I became a Didion acolyte in college, thanks to a course in which we spent a month reading much of her oeuvre, from “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” to “The Year of Magical Thinking,” culminating in a visit from the author herself. After her death, communion with her was only possible through events like the auction. But owning pens that she had perhaps touched would not get one any closer to experiencing who she really was. For that perspective, one might turn to Cory Leadbeater, a young writer who spent the last nine years of Didion’s life serving as her personal assistant, reading Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden aloud to her, ordering her the Kleenex that she always held crumpled in her hands and stuffed in her pockets, and eating the one-egg omelets she would cook for his breakfast each morning. While the rest of us settled for combing the estate catalogue, Leadbeater had actually lived with the famed writer in her Upper East Side apartment.
“The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion,” Leadbeater’s memoir, will probably appeal to Didion fans as a means of accessing her wisdom secondhand, from someone whom she loved like a son. But while the book does offer details of Didion’s everyday life and the philosophies that undergirded it, it eschews a dishy approach. It is 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.
One night in July 2013, Leadbeater, then 24, was drinking and smoking with his older brother and friends outside his parents’ house in Kearny, N.J., when he opened an email from the poet James Fenton, his mentor at the time in the MFA program at Columbia University. Earlier in the day, Fenton had sent a cryptic email about an unnamed “well-known writer” searching for an assistant, and Leadbeater had immediately expressed interest; now, Fenton revealed that Leadbeater would be interviewed by Joan Didion. “Whatever criminal gamble my father had made — desperately poor, abused horrifically, thirty years of manual labor, a few years of wire fraud — had paid off,” Leadbeater writes. “In one generation, we’d gone from the basement of the gas station next to the junkyard in New Jersey to the Upper East Side, Madison Avenue, Joan.”
Indeed, as Leadbeater gained entry into “a world of art and ideas and Supreme Fictions,” his family was experiencing the slow-burning fallout from his father’s “criminal gamble.” In 2012, the week after Leadbeater had been admitted to Columbia, his father revealed that he was under federal investigation for mortgage and wire fraud; lured in by pamphlets “from the likes of Carleton Sheets and Donald Trump,” he had evangelized about buying houses on the cheap and selling them before making a mortgage payment. It would be four queasy years before he was sentenced to 60 months in a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
But the taint of criminality wasn’t all that Leadbeater was trying to leave behind. As he explains, “I had grown up with the belt and my father’s mercurial fury, with coupon clipping on Sundays and Rush Limbaugh on Mondays … but Joan’s world was meant to have wiped my slate clean of all that.” Of course, even Didion and the much-craved approval she provided couldn’t erase Leadbeater’s past. Or the present that also haunted him. Shortly after he moved into Didion’s apartment, his best friend, Conor, died in his sleep. Leadbeater struggled with depression and addiction, and felt possessed by the protagonist of the novel he was writing, “who for three hundred pages tortures the world because of his own grief.”
After setting up this context, Leadbeater meanders in a nonlinear approach not unlike Didion’s own in her later memoirs. The narrative circles back on itself frequently, jumping forward and backward in time in chapters loosely themed around topics like friendship, romance and food, with Leadbeater juxtaposing memories from his life with Didion and with his family. At intervals throughout, he mulls over his tendency toward self-erasure, and his unwillingness to grapple with the past and integrate it into his current life and his future.
Rather than plotting an arc that builds self-discovery over time (“I have always been suspicious of the hero’s journey,” he writes), Leadbeater almost immediately conveys what he learned from Didion’s example. “One had the sense that she was traveling back and forth between two places: the seemingly banal present, and the other place, the place where there were no illusions about mortality and loss, where people were nakedly ambitious, craven, self-interested, morally compromised,” he writes in the second chapter. “Or perhaps she did not travel back and forth but had fused the two places entirely and could live in both places at once.” It is this sort of synthesis that eluded Leadbeater in his own life for so long, and it takes until the memoir’s final pages for him to truly embrace it.
This book’s well-wrought sentences mostly carry it forward despite loose plotting, but there are times when it stumbles due to uneven pacing. In several chapters, Leadbeater writes tributes to friends that feel out of place and tend to reveal little about the author himself. And we hear less and less about Leadbeater’s time with Didion as the memoir progresses. We’re left to wonder what she made of his lowest periods — after all, toward the beginning of the book, he writes: “It seems to me now one of the greatest gifts of my life that she was willing to make my problems her problems.” But Leadbeater writes that he cannot remember whole swaths of time when his drinking was at its worst.
Still, he makes it clear that Didion provided him with a tether to the world, a reason to keep living, because he had promised he would not leave her. And she shared with him a crucial perspective. Many prefer to think of Didion as only one version of herself — “the genius waif leaning against her Stingray” or “the lonely widow, padding aimlessly around her apartment, bereft forever without her husband and daughter,” as Leadbeater puts it. But, as he came to see, “she was all of those things, all at once … she did not try to reduce life down to a more manageable size in order to understand it; instead she endeavored to create a consciousness as large, varied, complex, and contradictory as life itself.” It is this sort of wisdom for which I once turned to Didion, and that Leadbeater himself amply provides.
Kristen Martin is a cultural critic based in Philadelphia. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow,” is forthcoming from Bold Type Books.
Joy, Death, and Joan Didion
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