David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, Black Planet, and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice).
The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in April 2022. The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.
The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the PEN/Revson Award, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
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Hi David, thanks so much for joining us today. Can we kick things off by talking about your writing career to date?
I’m the author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the most important books of the last decade by Lit Hub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in April 2022.
The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which I co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. I wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.
The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and the PEN/Revson Award, I have published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. My work has been translated into two dozen languages.
Can you take us through the creative process behind your recently published book, The Very Last Interview?
I decided to gather every interview to which I’ve ever been subjected, going back nearly 40 years. If it was a radio or TV interview, I transcribed it. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but I knew I wasn’t interested in any of my own answers. The questions interested me, however—approximately 2,700, which I collated and curated into 22 tightly focused chapters. Then the real work began: rewriting and reinventing and remixing the questions and finding a throughline.
During the pandemic, an interviewer pummels me. What do interviewers and interviewees believe in? What—at the edge of the apocalypse—does the reader believe in, with absolute conviction? If nothing, then what sustains us? If something specific—love, family, art, civic engagement, “god”—to what degree are any such consolations actually quite illusory?
I burn myself and my own work down to the ground. Am I conducting a mad lab experiment or trying to open up a new space for myself or, weirdly, agreeing with his most benighted critics?
A writer is supposed to try to “tell the truth” about everything. What if he were to try to tell the truth about his own work? What if he were to “read against” the affirmations offered by his previous books? Could he survive such a self-dismantling? Would he be left all alone? The increasingly loud threat of suicide begins to echo.
A centuries-old tradition: in late middle age or early old age, a writer—confronting his own spiritual exhaustion and impending mortality—ruthlessly interrogates himself. Innumerable examples: Anne Carson, Alphonse Daudet, Annie Ernaux, James Baldwin, Michel Leiris, Hervé Guibert, V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, John Cheever, Cyril Connolly, Camus, Rembrandt, Adrienne Kennedy, Kundera, Philip Roth, Thomas Bernhard, Margo Jefferson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Simon Gray, Spalding Gray, Renata Adler, Eduardo Galeano, David Markson, Beckett, Michel Leiris, Rousseau, Emerson, Montaigne.
What does a typical writing day look like for you?
I wake up very early: 5 or 6 am, drink too much coffee, and write as deep into the day as possible. I swim in the afternoon and read at night. Boring/thrilling.
Do you have a target word count that you like to hit each day?
I count it a good day so long as I’m working on the book (whatever the book is). That said, I try to write between 500 and 2,000 words a day.
What would be your top advice for writers out there trying to get published?
Forget about being published per se. “Write yourself naked, in blood, and in exile” – Denis Johnson.
What does your writing workspace look like?
Nothing special. I can write anywhere.
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