Life's Work: A Memoir of Storytelling and Self-Destruction

Author:   David Milch
Publisher:   Pan Macmillan
ISBN:  

9781035005635


Pages:   304
Publication Date:   15 September 2022
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
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Life's Work: A Memoir of Storytelling and Self-Destruction


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   David Milch
Publisher:   Pan Macmillan
Imprint:   Picador
Dimensions:   Width: 15.30cm , Height: 2.60cm , Length: 23.20cm
Weight:   0.376kg
ISBN:  

9781035005635


ISBN 10:   1035005638
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   15 September 2022
Recommended Age:   From 18 years
Audience:   General/trade ,  College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

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Reviews

Like the best memoirs, Life's Work is intimate, exquisitely observed, and intense. But unlike most-and what sets it apart-is 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 I've 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 <i>The Ice Storm</i> A wise, sly, hilarious, and poignant account of a life's work in hard drugs and hard television -- Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <i>The Netanyahus</i>


Like the best memoirs, Life's Work is intimate, exquisitely observed, and intense. But unlike most-and what sets it apart-is the heartbreak it embodies, the finality it signals. This is David Milch's farewell, and it will rock you. * Susan Orlean *


Author Information

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.

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