Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography [Hardcover]

For those of us readers who feel absolutely barraged by the literary world's seemingly never-ending thunderstorm of memoirs, "how to write" books, and autobiographies, David Shields has an answer. His self-proclaimed "attack on autobiography" succeeds in its poignancy, its quirky (often scary) humor, and its not-too-subtle critique on its own genre. Shields gives us his take on subjects ranging from criticism to Bill Murray to his own semi-fictional comings of age. He masterfully links 22 seemingly unrelated chapters in a manner which, upon finishing the book, the reader feels that he or she has been taken on a roller-coaster-esque ride through not just the author's life and culture, but through our lives and culture as well.

I read this book in an afternoon, in a single sitting. It's a book that, while maintaining its goal of introspection into something universally human, is still very fun to read. I felt the pangs of the narrator's past mistakes, laughed along with Shields when he quotes Mr. Murray, and got justifiably frustrated when taken along for a ride on the other side of a book review. Shields takes us into himself in an honest, open way and, in doing this, somehow opens some of our own doors; by telling us his dirty secrets, he reminds us of our own and lets us remember that we're all as goofy, confused, and [messed] as the next guy

Just as the cover is a menagerie of snapshots of the author, the insides of Enough About You contains 22 refreshing snapshots of one man's life that is somehow both unique and universal at the same time. Highly, highly recommended.

Photographs of the author from babyhood to middle age are everywhere on the great-looking cover of this book. Shields was a cute baby, a good-looking kid, and is a handsome man - but that's no reason to hold it against him.

Despite the flippancy of the book's title, in fact this is collection of deeply personal essays and informal cultural and literary criticism. Shields is a Professor of English and it's obvious he loves to teach: he provides a quirky survey course, too. In the first 45 pages, he cites more than several writers, among them his parents, Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, Bellow, Hunter S. Thompson (who once called him a "pencil-necked geek" for doubting some Thompson reportage), Sartre, Shakespeare, Proust, Updike, Nabokov - among others. In addition you quickly catch on that he loves film, and sports, and games, too. He loves to laugh - and is interested in the comics who provoke that laughter.

Shields doesn't embarrass easily, but he doesn't want to embarrass others, either. The piece "Properties of Language" is an appreciation, and it reminded me to reread some of my favorite writers. He loves Bill Murray and explains why in "The Only Solution to the Soul is the Senses." Shields recalls and deconstructs his obnoxious behavior toward a college girlfriend, his relationship to sports (he loves basketball, but would rather watch than play), and a variety of books and authors that have provided him intense pleasure.

His stuttering is a topic, too. He explains that his father stammered, but that as his son he took his dad's "halting speech and turned it into a full-blown stutter." Shields got help for his stutter at the University of Iowa, and tells that story, too. He wrote a great piece for his father's ninetieth birthday, but fear got ahold of him, and he never spoke it. Among Shields' many astonishing and beautiful assertions regarding his dad is this one: "He showed me how to love being in my own body, showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being myself and not some other self, and this self owes all of that to him."

These are essays that are personal, thoughtful, and satisfying.

I never suspected that David Shields Enough About You, Adventures in Autobiography would be able to take me to the introspective and invigorated terrain I found myself wandering by the time I had reached its close. Anyone who doubts that autobiographical work has the ability to deliver the proverbial "literary goods", or who has mistakenly identified as the exclusive domain of "great fiction" the pleasures, the insights, or the lingering pain we adoringly call "emotional power", has obviously not read Shields' transformative work.
Enough About You is a string of disparate fragmented passages, a protracted collage. Of particular interest to me was the essay on Bill Murray (which alone should be anthology material on the study of humor theory), and a magnetic retelling of the old "I read your journals" teen-love thread. The connections are scattered and loose, sometimes you find yourself reviewing, going back to other bits, or trying to figure why things seem related. Memoir and essay make up a major portion of the content, strung together on the surface only by the mental activity of the reader.
I have to admit, I backpedaled against what I thought was only going to be a lolling stream of rambles, self-conscious childhood reveries and literary cliquishness. That's the postmodern trap, you know: fragmentation (collage) and use of the first person have often been a way to spiral a story into self-obsessed rigor mortis. At the universities and literary circles, these works are often the roadkilled raccoon around which the critics gather and plant their mental maggots for years of discussion. Referencing the self, along with so-called "creative non-fiction", and most other conventional "reality based" postmodernisms are academic buzzings so overused and overstated, any hint of them will usually flick me to a fitful, nervous sleep.
But it didn't take long before I realized that with David Shields, I was seeing the residuals of a different kind of thinking; his work is developed and spicy and poignant and has an uncanny ability to set your insides a-churning. More importantly, it's a lot of fun to read.
The passages are always short and pithy, and they are nearly-every one of them tasty mouthfuls. This is an example of where the "good read" stuff started to sneak in, despite my critical cynicism. Somehow I felt like I was cheating, like the bon-bon wrappers were piling up around me and I was having too much fun.
Shields takes a moment to clarify himself. While giving us a book review, says he loves collage pieces because "they're all madly in love with their own crises." The fragments work themselves back together. He seems to say, "yes, you're doing some of the work, but what did you see?" He shows us, especially critics like myself, that our issues are our own, and what we get from a writer is at least as much about ourselves as it is about what they are offering. He also makes a compelling argument that our greatest qualities are often one in the same with our deepest flaws.
Resist if you must. I did.