Publishers Weekly
★ 04/08/2024
Leadbeater debuts with a stirring account of his time working for Joan Didion (1934–2021) in the final years of her life. While growing up in New Jersey, Leadbeater endured horrific physical and psychological abuse from his father. To cope, he threw himself into reading and writing, and eventually gained admission to Columbia University’s English program in 2012. The next year, Leadbeater accepted a position assisting a well-known but unnamed writer who needed help with “all kinds of things.” The employer, it turned out, was Didion. The two bonded, and Leadbeater, who had been commuting to classes from New Jersey, eventually moved in with Didion in Manhattan. With her help, he endured his father’s arrest for fraud, the death of a friend, and persistent thoughts of suicide. Quotidian tasks like ordering tissues bumped against casually glamorous endeavors, including dinners at Didion’s apartment with “Oscar winners, California governors, and Supreme Court justices.” Despite considering the period “in some ways a ludicrous fantasy,” Leadbeater credits Didion with advising him to “catalogue all the aspects of myself that seemed to operate without harmony or precision... because accurate accounting mattered more than neat narrative.” This gloriously written recollection does right by Didion’s advice. Agent: Sarah Bowlin, Aevitas Creative Management.
From the Publisher
Cory Leadbeater writes with beauty, precision and velocity and The Uptown Local is a memoir like no other. It’s the story of his relationship with a great American writer, but it’s also the saga of his family’s dark struggle with 21st century American realities, not to mention his own terrifying years of grief, addiction and depression. Leadbeater exposes all of his demons with wit and poetic intensity, but underneath his calamities we also discover a young man from a tough town whose life was saved by literature, by art, by music, and by the mentorship of those who’d come this way before him. Leadbeater’s passion to create proves a worthy match for his self-destructive urges, but the final piece of the puzzle will always be love. Leadbeater’s path to this wisdom, earned as a caregiver, partner and father, is the final, breathtaking flowering in this remarkable book.” — Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left To Come Looking For You
“The Uptown Local is a beautifully written and deeply moving memoir about how identity is reimagined through art, and how one writer came to understand himself amid the painful constraints of class and trauma. It is also about an intimate, tender, and unlikely friendship. And finally, it is a kind of love letter to the complexities of New York City, the miraculous place where everything seems possible.” — Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
“It has been a long time since I've read a memoir this poignant and intimate. As much a remembrance of Joan Didion as it is an inquiry into how we create—relationships, art, and finally one's self—The Uptown Local is a beautiful, heartrending book." — Cristina Henríquez, author of The Great Divide
“A piercing, erudite, deeply felt exploration of life and art, desire and loss, of choosing to seek out and make what’s beautiful against all odds, Cory Leadbeater’s The Uptown Local grabbed me by the throat and held me up close to all life’s layers: love, hate, birth, and death. I felt grateful, moved, richer because of its unrelenting clarity and force.” — Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want
“Something beautiful and lasting has been made: The Uptown Local. Cory Leadbeater’s debut memoir on an aspiring writer’s dream employment is a brilliant achievement: a consummately loving portrait of a great writer and a deeply flawed father and son. Leadbeater makes exquisite examination of depressions, terrors, and Death, yet the Joy part is wonderful and true.” — Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
“The Uptown Local renders the dizzying, sometimes painful experience of becoming yourself in prose that perfectly mirrors the story at its heart: at once tender and brutal, surreal and direct, cerebral and visceral. Here, the contradictions of a bifurcated life are not smoothed over, but pulled apart and examined with curiosity, rigor, and love. A spectacular debut." — Lilly Dancyger, author of First Love
"More than a tender ode to Joan Didion, Cory Leadbeater honors her memory by taking seriously an imperative central in her work: we must face hard truths to know ourselves. The Uptown Local is a beautiful catalog of twin yearnings: to be seen and to disappear; to belong everywhere and nowhere; to go forth and to return home, and—above all else—to love and to be loved." — Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Easy Beauty.
“Leadbeater debuts with a stirring account of his time working for Joan Didion in the final years of her life…This gloriously written recollection does right by Didion.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The Uptown Local is a twin portrait of a writer as a struggling young man and of a great author in the last years of her life." — Financial Times
"Leadbeater makes us see there was so much more to [Joan Didion] (to all of us) than just one thing." — The Guardian
Kirkus Reviews
2024-02-24
An emerging writer makes sense of his past while working for Joan Didion on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side.
For the last years of Didion’s life (1934-2021), Leadbeater was her personal assistant. The experience thrust him into the world of Manhattan’s wealthy elite during a time when his father was convicted of mortgage and wire fraud, his best friend unexpectedly passed away in his sleep, and his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Under these pressures, Leadbeater sunk into addiction and continued his lifelong battle with suicidal ideation. At the same time, he was writing one novel about a character named Billy Silvers, who possessed the author with a frightening strength, and another about a girl named Ward, whose story of surviving a flash flood was inspired by an article that, later, Leadbeater was unable to locate. Throughout, the author struggles to limit his fiction to the page. “I would begin to see that my own penchant for dishonesty wasn’t my imagination battling for a release at all; instead, it was me trying to leave behind my old life,” he writes. Ultimately, Didion helped him understand that he must accept—rather than deny—all his strange and disparate histories in order to become whole and authentic. “She did not try to reduce life down to a more manageable size in order to understand it….She rejected orthodoxy so as to better see the real,” he writes. At the line level, the text is expansive and poetic, full of vivid imagery and small, well-voiced epiphanies. However, Leadbeater as the protagonist barely changes throughout the book, partly because the plot’s unifying revelation occurs in the final five pages, leaving little time for readers to see the effect this realization had on his journey.
A beautifully written but unevenly paced memoir about family, history, and creative writing.
