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Bottom of the pile
12
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
19/100Critics
5/100Scholars
Author:
Cory Leadbeater
Publisher:
Ecco
Date:
June 11, 2024
A debut memoir about a young writer â struggling with depression, family issues, and addiction â and his life-changing decade working for Joan Didion.
What The Reviewers Say
The book is populated by people who appear in his life but not Didion’s. This can leave your head spinning, as if an acquaintance is breathlessly telling story after story about names you can’t quite place.
Less a revelation of life with Didion than a poetic, ruminative chronicle of Leadbeater’s struggle to synthesize the author’s sophisticated world with that of his lower-middle-class family.
This is ultimately a book about distances. The distance between Leadbeater’s nascent, frustrated literary efforts and the great body of work that lies behind Didion.
Though Didion didn’t live to see this work, one senses she would have been equally delighted with her protégé’s literary talent and, not least, his unblinking honesty..
