Shields - How literature saved my life

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Big Shoes Productions, Inc.: Excerpts from the Delilah show. Reprinted by permission of Big Shoes Productions, Inc., as administered by Clear Channel Communications, Inc.

Charles Mudede: Excerpt from On Culture by Charles Mudede from Seattle 100: Portraits of a City (New Rider Press, 2010). Reprinted by permission of the author.

Cond Nast: Excerpt from Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity by Ray Kurzweil, originally published in Wired (April 2008). Copyright 2008 by Cond Nast. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Cond Nast.

Counterpoint: Excerpt from The Brothers by Frederick Barthelme. Copyright 1993 by Frederick Barthelme. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

The David Foster Wallace Trust: Excerpt from A Conversation with David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery from the Dalkey Archive Press. Reprinted by permission of the David Foster Wallace Trust.

Georges Borchardt, Inc.: Excerpt from Paradoxes and Oxymorons from Shadow Train by John Ashbery. Copyright 1980, 1981 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for the author.

Scribner: Excerpt from The Choice from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems Revised by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by The Macmillan Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, co editor

Jeff, One Lonely Guy, coauthor

The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death, coeditor

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead

Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine

Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography

Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro

Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories

Dead Languages: A Novel

Heroes: A Novel

DAVID SHIELDS is the author of thirteen previous books, including Reality Hunger (named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications), The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead (New York Times best seller), Black Planet (National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). He has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Harpers, The Yale Review, Salon, Slate, McSweeneys, and The Believer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Other Titles by David Shields available in eBook

Reality Hunger 9780307593238

Black Planet 9780307767103

The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead 9780307268495

Visit: www.davidshields.com

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In which I evoke my character and personality, especially the way I always argue against myself, am ridiculously ambivalentwho knew?

A T A VERY EARLY AGE I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud ). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as frustrated writers. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didnt want to write. They worshipped real writers, i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped.

Hellmans statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this years fashions, was my mothers mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation. Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., A Few Words About a Wall, which she overpraised by way of dismissing. She died of breast cancer during my junior year of college.

My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic-depressive and constantly checking himself in to mental hospitals, where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy treatments, died a few years ago at ninety-eight. Ill never forget his running back and forth in the living room and repeating, I need the juice, while my third-grade friends and I tried to play indoor miniature golf. Thirty years later, I asked him what he thought of my writing, and he said, Too bad you didnt become a pro tennis player. You had some talent. I sent him a galley of my book The Thing About Life Is That One Day Youll Be Dead, in which he plays a major role; he sent back a list of errata. When the book tied for fifteenth place on the bestseller list one week, I clipped the listing and sent it to him. He asked me whether that countedbeing tied for last. I live in fear of becoming my father.

I was the editor of my junior high school and high school papers. In high school I worked at McDonalds. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. My freshman year at Brownwhere I was an almost unfathomably devoted English major who closed the library nearly every night for four years and who, at the end of one particularly productive work session, actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, I shall dethrone ShakespeareI worked as a custodian. Got fired. (Despite once having been an athlete, I have never been good at simple physical maneuversnever learned how to snap my fingers properly, blow a bubble, whistle, dive, rope climb, swing higher and higher on a swing.) One of my fellow student-custodians asked me if I was this bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water. I also worked as a proofreader at the Rhode Island Historical Society. I worked as a TA at Iowa. I house-sat whenever and wherever possible. I got a lot of grants. I made a very small amount of money stretch a long way.

I first started teaching at a private high school, with branches in Santa Monica and Malibu, for the children of the rich and semifamous. The kids would be, say, the daughter of the comedian Flip Wilson, the girlfriend of the son of Elizabeth Montgomery, Rob Lowes little brother. They werent, needless to say, interested in their school-work. I would sit in the front of the class and pretend to have answers to their questions about history, geometry, science. Who wrote