What did L.A.s ultimate party girl say about lust and fame? A peek inside Eve Babitz's private letters in "Too L.A."

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Set us as preferred Last things first: Eve Babitz is a major minor L.A.writer who died five years ago at age 78.

She spent nearly a quarter-century as a recluse, having suffered in 1997 a shocking and disfiguring accident while striking a match to light her Tiparillo.Her thin Indian skirt caught fire searing her panty hose into her flesh, leaving her with third-degree burns over more than half her body.

She never published again, though many championed her gifts, including me.At the time of her misfortune, I was book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

I had long admired her, especially the rollicking and indispensable “Slow Days, Fast Company,” first published in 1977, a charming and insightful series of stories bursting with pluck and sass.I recommended to John Carroll, the then-editor of the paper, that he make her a columnist and urged Babitz to write him directly.

She did, and that letter from October 2000 is the last included in “Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were),” a book of letters expertly edited and chosen by Lili Anolik.Babitz tells Carroll that “what the paper needs is some writers that cause such an uproar, people will have to read it in order to stay abreast of the edge.” Babitz knew what she was talking about.

She’d been living on that edge since she was a teenager at Hollywood High in the late 1950s.Book ReviewToo L.A.: Letters Never Sent But Some Were By Eve Babitz; edited by Lili Anolik New York Review of Books: 448 pages, $19If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The posthumous resurrection of Babitz’s writings is most welcome.Yet there is a risk of overpraising her merits.

She was an unabashed booster of the glossy L.A.that became synonymous with a rising creative elite whose élan and nar...