Always Crashing in the Same Car

On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California

By: Matthew Specktor

Narrated by: Matthew Specktor

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.

©2021 Matthew Specktor (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Loved this book

Beautifully written and read. I appreciated the sincerity, the research, meditation on failure and success.

Books can save your life

Wonderfully written, elegantly read. I recommend this book to everyone I know. If Spektor’s language, and references seem specifically tailored to you— it’ll resonate deeply. If you want to just read a good book about a person navigating passion and loss via ideas and art—you’ll get it too