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Product Identifiers

PublisherTin House Books, LLC

ISBN-101951142624

ISBN-139781951142629

eBay Product ID (ePID)9050394120

Product Key Features

Book TitleAlways Crashing in the Same Car : on Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

Number of Pages300 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicEntertainment & Performing Arts

Publication Year2021

IllustratorYes

GenreBiography & Autobiography

AuthorMatthew Specktor

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height1 in

Item Weight14.6 Oz

Item Length8.5 in

Item Width5.5 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2020-057479

ReviewsCompelling. . . . [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., 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., 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., 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., 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., Eloquent. . . . An incisive collection of artist portraits illuminates the tenuous quality of Hollywood celebrity and the price it exacts., Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir., A novelist and critic with a sharp eye for Hollywood blends memoir and cultural critique in this study of classic American failure narratives., 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., 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., Fascinating. . . . This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown., 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.

SynopsisIn 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., A Best Book of the Year at The Atlantic Los Angeles Times Bestseller "[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.

LC Classification NumberPS3619.P437Z46 2021