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Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
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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
"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 ..."
"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."
"Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir, but the whole falls short."
"Writing through his troubles, Specktor offers consolatory beauty."
"This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown."
"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."
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