Episode 23: Matthew Specktor

Matthew Specktor grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a talent agent and screenwriter. One of his childhood heroes was the doomed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who arrived in Hollywood in the late 1930s to eke out a living as a screenwriter while he labored on what ended up being his fourth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Specktor moved back to L.A. and into a crumbling building across the street from where Fitzgerald lived out his last years. Flailing professionally and reeling from his mother's cancer diagnosis, he became "unmoored." Instead of cracking up, as Fitz had after the Roaring Twenties ended and he struggled to complete his post-Gatsby masterpiece Tender is the Night, Specktor embarked on a journey of self-discovery, re-evaluating ideas of success and failure in general but especially in Los Angeles, his home town. What followed is part cultural memoir, part cultural history, and part portrait of a place, as the dust jacket declares in Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis & Los Angeles, California (Tin House Books, 2021). Specktor tells his own narrative alongside some known and lesser-known players of the New Hollywood era of his youth: you meet Carole Eastman, Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, and Michael Cimino. The result is a masterwork of genre-bending nonfiction, an unvarnished view of Tinseltown and its demons, but also its undeniable magic and charm. In the end, after much loss, optimism wins. And that is when you know you have a good book on your hands: When it helps us navigate through the "beautiful ruins that await us all." J.C. Gabel spoke with Skecktor, earlier this fall, about his latest book and the creative process.