Author(s): Cory Leadbeater

Literary | New Non-Fiction | June 2024

Cory Leadbeater grew up in a working-class town in New Jersey, one of three brothers, a quiet kid looking to find refuge from the rougher parts of his childhood in Dickens, Austen and Frost. Almost a decade ago when he was just starting at Columbia's MFA program, still living at home, he received an offer to work with a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. The writer: Joan Didion. Over the course of nine years working with Joan, Leadbeater struggles to walk the tightrope that appears before him after he accepts such an extraordinary offer. As he is drawn into a rarified world he'd only dreamed of as a child, his own family life, his mental health, his creative hopes spiral. He finds an advocate for his fiction but eventually has two manuscripts rejected, all while his mother battles cancer. In his other life with Joan, he dines with dignitaries, accompanies her to parties and art openings, helps keep order in her world, while he writes and drinks and tries to conquer his own addiction and depression - forces that have always accompanied his rich imagination. In hypnotic prose that pulses with life and longing, Leadbeater gives us an intimate look into a rare and beautiful relationship with a literary iconand exposes the fault lines between who gets a chance at the modern American Dream and who is left behind.