Life's Work: A Memoir

ISBN: 0525510761

Author: Milch, David

Condition: New

The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction. Lifes Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimers loosens his hold on his own past.This is David Milchs farewell, and it will rock you.-Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid ThiefONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, USA Today, Kirkus ReviewsIm on a boat sailing to some island where I dont know anybody. A boat someone is operating and we arent in touch. So begins David Milchs urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milchs 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 racehorses 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 School 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, then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him.Like Milchs best screenwriting, Lifes 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 master class on Milchs 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.