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

by Matthew Specktor Narrated by Matthew Specktor

Overview

Blending memoir and cultural criticism, Matthew Specktor explores family legacy, the lives of artists, and a city that embodies both dreams and disillusionment.



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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Remarkable. . . . Writing through his troubles, Specktor offers consolatory beauty."— The Los Angeles Times

"Revealing, haunting, thought-provoking and compulsively, compulsively readable."— The Washington Post

"A novelist and critic with a sharp eye for Hollywood blends memoir and cultural critique in this study of classic American failure narratives."— The New York Times Book Review

"Compelling. . . . [an] intimate investigation of one man’s imperfect life, the successes and failures, and most importantly, the realization that who we are now is everything."— Ploughshares

"Fascinating."— Booklist

"As heartfelt, as tormented, as full of feeling as a love story."— Alta

"Extraordinary."— The Millions

"Specktor masterfully orients the reader within the West Hollywood landscape."— Los Angeles Review of Books

"A blend of absorbing autobiographical vignettes and incisive cultural deep dives. . . . Specktor [is] a masterful observer of the weird tragedies and creative blocks that regularly befall artists in L.A."— Aquarium Drunkard

"Its blend of cultural commentary and memoir is never less than beguiling."— Vol.1 Brooklyn

"Eloquent. . . . An incisive collection of artist portraits illuminates the tenuous quality of Hollywood celebrity and the price it exacts."— Shelf Awareness

"Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir."— Kirkus Reviews

"A work indebted to femaleness and its varied incarnations."— BOMB Magazine

"Specktor has captured the LA I know, the one all around me and the one in my head, a city of invention and grit, surface and underbelly."— Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"Haunting, powerful, riveting, unforgettable—I could go on (and on) about Matthew Specktor's astounding new book about failure, writing, Los Angeles, and the movies. With scholarly rigor and tenderhearted sympathy, Specktor excavates the lives of artists forgotten (Carol Eastman, Eleanor Perry), underappreciated (Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby), and notorious (Warren Zevon, Michael Cimino), while always circling back to his own benighted Hollywood upbringing. This is an angry, sad, but always somehow joyful book about not hitting it big, and I've never read anything quite like it."— Tom Bissell, author of Creative Types

"Matthew Specktor's Always Crashing in the Same Car is going on the shelf with Play It As it Lays and The Big Sleep and my other favorite books about L.A. I'm not sure what it is. A memoir-essay grafted onto a psycho-geographic travelogue of the weirdest town to be from? All I know is I couldn't stop reading it."— John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

"A haunting memoir-in-criticism exploring a very certain kind of failure—the Hollywood story. Specktor intricately knits his own losses and nostalgias into a larger cultural narrative of writers and filmmakers whose failures left behind a ghostly glamour. I can’t get it out of my mind."— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and

"In Hollywood, according to Brecht’s famous formulation, there was no need of heaven and hell; the presence of heaven alone served the unsuccessful as hell. But Los Angeles has always been full of commuters on the congested freeway between both camps. They are the subject of Matthew Specktor’s continuously absorbing and revealing book, itself nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism."— Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage

"Eloquent."— ZYZZYVA

"It’s about Los Angeles, but it’s also about the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Renata Adler, directors like Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, musicians like Warren Zevon, but most of all, it’s about Specktor, how he relates to these artists and how they, in turn, helped him relate to where he’s from."— InsideHook

"Fascinating. . . . This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown."— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Kirkus Reviews

2021-05-12
Many people think we reveal more about ourselves by discussing favorite movies and music than when we talk about our own lives. Specktor tests that theory in his unusual new memoir.

The author, a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, tells the story of a difficult period of his life by writing about the creative people (and their work) that he was drawn to at the time. His picks serve to illuminate both his character and state of mind at the time, and they include actor Tuesday Weld, musician Warren Zevon, critic Renata Adler, and directors Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, whom he tackles together. A skilled critic himself, Specktor offers useful context for some of his choices—e.g., explaining the work of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Frank and Eleanor Perry for today’s audience: “If The Swimmerwas the fevered delirium of suburbia in decline—a noted inspiration, much later for the television series Mad Men—then Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewifewas the chronicle of that decline from the inside out: Mad Men, if January Jones’s Betty Draper were the protagonist of that show, with her husband Don nothing but a condescending, insufferable satellite.” Specktor also explains how his admiration for Five Easy Piecesscreenwriter Carole Eastman is wrapped in his conflicted thoughts of his screenwriter mother and his own stalled screenwriting career. Those personal moments are the strongest in the book—how Zevon’s music was the soundtrack to a painful family moment, how an ailing friend connected him to Weld’s work, how he idolized Thomas McGuane, whose work “cemented in place what had begun with Fitzgerald: my wish to strike sentences into being.” But whenever he reveals a bit of himself, Specktor quickly pulls back to the comfort of film history or deep descriptions of his Hollywood neighborhood.

Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir, but the whole falls short.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172903472
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	08/24/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos