David Shields - Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography

Enough About You attempts to move beyond those self-created mythologies we save for first dates and talk show appearances. Shields wants to capture the lumps in our throats, the ambivalences and misconnections we dont know how to express. David Shields uses gimmicks and sidelong glances to catch the truth with its pants down. If we can hold our impatience at bay, the technique works, provoking the reader to rethink the clumps of chronological data that pass for biography, so inadequate to convey the slippery slopes of a human life. JOY PRESS, Village Voice

Enough About You works because of the writers fearless honesty... in Enough About You, Shields ditches the outside subject matter to confront his narcissism head-on, a particularly potent theme in these self-absorbed times. J. PEDER ZANE, Raleigh News & Observer

[I]n an era of confessional memoirs, reality television, celebrity biographies, and Web cams broadcasting the details of everyday lives... Shields takes up autobiography as a strategy to unravel what it means to be human in a media-saturated culture... a kind of mutated memoir that pokes fun at our endless navel-gazing. ANDREW ENGELSON, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A valuable contribution to autobiographical writing. It not only furthers our understanding of David Shields but it also advances our appreciation of the depth and breadth of whats attainable within the genre. PETER DONAHUE, Lifeboat: A Journal of Memoir

[A]mazing... intriguing... fun... breezy... pithy... lively... wily... diverting... insouciant... Booklist

Novelist and cultural commentator Shields explores his own damned, doomed character in this plum collection of vignettes. What hes trying to get at in these pages is the mystery of identity, cutting to the bone as he explores the impulse to write autobiographically, to turn oneself into ones subject. Shields makes it easy to identify with his confusions and screw-ups and ambivalences, but his insightfulness and careful consideration are his canny talent. Gladdeningly inclusive, like a hug from Walt Whitman: declarative and fraught and good. Kirkus Reviews

Shields is a pioneering writer, breaking new ground. The future of personal narrative looks a lot like this book. ROBERT DARK

In this book on confession, self-reflection, and self-absorption, David Shields gets to several essential features of contemporary American character, and he does it with wit, intelligence, and a kind of insight that is all the more impressive because of its epigrammatic eloquence. The result is sometimes funny, sometimes profound, sometimes moving, and sometimes all these things at once. CHARLES BAXTER

Enough About You is a bold and altogether original approach to the pleasures and punishments of the personal narrative. I salute its enterprise whole-heartedly. VIVIAN GORNICK

David Shields has managed to achieve near-total self-exposure without being a damn showoff. In Enough About You, hes a post-modern Ancient Mariner, fixing us with his glittering eye and buttonholing us about everything, and we cant help but listen. He even volunteers for the ultimate literary suicide missionanswering your criticsand he comes back without a scratch. DAVID GATES

Enough About You reclaims the [autobiography] genre and lifts it to soaring new heights. Rochelle Renford, Weekly Planet

Shields turns out a series of uncommon and provocative discussions about what its like to play, to watch, to be watched, to be judged, to feel weak, to feel strong, and to not quite know what to feel. ERIC NEEL, ESPN.com

He recognizes the absurd self-absorption inherent in memoir, and that goes a long way in a book about the subject... a thoroughly entertaining literary memoir... should appeal to memoir enthusiasts looking for perceptive and humorous views on our own perpetual self-fascination. Amazon.com

Copyright 2002 by David Shields. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN-10: 1-59376-219-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-219-3

Cover design by Alvaro Villanueva

Interior design by Maria Mendez, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Soft Skull

1140 Broadway, Suite 704

New York, NY 10001

www.softskull.com

www.counterpointpress.com

For

Laurie and Natalie

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.

William Gass

Foreword to David Shieldss Enough About You: Notes toward the New Autobiography

IN THIS BOOK, David Shields is obsessed with what it means to be an autobiographical writer. Autobiography is where DNAs double helix gets bent and twisted, turns in on itself, tangles and knots its strands, and yields its greatest challenges to the writer and, in the case of David Shields, considerable rewards for the reader.

Shields has written autobiographical nonfiction and autobiographical fiction. In his second novel, Dead Languages, which deploys stuttering as a metaphor for the difficulty of human communication, the character based on Davids father is described in all of his flawed idiosyncrasy. When Davids father read the fictional depiction of himself in Dead Languages, he was, according to Shields, somewhat angry about the way his fictional counterpart was laid bare. In a letter to his father in Enough About You, Shields argues that the portrait of his father is a sympathetic one that honors the complexity of living by striving for a kind of painful truth, rather than sentimentality. However, Shields also acknowledges that his fathers response to this is probably, Yeah, yeah, but how would he like it if I wrote a book in which all of his most embarrassing moments had been resurrected for all to see? Point taken, but I side with the author here.

In nonfiction, theres usually no attempt to cloak identities in even the most translucent fictional guises, yet there is never anything mean or menacing about the way in which Shields writes about the people in his life. Insightful irony, perhaps, but nothing cruel. Hes too much in love, albeit nervously, with life and the living.

Im not a writer; Im an autobiographical documentary film-maker. I find utterly familiar Shieldss struggle with maintaining sufficient distance from life (in order to write about it) while per force having to remain immersed in life in order to have anything to observe. This defines the vexing and paradoxical terrain of autobiography, no matter what the medium. Shieldss work artfully weaves into a single thematic braid acute observations about, on the one hand, the world around him and, on the other, his own internal state. Enough About You is a crazy quilt of seemingly random swatches: appreciations of Bill Murray and Adam Sandler, Vince Carter and Bob Knight; explorations of stuttering, sex, vicariousness, celebrity; exegeses of Rousseau, Nabokov, Renata Adler; a dream about his father. Shields