Quillette
•71% Informative
Always Crashing in the Same Car is a memoir of desultory personal loss disguised as an inquiry into the rise and fall of a 1970s Hollywood elite.
Author Matthew Specktor is haunted by what he has sort-of/kind-of achieved: minor notoriety and major obscurity in Tinseltown.
Bob Greene’s new book is a classic brew of stale blame, Greene says.
Greene says it's his ’hood, where he came of age, romantically screen-addled.
Greene: He holds the movies so responsible for what he calls our society’s “ethical failures.” Greene: We have an amateurish habit of nattering nattering at an new writer or a new writer.
Elizabeth Specktor’s book, Always Crashing, explores the rise and fall of American artists who are judged less for their innovation and deconstructive contrariness and more for their commerciality.
The author is working in a subgenre we might call the “failure memoir” or “the memoir of decline,” and its subspecies, the submission memoir’—that is, I caved, I quit fighting, I survived and I confess. Failure signals that anyone can fall in one's first, second, or third act.
VR Score
67
Informative language
62
Neutral language
26
Article tone
informal
Language
English
Language complexity
47
Offensive language
likely offensive
Hate speech
not hateful
Attention-grabbing headline
not detected
Known propaganda techniques
not detected
Time-value
long-living
External references
24
Source diversity
4
Affiliate links
no affiliate links