Review of Floor Sample by Julia Cameron

*Floor Sample* by Julia Cameron (2006). Published by Tarcher.

I had never heard of Julia Cameron or Floor Sample until I received a copy of the book from the publisher via NetGalley, which I am eternally great for the opportunity to have and read. But I will admit, the cover of the book is what drew me in. I barely read the synopsis before going into it several months are getting ahold of the book, and I ended up bringing my Kindle to New York City for my work trip just so I could go and get this done.

There were many advanced copies I needed to get through, and I find that the subway commute from where I stay in Brooklyn and back is usually more than enough for me to plough through several books over the course of a week or two.

Anyways, I had never heard of Cameron, as I stated before. I know of The Artist’s Way but had never gotten around to reading that, either, which is has become the story of my life these days. There’s simply too much to read and not enough time for my little brain to process everything that I need to do.

But because I went in blind, I was doing some double takes at my book because of who she knew and how she got to a certain point professionally.

Onwards with the review, shall we?

A memoir of connection, art, and addiction.

So we begin Floor Sample with Julia Cameron’s time at Georgetown in Washington D.C., and trying to make connections as a writer slash journalist. She ends up transferring to Fordham in search of greater opportunities in New York, but while working at a magazine, she’s assigned to cover a little known filmmaker at the time named Martin Scorsese.

She’s supposed to be writing about his upcoming movie that he’s been running around town making, a little one called Taxi Driver. But when they meet for the first time, sparks fly, and their relationship progresses really quickly.

It becomes impossible for her to be impartial in her writing at this point, but the marriage falls apart really quick. Cameron is very aware that Scorsese is seeing Liza Minelli on the side and is cheating on her, so the marriage gets broken up, despite the fact they have a daughter together in the span of their one year relationship happening. What ends up happening next is a descent into addiction for Julia Cameron.

She uproots her life and goes to Los Angeles, as New York is Martin’s city. She tries to find work in the new city and along the way, she ends up drinking a lot more and using drugs.

This escalates throughout the memoir, which goes deeper into the behavior and symptoms she began to experience as she fell deeper into addiction and couldn’t find her way out of it originally. As the memoir progresses, she does try to find ways out of these situations and addictions, battling against her demons to unblock her creativity at the same time.

I think my problem with this memoir is that Cameron doesn’t go the extra length to connect it to a point of reflection. There was a shocking amount of just telling the situation as it was for me, and it felt like it was just recalling the events that had happened.

There wasn’t enough, or too little of, reflecting on the moment and being like, “yeah, this was a destructive.” That makes these kinds of memoirs dangerous because in an era where people aren’t thinking as critically, they can romanticize this way of life because Cameron found her way out and wrote The Artist’s Way.

Overall Thoughts

I think Julia Cameron has the potential to write a great memoir about this, but this one falls flat completely for me. To be surrounded by such fascinating people and then have such a gold mine of a story to write and reflect about is rare for a lot of people, but I think she asks too much of the readers from the get-go.

There’s kind of this feeling that she assumes you know a bit about her already going into it, and for someone like me who ends up casually reading this book, I don’t know anything about her. I have no emotional investment.

So at the end of the day, I think I wanted to see this story presented in a different way.

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