Always Crashing in the Same Car

June 1, 2021
Many people think we reveal more about ourselves by discussing favorite movies and music than when we talk about our own lives. Specktor tests that theory in his unusual new memoir. The author, a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, tells the story of a difficult period of his life by writing about the creative people (and their work) that he was drawn to at the time. His picks serve to illuminate both his character and state of mind at the time, and they include actor Tuesday Weld, musician Warren Zevon, critic Renata Adler, and directors Hal Ashby and Michael Cimino, whom he tackles together. A skilled critic himself, Specktor offers useful context for some of his choices--e.g., explaining the work of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Frank and Eleanor Perry for today's audience: "If The Swimmer was the fevered delirium of suburbia in decline--a noted inspiration, much later for the television series Mad Men--then Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife was the chronicle of that decline from the inside out: Mad Men, if January Jones's Betty Draper were the protagonist of that show, with her husband Don nothing but a condescending, insufferable satellite." Specktor also explains how his admiration for Five Easy Pieces screenwriter Carole Eastman is wrapped in his conflicted thoughts of his screenwriter mother and his own stalled screenwriting career. Those personal moments are the strongest in the book--how Zevon's music was the soundtrack to a painful family moment, how an ailing friend connected him to Weld's work, how he idolized Thomas McGuane, whose work "cemented in place what had begun with Fitzgerald: my wish to strike sentences into being." But whenever he reveals a bit of himself, Specktor quickly pulls back to the comfort of film history or deep descriptions of his Hollywood neighborhood. Specktor delivers interesting pieces of criticism, reporting, and self-help in this unique memoir, but the whole falls short.

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Starred review from June 28, 2021
Specktor (American Dream Machine), a novelist and film critic, calls on both skills in this fascinating look at Hollywood, a place that’s “as much a notion as it is a neighborhood.” To better understand his “gnawing fascination” with his hometown and its promise “against some very steep odds for ‘success,’ ” he surveys a range of “marginal” Hollywood figures who were drawn to its flame, but “whose careers carry an aura of what might, also, have been.” These include film director Frank Perry, whose “modest” reputation obscured the “substantial” body of work of his partner and wife Eleanor Perry, thanks to the industry’s “institutional and overt sexism”—a situation that echoes the careers of Specktor’s film industry parents. Rock singer-songwriter Warren Zevon (and former paramour of writer Eve Babitz) may have been born in Chicago, but his music was conceived from “the mirage of Hollywood... like an all-night casino, in which every gesture has the force of desperation while remaining... fundamentally lighthearted.” Meanwhile, an illuminating essay on Specktor’s childhood idol, the novelist Thomas McGuane, considers how he left the “sheer California chaos” that both fueled and imperiled his writing for a quiet life in Montana. This enthralling work deserves a central spot on the ever-growing shelf of books about Tinseltown.