By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion
Cory Leadbeater, Fleet, $32.99
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote Joan Didion in her seminal 1979 essay collection, The White Album.
As it happened, to continue living was a daily trial for someone close to her. Cory Leadbeater, her personal assistant for nine years, considered “self-erasure” more than once while working with the acclaimed writer and journalist. The fuel to keep going came from writing his own dark fiction, a steady supply of bourbon, and knowledge about the limits of reinvention.
Didion too played a role keeping her assistant alive – if even she didn’t know it. In The Uptown Local, Leadbeater recounts the almost decade-long relationship assisting Didion, a rare assignment that offered both stability and erudition during devastating personal and psychological upheaval. First, there was his father’s imprisonment for mortgage fraud, the result of a get-rich-quick scheme flipping houses and cheating banks. Then his close friend died suddenly in his sleep. Finally, a cancer diagnosis arrived for his already suffering mother.
As these crises unfolded, Leadbeater’s impulse for self-annihilation beckoned each day while attending to Didion. The job had arrived by chance when he befriended a university lecturer who set up the unlikely pairing. “Need for a Personal Assistant” read the cryptic email that arrived one night in 2012. After an awkward first introduction, the relationship quickly became one of co-dependence. When Didion suffered a fall a year into his tenure, she “made me promise not to leave her; I did promise; I did not leave her”.
Devastation and ecstasy often arrive together, Leadbeater writes, these emotions elbowing each other through the door of our defenceless mind. With Didion, Leadbeater was thrust into the rarefied world of Supreme Court justices and eminent New York editors while his father phoned from a New Jersey prison, pleading for legislative transcripts and money for vending machine commissaries. But Didion, even in her diminutive stature, held an intense gravitational pull that kept Leadbeater shielded from his crumbling private life.
Didion in her New York apartment in 2005.Credit: Judy Griesedieck/Getty
As the years passed as a companion and confidante to the author, Leadbeater succumbed to deeper self-destruction. There was heavy drinking, internet searches of school shootings, and growing mania about his novel-in-the-works.
What proved one of the most devastating experiences was when Leadbeater’s novel – which Didion had told him was “wonderful” – was summarily rejected by publishers.
Some of our suspicions about the enigmatic Didion, such as her taciturn demeanour and observational eye, are confirmed in the memoir. The famed journalist never did small talk and remained circumspect with her words. Vanilla ice-cream eaten with a fork was apparently a favourite after dinner, while listening to poetry (particularly about California) proved a private comfort when melancholia set in.
Didion famously personalised her reportage while also keeping her own writing under tight control. Such hallmarks of Didion’s prose are clearly imitated by Leadbeater, who similarly adopts – sometimes unevenly – a self-contained and idiomatic style to enrich his own memories of their time together. “No one knew what I did or felt except Joan, who seemed to understand it all,” he writes.
Episodic moments, from welcoming the birth of his daughter to the death of Didion in 2021, unfurl across The Uptown Local to a stirring and epiphanous end. After her death, Didion’s dictum to chronicle the incoherent and imprecise parts of life reverberates loudly for her former assistant. The magical truth finally extracted from a decade with her is that “accurate accounting matter[s] more than neat narrative”.
The Uptown Local shows Leadbeater embracing Didion’s maxim – even if it involves painfully recounting his own fractured life. Through expressive and exposing prose, he charts parallel journeys – one spiritually flourishing in Didion’s private home, the other emotionally unravelling thanks to his home life – that never reconcile in the end. The final lesson offered is Leadbeater’s own addendum to Didion’s famous words: sharing our stories, both of suffering and of joy, is what truly keeps us living.
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