David Shields
David Shields didn’t set out to write a book about death. Initially, Shields simply set out to pen a few essays. He wrote about an array of topics — his bad back, the way his cat acts like a teenager, the joys of swimming at his local pool. But as Shields dug deeper into his interests, clear themes began to emerge. Most of his essays seemed to circle back around the trials and tribulations of having a human body, the fascinating cycle of life and — especially — life’s inevitable ending. Gradually, Shields ‘simple collection of essays was reshaped.
The result is his latest book, cheekily titled The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. In it, Shields mixes those personal essays (and others) with raw data on the body’s development from birth to death. But the real heart of the book is Shields’father, now in his 90s and still surprisingly physically robust (Shields calls him “the Energizer bunny”). It is this humane center that connects the various strands in the book, and helps to explain Shields’own fascination with bodies, and how they change from vigorous, brief youth to old age and death.
What emerges is a book that approaches human frailty with hope, while remaining careful not to fall into the self-help trap of ladling out advice or, worse, philosophy. Shields simply wants to share some intriguing tales and facts, and to supplement them with commentary from famous folks ranging from Emerson and Zola to Woody Allen and Shields’own back doctor.
Shields recently sat down to talk about his book’s genesis, how readers have reacted and what it’s like to be the guy at the party who can’t stop talking about death.
You’ve had a couple of readings already for this book. What was the reaction?
The main thing that I’m struck by is that despite the subject and despite the title, for people the book is oddly giddy and oddly a pleasure. It’s not grim or somber or sober — it’s actually very life-hugging. I also originally thought the book would be for people my age or older but, to my surprise, people in their 30s or younger are reading it, not just people planning the end of their life or whatever. When I gave this reading in Menlo Park in California, this elderly woman said, “You’re lucky to have written this book at your age.” She thought it was kind of a blessing that at middle age I’ve written this book about mortality. It’s sort of a weird book for a relatively young person such as myself to write, but it allows me to actually employ some of this revelation for the rest of my life.
Well, you cover every angle of the life experience so presumably anyone could find themselves in there.
People say that the book is sort of a reflecting pool. You can’t help but compare how creaky your bones are to how creaky your bones are supposed to be at your age. The book is ostensibly about my father and me, but I hope it’s also, for readers, sort of reading themselves.
So how did you start putting the book together originally?
It was a funny process. It began as a series of chapters exploring the body, with me being middle-aged, 46 and 47, and hating my body and how creaky it was getting. So I had one essay on my bad back, one on swimming and then I realized I had to add a lot of data. I was trying to tell a universal story of the human body so I started to do a huge amount of research about the body. Then I attended this non-fiction conference and I realized that all the work I really liked had a deeply personal aspect, a human to anchor it. I realized I needed to anchor the book in my father. Here’s my dad, he’s this human survival machine and he makes me contemplate my own body.
This is a pretty grand topic. How did you limit the scope of your research?
What helped is that the topic is nothing more than life and sex and death; it’s everything, but it’s about these things not generally, but corporally, through the body, and I thought I would do it cradle to grave, from infancy to oblivion, from me, to my father to people in general. I did a huge amount of research, and had dozens of pages of citations from books, but then I decided that this book doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive medical document on the subject. There was definitely a version of the book that was considerably longer. I would fall in love with the data and the quotations because they were so moving to me.
The metaphor I think of is that the material is like a kite. The kite can fly as high as it wants to, it can go hundreds of feet in the air, but I always need to be there holding the kite from the ground, so that even if I’m going on at length quoting a bunch of famous people’s last words, it’s important to wonder what my last words will be or what my father’s last words will be. I was painfully aware while I was editing to always bring it back to myself or [my daughter] Natalie or my father. So it has some of the unpredictability of life, so that you’re in the middle of a bunch of data and suddenly get a very confessional passage on my acne or something.
Your dad gets a place of real prominence, but how about your mom?
That was something that I thought about and at some point I kind of panicked, like is this really unbalanced? My mother was a major formative influence on my life, at least as much as my father. Partly, it’s that she died around 30 years ago, and also this book is very much about the body and she wasn’t a hugely physical person, she was mainly a cerebral and intellectual and political person. I’ve written about her in fiction and non-fiction, basing mother figures on her, so I felt like I had written about my mom before. Plus I felt like this book when it took shape was kind of Oedipal, about fathers and sons, so I felt like it was okay if it was somewhat unbalanced. Well we’re both bald, we like sports, we’re writers… Every non-fiction book has to find its frame and emphasis, and I could write a whole book about my mom, but this isn’t a family memoir.
Right it’s a book about the human body, and you and your father.
Yeah and I think he is a wonderful lens through which to view human physicality, which is a thing I’m obsessed with in a general sense too. There’s something really joyful about a lot of little physical moments, and that can be swimming laps at the pool or eating a bag of donuts.
Did you find any books inspiring or influential while writing?
