In 1999, Jennifer Lopez released her first record, On the 6—a title that alluded to her commute from the Bronx to Manhattan while working her early jobs as a dancer. Perhaps Cory Leadbeater thought better of titling his memoir the same, opting instead for The Uptown Local, which says as little about Joan Didion as the book itself…but “at least” readers know he had to take the 6 train during the final part of his commute to get to her apartment (scintillating indeed!). A workplace where he himself admits that he spent most of his time drinking in the back room, sleeping there every night for four of the nine years as her, for all intents and purposes, caretaker.

While, for some, getting a book deal based on being a “celebrity” assistant might feel “icky,” for Leadbeater (whose last name, appropriately, has some masturbatory connotations), it seemed a chance to get a lot off his chest (and yes, get off in general). Not about Joan Didion (though her name is mentioned in the full title: The Uptown Local: Joy, Death and Joan Didion: A Memoir), so much as his fraught childhood and various insecurities about class standing. Specifically, the intense disconnect and bifurcation that came with suddenly ascending into the upper echelons of New York City (via none other than the Upper East Side) from his former station in life as a “working-class” New Jerseyan. His entrée into this world began with having poet James Fenton, who had become Leadbeater’s mentor while he was a graduate student at Columbia, refer him to an email about a “well-known” author being in search of an assistant. The rest, as they say, is history.

One might say that Leadbeater was first led to the “gig” in 2012 (a year, incidentally, that many prophesized would be “the end”—and maybe it was). For that’s when he struck up a mentorship with Fenton, who, in 2013, would pass along the “job posting” about the famous writer in need of a personal assistant. Even if Didion’s needs were more geared toward having a “minder” rather than an assistant. Someone, in short, who would be present day and night in case something health-related happened to her or she fell, or some other such common health hazard among the elderly. It hardly sounds as glamorous as being her assistant might have been in the “Didion heyday” of the late 1960s and 1970s. But then again, millennials like Leadbeater had probably already grown accustomed to having lower standards in terms of expectations for glitz and “sin.” In other words, life as an artist had already become decidedly “milquetoast” in post-9/11 New York.

Still, who was Leadbeater to turn down such an “opportunity”? The opportunity to go down in history not as his own person, his own standalone writer, but as “Joan Didion’s assistant.” Something he willingly admits to taking the risk on a couple of times in the brief-but-somehow-long-and-overwrought narrative. One that commences in an annoyingly wistful, Carrie Bradshaw sort of way: “…[my father] was in prison while I lived rent-free on 71st Street with Joan, where she taught me about fish and the New York Review and love.” Among the blurbs justifying a sentence like that is one from Dana Spiotta on the inside of the dust jacket, insisting, among other things, that The Uptown Local is “a kind of love letter to the complexities of New York City, the miraculous place where everything seems possible.” A.k.a. even a “lowly” New Jerseyan with “no pedigree” can end up being the hired help for someone who’s a big deal.

And yes, Leadbeater is sure to mention—many times, in many ways—that he felt like a perennial outsider in Didion’s world, never treated with much respect or regard by the company she kept. Which, honestly, should say something about Didion since, as the old adage goes, “You are the company you keep.” And if Joan rolled with a lot of hoity-toity cunts, well… Even so, of course it’s “understandable” that Leadbeater would be enchanted by the whole thing—this unexpected turn of events in his otherwise dreary/exciting-in-a-bad-way life. Namely, his father’s imprisonment for real estate fraud (having capitalized on the subprime mortgage rates that eventually spurred the 2008 financial crisis after the housing bubble burst). Leadbeater’s dad? Yeah, he was one of those people that took advantage of the ample pre-2008 possibilities for mortgage fraud (and wire fraud, to boot). So while Mr. Leadbeater (whose first name is never given) goes through a lengthy trial and sentencing process, his son is convinced that, even though he’s now “made it” in the world just as his father has failed spectacularly, he is nonetheless as much of a fraud as his father. An imposter who will be found out and ejected from Didion’s world—perhaps by none other than Didion herself. Though, repeatedly, Leadbeater is also adamant about mentioning how beloved he is by Mrs. Dunne, writing such anecdotes as, “…when I introduced Joan to Liz [his girlfriend], Liz made a nervous joke about Joan getting rid of me one day. Joan looked stonily at Liz. ‘No,’ Joan said sternly, and flatly. Joan waited, then followed it up: ‘No,’ she said again, and the subject was closed.” So much for writers having a sense of humor.

