On the observers – Emma Garland in TLS:

‘Cory Leadbeater’s The Uptown Local: Joy, death, and Joan Didion leans most closely into the legend, which is unsurprising considering that he was her live-in personal assistant during the last nine years of her life. It’s a memoir that lays bare the author’s own demons – a graduate student at Columbia University struggling with his writing, struggling with depression, struggling to distance himself from his dysfunctional youth in New Jersey – while offering an account of his unique access to Didion. The pair were connected by the British poet James Fenton, one of Leadbeater’s tutors at Columbia, who emailed him cryptically with a job offer, of sorts – a “well-known writer” friend needed help with “all kinds of things”. Without knowing who or what, Leadbeater agreed to start the following week. The first anecdote of his relationship with Didion describes them listening to Ella Fitzgerald’s “There’s a Small Hotel” and discussing Didion’s favourite hotels – the Royal Hawaiian, the Beverly Wilshire. Leadbeater is wearing a blue hat and, without saying a word, she takes it off his head, puts it on hers and wears it for the rest of the afternoon. It’s in these moments that The Uptown Local is most successful: with Didion, ever the observer, in the rare position of being observed.’

(…)

‘“[W]riters shape their … narratives about the world in ways that are different from people who aren’t writers – and sometimes to the detriment of everyone around them.” They are, Ellis believes, “doomed to be alone, creating false narratives so people will pay attention”. This was Joan Didion’s life’s work. She wasn’t just a writer. She was a celebrity, an institution, a cultural assassin who embedded herself with the runaways and acid heads of Haight-Ashbury, then made her name by tearing them apart – and she never pretended otherwise. As she put it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Writers are always selling somebody out”.’

Read the article here.

A cultural assassin in times of revolution that was just a ‘cultural breakdown’ – and yes selling somebody out, if worse comes to worse, themselves.

As to Leadbeater, be careful with personal assistants. They might not be looking for work but for a story, for a book.