Eve Babitz, whose works of memoir and fiction painted a vivid portrait of late 20th-century Los Angeles, died Friday at 78, the New York Times reports.

Babitz, a Hollywood native, worked as an artist in the music industry in the 1960s, designing album covers, before making her literary debut in 1974 with Eve’s Hollywood, a memoir that showcased her sharp sense of humor and solidified her reputation as an expert chronicler of Southern California hedonism.

She would go on to write both fiction and nonfiction, publishing books including the novel L.A. Woman, the short story collection Black Swans, and the essay collection Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night.

Her last work was the anthology I Used To Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz, published by New York Review Books in 2019.

Tributes poured in for Babitz over the weekend. In her hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, author Matthew Specktor wrote, “She understood this place from the inside out, and moreover, she loved it without apology.”

Journalist Matt Haber tweeted, “RIP, Eve Babitz, the best thing Los Angeles ever produced and line for line one of the funniest writers of the second half of the last century.”

Also on Twitter, Hannah Ewens wrote, “Eve Babitz made being a writer seem glamorous. She showed you can be a chronicler of culture and place and find pleasure and joy, not just dirt and darkness. I already wish she’d have written more but that would mean a boring life and she was one of a kind! Hungover icon.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.