But one supposes that’s what happens when you become a “prestige” writer—and a moneyed one, to boot (in fact, Didion might have been the last writer who actually made bank off such a profession in a manner that didn’t require writing total schlock…save for some of her and John’s screenplays). Everything starts to be taken way too seriously. Granted, that was Didion’s writing style—to speak on serious matters in somber tones. The last subject she would write about in that signature way was her daughter, Quintana, in Blue Nights. Her final release of new material, and a companion, of sorts, to her other “grief novel,” The Year of Magical Thinking.

Blue Nights came out in 2011, two years before Leadbeater arrived onto the scene to help with, apparently, not much related to writing. And while Leadbeater might have seen his newfound position as Joan’s righthand man as a stroke of good fortune, the reality was that he came into the picture as Didion was giving up on her lifelong purpose, resigning herself to an existence where she could no longer do the thing she loved with the level of perspicacity that had come to be expected of her.

And so, in the final years of her life, all we really learn from The Uptown Local is that Leadbeater read to her, brought her the things she needed and took walks with her down Park Avenue and other main thoroughfares of the Upper East Side. For someone who spent nine years with her, it’s very little information to be gleaned in the over two hundred pages that speak mostly to Leadbeater’s own insecurities and grievances. These being manifest in a description like, “When the ceremony [read: Joan’s funeral] concluded, I was invited to a small luncheon [Leadbeater had clearly been spending too much time with older ladies to use this word so freely] with some of Joan’s circle, but I wished never again to speak to several of them. They had long regarded me as the help, the unfortunate necessity that had come with Joan’s age and aloneness. Whereas Joan had never behaved aristocratically toward me, several of those closest to her afforded themselves the banal vulgarity that came with class superiority.”

To put this very specific moment in print as a “fuck you” to all those in Didion’s circle who “slighted” him (or just didn’t treat him like the great writer he saw himself as) is a testament to what this book is really about—its true “purpose,” if you will. And that is to say “fuck you” to everyone and everything that did him dirty in the past: his dad, his alcoholism, the publishers that rejected his various other manuscripts (that were actual works of fiction instead of a memoir—always a mistake of a genre choice for a first novel by someone who wants to write fiction). Hell, “the universe.” Even if it’s that very entity that brought him to Joan, who he was so close to but can still say nothing of substance about to the readers who likely picked up this book in the hope that he would.

Despite this, there are a couple of occasions when Leadbeater is sure to remind his reader that this is “his story” too. Most notably in the Acknowledgements (always important to read), where he emphasizes a thank you to the person who told him, ‘It’s your story, too.’” Though maybe that’s a person the reader ought to chide rather than thank. What’s more, one wonders what Didion would have written in a novel with Leadbeater’s name in the title. Or perhaps she would have known better to attempt writing a story that’s not really “there.” Nonetheless, Leadbeater has clearly gotten what he wanted out of this publication: 1) to be published “legitimately” (a.k.a. by one of the Big Five) and 2) to settle some old scores. All in a bid to prove, at any cost, that he’s not “New Jersey trash.” But maybe that’s no worse than Joan needing to prove her own worth by getting her loutish boyfriend, Noel Parmentel, to put in a word with an independent publisher to ensure that her debut, Run River, got published, thereby setting her on the course toward becoming Leadbeater’s employer.