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Analysis On Eve Babitz
Analysis On Eve Babitz
3.21.2020
Eve Babitz is a writer who would sacrifice meaning-making for pure amusement. In her
writing ethics, fun is imperial; satire is essential; and flippant judgments are there to spice up the
first two. It is common that her swarm of wisecracks and Los Angeles lingo flies around and
dilutes storylines and claims, making them hardly visible, yet the entirety of her essay,
nevertheless, never fails to arouse a trenchant feeling in the readers—It feels like she casted a
spell on her words to make them talk beyond literal limitations. How does she keep her work
from being simply a game of words or a clever gimmick that attracts Americans who just want to
The more I read Babitz, the more I see the answer. After reading her “No Onion,” a
collection of shorter, subtitled passages coalesced under one title, I came to realize a little more
about the driving forces behind her writing. “No Onion” is about American comic books and
magazines, teen romances and kisses, onions and garlic, but most importantly, about the odors
that linger in Eve Babitz’s memories. “They seemed to understand that the consequence of
Archie saying ‘no onions’ would result in an ‘out-of-gas’ car with hearts coming up from the
roof.” (Babitz, 69) Again, opening with an ambiguous sentence exclusively validated through a
comic book character, Babitz flirts with her readers, challenging them to guess the subject matter
of this prose. While I did not grow up in the U.S., I assume those who grew up consuming
American pop culture can get her point right away: it is about kissing, kissing without eating
onions beforehand because it is just unacceptable—what a piece of tacit and classical American
teen knowledge.
“No Onion” ironically details Babitz’s onion-phobia moments—how she felt obliged to
abide the rule—and the anomalies she encountered growing up that made her doubt the rule’s
credibility, such as the skater boy in her high school who didn’t mind kissing her after having hot
dogs with onions. It is almost like her memoir about first loves—in fact, it is—but she seems to
have said more. The No Onion Rule itself might be intellectually insignificant and childlike, but
think Babitz’s writing merely functions to recount the cultural scene of her time, she reflects—
through the most minor and unexpected lenses—on the determinants of the cultural mentality she
shares with her even-aged. However, Babitz never tells us what to think: the trenchant feelings
her work arouse in us would, eventually, turn into understandings, except that they are not from
her but from us. This might also explain why she intends to keep her work elusive—she wants us
As readers, we can take Eve Babitz’s work merely as a nostalgic stunt that transmits us
back to our youthful past or to the passionate land we all have dreamed to live on, but we can
also choose to dig deeper and see the critical thinking, dissecting the entire golden era, behind
those jokes.
WORKS CITED
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Babitz, Eve. I Used to Be Charming. “No Onion”, page 69 - 75. New York Review Books, 2019.