THE UPTOWN LOCAL

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.