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Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
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60/99
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About This Book
In 2006, Matthew Specktor moved into a crumbling Los Angeles apartment opposite the one in which F. Scott Fitzgerald spent the last moments of his life. Fitz had been Specktor's first literary idol, someone whose own passage through Hollywood had, allegedly, broken him. Freshly divorced, professionally flailing, and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, Specktor was feeling unmoored. But rather than giving in or "cracking up," he embarked on an obsessive journey to make sense of the mythologies of "success" and "failure" that haunt the artist's life and the American imagination. Part memoir, part cultural history, part portrait of place, Always Crashing in the Same Car explores Hollywood through a certain kind of collapse. It's a vibrant and intimate inspection of failure told through the lives of iconic, if under-sung, artists—Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, and Hal Ashby, among others—and the author's own family history. Through this constellation of Hollywood figures, he unearths a fascinating alternate history of the city that raised him and explores the ways in which curtailed ambition, insufficiency, and loss shape all our lives. At once deeply personal and broadly erudite, it is a story of an art form (the movies), a city (Los Angeles), and one person's attempt to create meaning out of both. Above all, Specktor creates a moving search for optimism alongside the inevitability of failure and reveals the still-resonant power of art to help us navigate the beautiful ruins that await us all.
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Reviews
"The only flaw in Always Crashing is that, at times, the author's flashbacks distract the reader from the organic flow of the prose, necessitating a reread."
"In the rest of this book, this elegy to failure, Specktor will deliver essays on some of the lives and losses he has been captivated by, held under the sway of people who were never exactly there."
"Specktor, a novelist and film critic, calls on both skills in this fascinating look at Hollywood ..."
"Writing through his troubles, Specktor offers consolatory beauty."
"Specktor provides his readers with a voluminous list of recommended books and films to complete this engagingly conversational, confessional, rueful, and wonderfully researched work."
"Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir, but the whole falls short."
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