"[An] absorbing and revealing book. . . . nestling in the fruitful terrain between memoir and criticism." —Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage
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
Praise For…
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
