Lili Anolik on Eve Babitz, LA, and the Myth of Objectivity in Biography
This Week from the Big Table Podcast
Big Table is a half-hour arts program/podcast, an exploration of art and culture as told through interviews with authors and artists, conducted and curated by writer, editor, and publisher J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors.
Lili Anolik, whose 2014 Vanity Fair profile of the reclusive writer jump-started the Eve Babitz revival, discusses her biography, Hollywood’s Eve (Scribner), and—as its subtitle suggests—“the Secret History of LA.”
From the episode:
Lili Anolik: I have a problem with objectivity. I always think it’s a pose. Why would I be moved to spend five or six years of my life on a subject that I was neutral about? With this book, I clocked my subjectivity from the start. Cold-eyed subjectivity is what you need to write a good book. I’m extremely tough on Eve. The fact that I love her doesn’t mean I’m going to be soft on her.
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A co-production between Hat & Beard, Dublab, and Gold-Diggers in Los Angeles, Big Table is dedicated to the interviewing style and enduring memory of Studs Terkel, the Chicago oral historian, actor, activist, TV pioneer, and long-time radio host and author. You can learn more about Studs’ work here. Big Table is the first digital initiative of Invisible Republic, a nonprofit arts organization working in coordination with Future Roots, Inc.
Big Table
Big Table is a half-hour podcast about books and conversation told through interviews with authors conducted and curated by writer, editor, publisher and historian J.C. Gabel and a small cast of contributors, including Ray Bradbury biographer and scholar Sam Weller, London-based producer and creative director Dermot McPartland, and biographer, journalist, and punk professor Vivien Goldman. Editing by J.C. Gabel and Matteah Baim. Sound design by Matteah Baim. Engineering by Jacob Ross. Produced by Invisible Republic, Hat & Beard Press, Dub Lab and Golddiggers.
