Always Crashing in the Same Car: A Novel after David Bowie

An intricate collage-novel fusing and confusing fact and imagination, Always Crashing in the Same Car is a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectivesthe protean musician himself, an academic trying to compose a critical monograph about him, friends, lovers, musicologists, and others in Bowies orbit.

At its core beat questions about how we read others, how we are read by them, how (if at all) we can tell the past with something even close to accuracy, what it feels like being the opposite of young and still committed to bracing, volatile innovation.

Set during Bowies last monthsthose during which he worked on his acclaimed final album Black Star while battling liver cancer and the consequences of a sixth heart attackyet washing back and forth across his exhilarating, kaleidoscopically costumed life, Always Crashing in the Same Car enacts a poetics of impermanence, of art, of love, of truth, even of death, that apparently most permanent of conditions.