Always Crashing in the Same Car
On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
by Matthew Specktor
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Pub Date Jul 27 2021 | Archive Date Jun 30 2021
Tin House | Tin House Books
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Description
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.
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.
About the Author:
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound; a nonfiction book, The Sting; and the forthcoming memoir The Golden Hour (Ecco/HarperCollins). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell fellow, and is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He resides in Los Angeles. www.matthewspecktor.com
Advance Praise
"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
"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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781951142629 |
| PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Reviewer 460454
Always Crashing in the Same Car is a thoughtful memoir in which the author shares tales from his own life in Los Angeles along with those of other LA artists who have touched his life in some way. Whether it be a musician whose song provided the soundtrack to a life-changing event in the author's own life, or an analysis of thr career of a screenwriter who reminds the author of his own mother, Matthew Spektor does a wonderful job illustrating the ways in which we can relate others' art and lives to our own personal triumphs and tragedies (or, as he might be more apt to say, successes and failures). I enjoyed this portrait of LA-based creatives through the decades who dreamt big, worked hard, yet in many ways didn't get what they bargained for. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review an e-ARC of this book.
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General Fiction (Adult), Literary Fiction, Women's Fiction
