The Uptown Local, Cory Leadbeater

Where to begin… so good, I immediately reread it. This memoir is near flawless in exposing the intimacy, the pain of self, the lasting and poignant relationships between people, and a loving and lasting ode to Joan Didion. His prose - pulling apart his life and examining from angles is beautiful for its honesty, and frightening for its truth. Death and life have never been so close together.

His friendship with poet and journalist James Fenton leads to a job as a personal assistant to writer Joan Didion. He promises her he won’t leave her, and for the next 9+ years is by her side – each saving the other one from loneliness, and in Cory’s case – death itself. He knew when getting this job that his center of life, his world, was about to dramatically change. His bouts with depression, thoughts of continuous suicide, and the only one keeping him alive is Joan – his promise to her holy.

He’ll create a moment – putting salad dressing on a salad he made for friends as a starting point and introduction to a woman he fell in love with and eventually married. Little things are big things. His continued rejections from publishers, and agents; his extremely addictive personality and behavior, self-sabotage, his book character Billy Silvers (his darker alter ego)… everything, bare and open, exposed. “The dead stay dead, but they continue to talk.” Searching, longing, for at most times we can’t even describe or put into words. Cory can… and does so magnificently.