The Fame-Adjacent Memoir

Suze Rotolo's "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" and Cory Leadbeater's "The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir"

I am an avid reader, and while I love to get lost in a good novel, I’ve always been drawn to nonfiction. I tend to gravitate toward trauma memoirs—books about people who have survived toxic upbringings, turned their backs on fundamentalist religious communities, or struggled with and overcome addiction. I like stories where people discover and act on their inner strength—most likely because I had my own trauma as a teen and find it comforting to see how others marshalled the resilience they needed to succeed in life.

Generally the memoirs I read are not by celebrities, though sometimes the authors become celebrities because their books hit it big—as with Tara Westover’s Educated and pretty much every memoir by Dani Shapiro, from her first, Slow Motion: A Life Rescued by Tragedy, to her fifth, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, which sent her career to new heights.

I tend not to read a lot of celebrity memoirs because as much as I like gossip, I’d rather get my dose of name-dropping from publications like People and Vanity Fair. When I read someone’s life story, I want to learn about their inner strength. That’s why I loved actor Alan Cumming’s first memoir, Not My Father’s Son. I didn’t expect to be blown away by it, but it turns out he’s an excellent storyteller, and boy did he have a story to tell. I also liked Baggage: Tales from a Fully-Packed Life, his second memoir, though it didn’t pack quite the wallop of Not My Father’s Son (a good thing — nobody should have to live through the abuse that Cumming suffered at the hands of his cruel and miserable father).

I don’t read books in any particular order — if I come across a review or hear about something that interests me, I’ll usually put it on hold at the library. Sometimes I wind up reading books and discovering a pattern, which is what happened last week when I inadvertently wound up reading two memoirs in succession that fit into a category that used to really bother me: the celebrity-adjacent memoir.

I’m not sure why I once thought it was bad that people had books published just because they knew someone famous or had had an experience that was deemed newsworthy. Maybe the books I read that fit those categories weren’t so good (but don’t ask me what those books were, because I’ve long since forgotten the titles). Or —and it pains me to admit this— it’s quite likely I was envious because I was having such a hard time getting traction in the publishing world. Not a very redeeming quality, envy, but I’m happy to report I’ve outgrown it. Now if I read a celebrity-adjacent memoir (or anything, really) that’s lousy, I put it aside and read something better.

Needless to say, I didn’t put aside the two books I’m going to discuss here. They were both edifying, albeit for different reasons.

The first was Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. Rotolo became Bob Dylan’s girlfriend after he arrived in New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961. I was curious about her life after reading Susan Bordo’s Substack about the vast difference between Suze and Sylvie Russo, the fictional girlfriend in the new Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.”

As portrayed by Elle Fanning, Sylvie is stunning, artsy, and one-dimensional: her main role in Dylan’s life seems to be to act adoring and encouraging and, when she can’t divert his attention from his music or his duets with Joan Baez, to grow misty eyed and gaze upon him like a sad puppy.

The Suze Rotolo whose memoir was published in 2009, when the author was 65, is lively, observant, and very much an independent spirit: she broke up with Dylan not because she was jealous and couldn’t compete, but because she was an artist and person in her own right, and she didn’t want to spend her life being the handmaiden to his talent or the intermediary between him and his adoring public.

Freewheelin’ isn’t brilliant literature, but Rotolo’s upbringing was really interesting, and she did a great job capturing an important moment in cultural history. She shares behind-the-scenes details not just about Dylan, but about those in his orbit, including Peter Seeger and the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia. I devoured the book over a weekend, and after I finished it I began reading a book I’d just picked up from my holds at the library: The Uptown Local: Joy, Death, and Joan Didion: A Memoir, by Cory Leadbeater.

I don’t recall where I heard about Leadbeater’s book, only that I wanted to read it because I knew it was by Didion’s personal assistant. I pictured a young-to-middle-aged woman who worked at a publishing company and catalogued Didion’s correspondence and responded to it. I have no clue where I got that idea, but it was definitely off base.

For starters, Leadbeater is a male, and he was in his early twenties and a student in the MFA program in poetry at Columbia University when James Fenton, a poet he’d sought as a mentor, got him the gig as Didion’s personal assistant. In that capacity Leadbeater filled a wide range of roles, among them personal shopper, scheduler, secretary, and companion. Often he lived in Didion’s apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan, where he all but recited “Pinch me, I’m dreaming” on a daily basis.

Leadbeater, the middle of three brothers, grew up in a working class family in Jersey City. His father abused him physically and emotionally throughout his entire life. Leadbeater’s brothers were spared, and I’m still not entirely sure how he managed to have the good relationship with his siblings that he describes in the memoir. I suspect the reason he wasn’t overwhelmed with resentment toward them is that he turned much of his anger inward, toward himself.

He's deeply insecure, but Didion doesn’t notice or, more likely, isn’t bothered by it. She welcomes him into her world unquestioningly and gratefully. She’s a frail widow who has buried her only child, so it’s tempting to think she sees Leadbeater as a child substitute, but their relationship seems to be more that of equals, of friends, of people who genuinely enjoy each other’s company, even though it’s clear one of them is working for the other.

Leadbeater is battling plenty of demons including a serious drinking problem, grief over the loss of his closest friend from college, and fear that Didion and the boldface names he meets at her house and social events will discover that his father is about to be sentenced to prison for real estate fraud. Covering up something that big comes as a cost, including the often out-of-control drinking Leadbeater engages in when he’s not on Didion duty.

An ongoing theme in the memoir is that Didion basically rescued the lost, young writer and helped make him at home in the kind of rarefied life he could only dream of growing up across the river in New Jersey. If that were the only story line, though, The Uptown Local would be a pretty dull book. What gives it the required dramatic tension is the balancing act Leadbeater forces himself to perform: with Didion he’s an aspiring literary artist apprenticed to and employed by a literary superstar, while away from her he’s a working-class substance abuser spawned by an abusive criminal and his enabling wife and he’s drowning in self-doubt about whether he actually has what it takes to be a writer.

The fact is, if he hadn’t been Didion’s assistant, this, his first book, likely wouldn’t have been published. What Leadbeater and Rotolo have in common is that they became first-time authors because they had stories that nobody else could tell, about what it was like to have an intimate relationship with notable cultural figures of the late twentieth century.

It would have been easy to exploit those relationships but Leadbeater and Rotolo have grounded their stories and turned them into books that offer more than gossip and name-dropping. Rotolo has captured the people, places and music that were the foundation of the folk music movement in the early 1960s. Leadbeater provides readers with an insider’s look at one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century juxtaposed against a coming-of-age story of a talented young writer nearly crippled with the kind of self-doubt that plagues so many of us who choose this career.

What fame-adjacent memoirs have you read? And why would you recommend them—or not?

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