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.
________________________________
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.
