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Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

by Matthew Specktor

Tin House ·2021 ·373 pages
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
48/99
Near the Top

59/99

Critics' Rating Index

Maybe Someday

36/99

Readers' Rating Index

n/a

Scholars' Citation Index

66/99

Volume of Reviews

31/99

Volume of Reader Ratings

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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.


Reviews

"This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Across these essays, which create a fascinating blend of memoir and criticism, he weaves his experiences of divorce and loss between profiles of creative Los Angeles figures and their successes and failures ..."

Alexander Moran· Booklist Read review ↗ Near the Top

"As if a book as good as this can really be expected to flourish."

David Thomson· London Review of Books Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Personal moments are the strongest in the book ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Maybe Someday

"But it isn't all subtraction; he also offers moments of nurturing clarity ..."

Lorraine Berry· Los Angeles Times Read review ↗ Near the Top

"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."

Wayne Catan· Los Angeles Review of Books Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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