I Used to Be Charming
The Rest of Eve Babitz
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Narrated by:
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Brittany Pressley
About this listen
Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.
Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
All previously uncollected, these pieces range from sharp personal essays on body image and the male gaze to playful meditations on everything from ballroom dancing to kissing to perfume. There are breathtaking celebrity profiles, too. In one, Nicholas Cage takes her for a ride in his ’67 Stingray and in another she dishes about dragging Jim Morrison to bed before the Doors had even settled on a band name (“Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him,” she writes). In another essay, the author ponders her earliest days in the spotlight, posing nude with Marcel Duchamp, and in another, the never-before-published title essay, she writes about the tragic accident that compelled her to leave that spotlight behind forever.
©2019 Eve Babitz (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Introduction © 2019 by Molly Lambert.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Truth: Sherri Griffin and her daughter, Katie, recently moved to the idyllic beach town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. They’ve been welcomed by Rebecca Coleman, unofficial former leader of the Newburyport Mom Squad, and her teenage daughter Alexa, Katie’s new babysitter. Truth: Alexa has time on her hands after a falling-out with her friends involving her popular YouTube channel.
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Really more of a YA novel...
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Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
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- Narrated by: Daniel Deadwyler, Jeanette Illidge, Je Nie Fleming, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Striking in their emotional immediacy, the stories in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self are based in a world where inequality is reality but where the insecurities of adolescence and young adulthood, and the tensions within family and the community, are sometimes the biggest complicating forces in one's sense of identity and the choices one makes.
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things we do to oursekves
- By Jamintel on 02-06-23
By: Danielle Evans
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Lady Oracle
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.
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A Feminist Romp
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By: Margaret Atwood
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American on Purpose
- The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
- By: Craig Ferguson
- Narrated by: Craig Ferguson
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In American on Purpose, Craig Ferguson delivers a moving and achingly funny memoir of living the American dream as he journeys from the mean streets of Glasgow, Scotland, to the comedic promised land of Hollywood. Along the way, he stumbles through several attempts to make his mark - as a punk rock musician, a construction worker, a bouncer, and, tragically, a modern dancer.
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Unabashedly Honest
- By Diane on 12-09-09
By: Craig Ferguson
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I Don’t Care about Your Band
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- Narrated by: Julie Klausner
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In the tradition of Cynthia Heimel and Chelsea Handler, and with the boisterous iconoclasm of Amy Sedaris, Julie Klausner's candid and funny debut I Don't Care about Your Band sheds light on the humiliations we endure to find love - and the lessons that can be culled from the wreckage. I Don't Care about Your Band posits that lately the worst guys to date are the ones who seem sensitive. It's the jerks in nice guy clothing, not the players in Ed Hardy, who break the hearts of modern girls.
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Shopping for Men at the Wrong Mall
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By: Julie Klausner
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I Hate Everyone, Except You
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- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
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Clinton Kelly is probably best known for teaching women how to make their butts look smaller. But in I Hate Everyone, Except You, he reveals some heretofore unknown secrets about himself, like that he's a finicky connoisseur of 1980s pornography, a disillusioned critic of New Jersey's premier water parks, and perhaps the world's least enthused high school commencement speaker.
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Filthy language overshadowed stories
- By Doris on 04-29-17
By: Clinton Kelly
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Power & Beauty
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- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
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Hip-hop artist Tip "T.I." Harris has received every acclaim the music world has to offer. Now, working with bestselling celebrity collaborator David Ritz, T.I. applies all his talent and experience to the world of fiction by creating the epic love story of Power and Beauty. After the death of his mother, Charlotte, Paul “Power” Clay allows himself to be guided by Slim, a local businessman. Slim always has the best of everything, and Power is sure that if he learns Slim's ways, he'll make something of himself - and perhaps be worthy of Tanya “Beauty” Long.
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Suprised by T.I.'s story telling skills
- By Dream on 07-11-12
By: Tip "T.I." Harris, and others
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Dying of Politeness
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From two-time Academy Award winner and screen icon Geena Davis, the surprising tale of her “journey to badassery”—from her epically polite childhood to roles that loaned her the strength to become a powerhouse in Hollywood.
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so perfect
- By Kimber on 10-16-22
By: Geena Davis
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Some Girls
- My Life in a Harem
- By: Jillian Lauren
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince's harem and emerges from the secret Xanadu both richer and wiser. At 18, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The "casting director" told her that a rich businessman would pay pretty girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next 18 months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah....
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Boring, Pretentious Book
- By Marcos on 04-23-11
By: Jillian Lauren
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The Hourglass
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- Length: 15 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 2014. Sensible Nora has always taken success for granted until suddenly her life begins to fall apart. Troubled by anxiety and nightmares, she finds herself drawn to the sweeping beaches of Tenby, a place she's been only once before. Together with a local girl, she rents a beautiful townhouse and slowly begins to settle in to her new life. But Tenby hides a secret, and Nora will soon discover that this little town by the sea has the power to heal even the most painful memories.
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Buy it!!!!
- By LoveAmazon on 11-12-17
By: Tracy Rees
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The Stuff that Never Happened
- A Novel
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Overall
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Annabelle McKay knows she shouldn’t have any complaints. She’s been in a stable marriage that’s lasted almost three decades and has provided her with two wonderful children and thousands of family dinners around a sturdy oak table. Other wives envy the fact that Grant is not the type of man who would ever cheat on her or leave her for a younger woman. The trouble is Annabelle isn’t sure she wants to be married to Grant anymore. The trouble is she’s still in love with someone else.
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Don’t pass this one up.
- By Lauren on 03-10-20
By: Maddie Dawson
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Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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What listeners say about I Used to Be Charming
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Lisa Persky
- 08-12-23
Narrator Destroys Narrative
The self-congratulatory, wry tone of this performer’s voice is unnecessary and wrecks the writer’s writing voice. This narrator also knows nothing of the place or the time and thus makes mistakes when speaking the names of areas and products. If I could see, I would have read the book but I can’t and I wanted to know the content of these Babitz pieces so I endured.
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Overall
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Performance
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- SusanV
- 10-25-19
Only Thing Wrong - the Narrator
Some of the most popular narrators on Audible.com can really blow it when reading personal essays. The author, Eve Babitz, has a wry wit and off-hand way of describing perverse events in her life. The narrator here reads along, punching up dialogue with stunning tone-deafness. Tolerable at best. I gave up and bought the book to read.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Pasternak
- 10-25-24
A Snicker Salad
I enjoyed remembering roller skates, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a first encounter with little green capers, shopping at Ralph’s and other stuff circa 1976. And the author’s brush with death is stunning - though oddly treated like nothing more than a brief chapter in a book rather than a serious event without long lasting physical and mental consequences. The superficial romp through several decades of popular culture is kind of fun. But I think it’s a shame to meet so many interesting people and find so little of real substance to write about any of them. And I think the breathless rant and rave promotion of the Fioricci label near the last of the book is a good spot to double the playback speed. It struck me as one massive commercial interruption. Babitz and I are roughly the same age. And I spent most of my life in California. It follows, this book rang my bell a few times. And oral presentation captured a bit of suitable snark. Nevertheless, I regret wasting a credit on this one.
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