Enter the Dream Factory

A Conversation with Novelist, Critic, and Essayist Matthew Specktor

Greetings friends and fellow travelers,

Before today’s feature, three submission opportunities.

• Forest Avenue Press will be open for unagented (and previously unpublished) novel manuscripts from from Jan. 6 - Feb. 9, 2025 - submission guidelines can be found here.

• Boulevard is now open for general fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions through May 1, 2025. Submission page here.

• Prairie Schooner is also open for general prose and poetry submissions through May 1, 2025. Guidelines can be found here.

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Matthew Specktor is a writer whose books and Substack posts I look forward to unreservedly. He has a new book out next April, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood, its waves doubtless already rippling the collective unconscious. Along with being a gifted novelist, critic, and essayist, he is a cofounder of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and…coincidentally, his birthday is this Saturday. You might subscribe to his Substack Slow Players 🎈(He’s not in the habit of clogging subscribers’ inboxes). His wife Samantha Culp also writes a fine ‘stack, Border Studies - Notes from Samantha Culp.

His 2021 book, Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California (Tin House), part culture study, part memoir, is one of the best books I’ve read in any year. Matthew spoke with me about it for The Millions in July 2021, and I’ve excerpted that conversation below. (The full text is available here).

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Many readers know Matthew Specktor as the author of the excellent 2013 novel American Dream Machine, which, like his virtuosic new work of nonfiction, Always Crashing in the Same Car, explores Hollywood both as metaphor and as geographic location from an insider’s point of view.

The son of a screenwriter and one of the founding partners of the powerhouse talent agency Creative Arts Agency, Specktor was born and raised in Los Angeles and grew up observing the successes and near misses of many actors and screenwriters. His lifelong proximity to and nuanced understanding of the traps and rewards of a career in Hollywood imbue his new book with authority and pathos, as do his own experiences as a screenwriter.

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, the book’s chapters each focus on a well known writer, musician, or filmmaker with ties to Hollywood—among them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tuesday Weld, Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Renata Adler, and Warren Zevon—whose life and work Specktor has researched extensively and admired as a fan and close observer for many years. Most of his subjects were—famously or not—beset by professional frustrations and disappointment, self-sabotage, turbulent intimate relationships, and by some measures, failure to reach a higher plane of notoriety, prosperity, and sustained personal contentment.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about this extraordinary book is how eloquently and compassionately Specktor writes about loneliness and disappointment—his own as a writer, as a friend, as a son and a husband— as well as that of his subjects. He sees with a clear, unwavering eye the perils of believing the glittering promises fame makes and acknowledges how difficult it is to ignore them.

I had the opportunity to correspond with Specktor about Always Crashing in the Same Car.

Christine Sneed: I’m curious about how you chose the writers, filmmakers, and musicians who serve as focal points for the eight chapters in this book. Had you been thinking of writing a biography about one of your subjects but in time realized you instead wanted to write a book with several protagonists that explored fame, creative success, failure, and the loneliness of artists?

Matthew Specktor: I had a list. Anyone who knows me has heard me fulminate about lists at one time or another—I tend to resist them, and I think their prevalence (as Top Ten Lists, Best of the Year, etc.) has had a deranging effect on the culture at large. But in this case, the joke was on me: I made a list. There was never any intention of writing a biography of anybody. I just drew up a constellation of people who fascinated me and wondered what, say, Tom McGuane might have in common with Tuesday Weld, or Hal Ashby with Renata Adler.

Eventually I realized that all of these people had traveled complicated paths that had some relation to the movies, and to certain American mythologies that exist both inside and far beyond Hollywood. There was some winnowing—it was a really long list, and I wanted to be sure that each person’s story was different, that I didn’t get locked in to writing too extensively about disappointed screenwriters, or musicians with problematic personalities—but somehow it all fell together, as books tend to.

The people I chose had all kept me company during a difficult time in my life, and their paths kept intersecting: Tuesday Weld playing Zelda Fitzgerald in a television movie; Frank Perry directing Tom McGuane; McGuane co-writing songs with Warren Zevon. The various strands cross-pollinated nicely.

“Obviously, the life of an artist—surely no more than any other kind of life, but perhaps a little more forthrightly—is about disappointment.”

CS: I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book quite like this one—was the memoir and cultural criticism duality present from the beginning? As I read, I wondered if it began as a traditional memoir but before long you discovered you were more interested in looking at your life in tandem with other artists’ professional and personal trajectories.

