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.
