny and insightful, throughout this fabulous collection.

Zesty essays by a sly observer ... The collection includes a charming recollection of posing nude with Marcel Duchamp; sympathetic portraits of actors James Woods, Nicholas Cage, and Billy Baldwin; and a paean to her friend Linda Ronstadt ... A spirited, entertaining collection.