Life's Work

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Description

I feel like I'm on a boat sailing to some island where I don't know anybody. I'm on a boat someone is operating and we aren't in touch. So begins David Milch's urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch's life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace. Betting on race horses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law only to be expelled for shooting out streetlights with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers' Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the most lauded television series of all time, made a family and pursued sobriety, and then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him. Like Milch's best screenwriting, Life's Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception, and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a masterclass on Milch's unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all.

Reviews

Like the best memoirs, Life's Work is intimate, exquisitely observed, and intense. But unlike mostand what sets it apartis the heartbreak it embodies, the finality it signals. This is David Milch's farewell, and it will rock you. * Susan Orlean *
A heartrending cry from the horizon line of consciousness, a hilarious yarn of the truth-telling variety, and a brutal case history of addiction and self-destruction, written in the most gorgeously humane voice Ive encountered in a work of nonfiction in a long while. I can think of few recent books that have pulsed with life this transparently, this powerfully -- Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm
A wise, sly, hilarious, and poignant account of a lifes work in hard drugs and hard television -- Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Netanyahus

Author Bio

David Milch graduated summa cum laude from Yale University, where he won the Tinker Prize. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He worked as a writing teacher and lecturer in English literature at Yale. During his teaching career, he assisted Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in the writing of several college textbooks on literature. His poetry and fiction have been published in The Atlantic and Southern Review. In 1982, Milch wrote his first television script for Hill Street Blues. Since then, among other credits, Milch created and wrote the shows NYPD Blue, John from Cincinnati, Luck, and Deadwood.