MS: It was never a traditional memoir. I don’t know if I could write one of those. In 2016 I had finished a novel, and I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t want to publish it. My agent was ready to go and I just couldn’t get excited about it. (Never mind the fact I’d already written it. Maybe I just didn’t think it was that good!) I started thinking about the books I’d read around that period that had excited me—Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock; Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments; Hilton Als’s The Women (very much that one, which does blend criticism and memoir in a very beguiling way); Terry Castle’s The Professor: A Sentimental Education—and I realized pretty much everything that had excited me recently wasn’t a novel. A wonderful monograph by Sam Sweet called Hadley, Lee, Lightcap was another.

And these books, with the exception of Castle’s, weren’t essay collections either. They were long form prose excursions that managed to be intensely and vividly personal, on the one hand, and on the other to turn their gazes on things that were outside, to work in a way that was also sort of oblique or elliptical. Which appealed to me. I thought, why not write a book that interpolates all these different modes—of fact, found material, speculation, criticism—and allows them to coexist, that has a kind of almanac quality.

That sort of expansiveness is what writing is for! But conversely…I know this book is gonna sit on a shelf marked “memoir” or “nonfiction” or whatever, but I’ll go to my grave insisting it’s actually a kind of novel. There’s nothing that asserts a novel can’t contain all sorts of factual material. As Ishmael Reed said (speaking of writers who don’t always get their due), “A novel can be anything it wants to. It can be the six o’clock news.”

“I thought, why not write a book that interpolates all these different modes—of fact, found material, speculation, criticism—and allows them to coexist, that has a kind of almanac quality.”

CS: The chapter focusing on Tuesday Weld features a wrenching story of your close friendship with “D,” whose struggles with addiction and depression kept him from realizing his potential as a novelist. “‘My heart will always be with the loser,’ [D] wrote. ‘Always.’”

In the same paragraph, as a kind of reply to the above, you wrote, “I thought [D] saw the world all the way to the bottom. That he understood the meaning of disappointment.”

Today the cult of optimism (Think positive, everyone, or shut the fuck up!) has sent a lot of people the message that failure and disappointment are to be avoided at all costs. But doesn’t that view all but guarantee some of us will become insufferable, if not outright monsters? With your own daughter (and yourself), how do you address the tension between positive thinking and realistic expectations?

MS: Well, that’s the work of a lifetime, isn’t it? Obviously, the life of an artist—surely no more than any other kind of life, but perhaps a little more forthrightly—is about disappointment. Even the most successful artists are rejected over and over again (or they have been, and just from knowing a lot of absurdly successful ones I know how often they’re—still—rejected), and it usually takes an unholy amount of rejection even to reach a very modest degree of public-facing success.

Unless one is lying to oneself, life is a hotbed of failure. You miss your goals. Your relationships implode. You lose your job. You disappoint your friends, or your children. You have an experience of illness, or loss. This happens. To everybody, it happens. But with any luck, and (it must be said) with whatever privilege one has that allows you to even have a chance at succeeding (i.e. of not being murdered by the police, of having time to write, etc.), you are likely to succeed at least occasionally.

And if you can internalize some of those successes as effectively as we all do our disappointments (which, we’d better internalize too; I mean, otherwise you turn into a moron or a monster, like Tony Robbins or something), you become a little more flexible. The failures might not torture you as much, and the successes won’t mess with your head. My own heart always will be with the loser, though, also, just like D’s was. Always, it will.

CS: I was particularly moved by the passages about your mother, a frustrated screenwriter who, due to a WGA strike and her one produced script having been written during that strike, was thereafter blackballed by the industry. Her dependence on alcohol increased after her career foundered, and your relationship with her also faltered. When you reconciled with her after years of silence, did she have a different perspective on her experiences or any advice to offer you as a writer?

MS: Not really. I mean, her estrangement from Hollywood—and her estrangement from me—might not have left her with a ton of usable information. (I’m not sure that estrangements ever do.) She never talked about that part of her life much. But the story of her talent was an odd one, insofar as that talent may never have had a chance to properly develop, and she largely stopped thinking of herself as a writer once she quit writing. (On the other hand, there was a late short story or two I found among her papers, so…apparently she didn’t entirely quit writing.)

But the real story there is that of an entire generation of women, many of whom my mother was friendly with, like Polly Platt, or Elaine May, Carole Eastman and Joan Micklin Silver, Barbara Avedon—I mean there were a ton of preternaturally gifted women (it’s hardly too much to call some of them geniuses) whose work in Hollywood didn’t get its due.

That to me was the bigger story (and still is: it factors into my next book as well). I don’t know that my mother had that kind of talent—the one produced movie she wrote isn’t overwhelmingly good—but I do know that for reasons that go beyond even her own personal demons, she never had a chance to find out. That’s a lesson, I suppose, and a particularly important one for a white, male writer to be taught. There’s much more than “talent” involved in the making of an artist. 📗