• Always Crashing in the Same Car

  • On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California
  • By: Matthew Specktor
  • Narrated by: Matthew Specktor
  • Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (24 ratings)

Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.
Always Crashing in the Same Car  By  cover art

Always Crashing in the Same Car

By: Matthew Specktor
Narrated by: Matthew Specktor
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $17.19

Buy for $17.19

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

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

More from the same

What listeners say about Always Crashing in the Same Car

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    18
  • 4 Stars
    4
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    17
  • 4 Stars
    2
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    16
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful