1979’s “Sex and Rage” is essentially Babitz’s autobiography. The heroine Jacaranda Leven comes of age in southern California where she parties hard, is sexually free, and does things on her terms. It was an interesting time for women. As much as the majority of the U.S. was still hanging onto the puritanical ideals of the ’40s and ’50s, the second wave of feminism was making its cultural impact, offering women new ways to take up space in the world.

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“[It] was an exotic time for all of us who were there … It was a time of freedom and, seemingly, little consequence… ​I did say ‘seemingly,’” Babitz told Los Angeles Magazine in 2019. “We found out later there were plenty of consequences… But everyone was having sex, taking drugs, listening to or making great music. There were no words like ‘trigger’ or ‘PC.’ If you didn’t want to join the party, you​ took yourself home, and you were responsible for doing that.”

Eventually, Jacaranda (like Babitz) stops partying and moves to New York to become a writer, instead of settling down into marriage and having a family. In NYC, she achieves her literary pursuits by doing things her way. A real-life example of this is Babitz’s first attempt at getting published in which she sent a letter to the author of “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller. It read: “I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.”

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