oh just shoot me why don’t you!

Of course, I am very short and scrawny myself! I’m assuming you’re referring to the unsent letter Eve Babitz wrote to Joan Didion, quoted in Lili Anolik’s biography, that I reblogged a while ago.

Her size should have nothing to do with the credibility of her work and that’s precisely why the question Eve raises is important. Eve herself was positioned like an inverse to Joan. She was branded “Eve Babitz with the great big tits”, her public image built around her body, with the nude Duchamp chess photo eclipsing her writing for years. Her work has only more recently begun to receive wider recognition.

And so she posits this question: what bearing does a woman’s appearance have on how seriously her art is taken? Joan couldn’t help being small, but it was a part of her image, and I can understand why Eve asks “would the men in her life have perceived her work differently if she didn’t look the way she did?”. To be small is to be more in line with what is deemed societally acceptable for a woman. Although we cannot help it, and although it shouldn’t say anything about the merit of our work, that is unfortunately not for us to decide.