There were some books that were terribly helpful, like the Oxford Book of Aging, which follows the same cradle to grave timeline as my book. Also, this book Famous Last Words. In all there were dozens, if not hundreds, of sources. If my book has a contribution, it’s the way that it mixes and matches three convergent streams: a data stream, a wisdom stream and a father-son stream, and you can read other books on fathers and sons, like Tuesdays with Morrie or whatever, then read some dry books on data and then pore over some books of quotations, which would all be kind of boring, so instead I wanted to vary all these together. Also David Markson, whose books like This Is Not a Novel and Vanishing Point hover between fiction and non-fiction, and they’re all contemplations on mortality, has been a tremendous influence on me. My book owes a lot to his work, much more than any medical book per se.
How were you to be around while researching this book, given the material can tend to be a bit morbid?
There was a time when I was researching the book that I was the guy who at dinner every night would bore everyone with this obscure macabre data that I couldn’t help sharing. I was that guy at the party, for a couple of years. I was the death guy. But I found the data so hilarious and so moving. From one perspective it’s God awful, but from another you can’t help laughing and feeling something communal with your fellow human beings. My wife and daughter, I think, found the information pretty compelling, but I also feel like they’re glad I’ve moved on.
People in the Pacific Northwest have a reputation for being a bit more health and body-conscious than people in other parts of the country. Did living there have an influence on this book?
I hate to admit that it does. I’ve lived here for quite some time, but I wasn’t born or raised here, I’m not a nature person, I’m Jewish and Seattle is not very Jewish, so there’s things here that I resist. But let’s say I had been working at the University of Pittsburgh for the last fifteen years, would I have written this book? I’m not sure I would have. I think because you’re surrounded by mountains, and on a clear day can look out your window and see Mount Rainier, it does put your life in perspective. People here tend to not cross against a red light, like it’s part of the natural cycle. I think being in Seattle, which is very focused on health and nature and is not a very religious place, the least God-fearing place in the country, created a context where I had the nerve and the impulse to write this book.
Well, there’s been a real increase in interest in organic food and healthy living across the country. Did that play a part?
People here are very health conscious, and it’s easy to make fun of because it can seem sort of robotic, pleasure-hating and sort of narcissistic, but on the other hand it’s cutting edge. Think about Alice Waters. In a way she’s changed the way people eat. I mean my wife is a very good cook and we are quite health conscious, and then I’ll walk past someone who’s eating like a bag of donuts, like a heavy or obese person and he or she is stuffing his or her face with glazed donuts. I would say those people have the secret of life no less than I do. All that careful diet and exercise, is it going to solve anything for me? Not really. You’ll live slightly longer or be healthy, but there’s something beautiful to me about that joy in the bag of donuts.
I was reading this biography of Hunter S. Thompson and he was acknowledging that he was a drug addict and an alcoholic and saying you don’t get out of this life alive, and in some ways he was just an addict, and there’s no reason to romanticize it, but in some ways he had it figured out. I am sort of moved by human gluttony, and I find myself moved by the fact that we all die, but cheesecake tastes good!
Were you concerned at all about this turning into a self-help book?
That was the enemy all along. I mean even the title could be misread as a self-help title, although I hope it’s pretty tongue in cheek. A long time ago I wrote a novel, Dead Languages, about growing up with a stuttering problem, and there too I was concerned that the book not fall into a kind of therapeutic mode like ‘here’s how little Jeremy leaned how to overcome his speech problem.’I never wanted this book to feel self-help-ish. It was important that the book feel sardonic, and feel kind of unhelpful in a certain way, that it be existentially nervous. To me, it’s sort of like the anti-self-help book that nevertheless, for a certain kind of reader, actually offers something to hold on to.
Inserting your father must have made that even harder, given the tendency of people to sentimentalize.
For me a lot of it was the paradox of it. Here I was a relatively healthy middle aged person haunted by death, and then my dad is this quite old person who through his late 80s was addicted to life’s physical energies, and through his early 90s was jogging and playing golf and tennis. I didn’t want to succumb to some kind of “He really gets it” thing. I mean he’s been shadowed by manic depression, and he’s a somewhat exhausting person, selfish, vulgar and he’s this kind of raw oceanic life-force. It’s not necessarily good or bad, so I wanted to avoid sentimentalizing it.
In an interview I read you claimed that “every book retires the subject.” Would you care to amend that statement in light of the fact that the subject of this book can’t really ever end?
Haha, right. Well, you got me. What are you going to do, retire the subject of life and death? I will say that, having written the book over the last three plus years, I definitely feel a different relationship to my own mortality than I did when I started. I feel like I’ve retired the subject in the sense that I feel the only way out is deeper in, and by overwhelming myself with death data I feel weirdly relieved. It sounds kind of corny, like the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, like “I’m ready to live!” Even though it’s on this ultimate downer subject, I feel that the book and I as a writer and I hope the reader too, come out of the book joyful.
So that’s the take-away from the book then. It’s about getting over it, and exorcising the “death haunt.” Is that the use of the book or the project?
You nailed it. I think of the chapter about my back as a parable for the whole book. You never get over your back problem, or your mortality. My back pain is a metaphor for the human condition, but you have to kind of lean into it, dig the fact that you do have a body, don’t pretend that there are any solutions to your back problems or to your mortality. That’s what kind of drove me crazy in my 30s and 40s, looking for a solution, like transcendental meditation or religion or the immortality of art, and for people who are actively religious the book may be off-putting for that reason. But if you can live with that, it may be inspiring.
