Enough About You: Notes toward the New Autobiography

Nonfiction – Literary | Simon & Schuster | Hardcover | 2002 | $22.00 | 0-7432-2578-3
Reissued in paperback by Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint|2009| $14.95|1-59376-219-4

“Enough About You is an autobiography that complicates the process of autobiographical writing, of talking about oneself directly, at every turn . . . [I]f consciousness is irrevocably fragmented, [Shields is] pretty good at putting the pieces back together. ‘Seamless’ would be the wrong word for this book, but Shields’s ability to weave a coherent and rather likable voice—ironic, self-implicating, blackly funny, hopeful—through these disjointed passages is impressive.”—Elaine Blair, Newsday

Enough About You is a book about David Shields, but it’s also a terrifically engrossing exploration and exploitation of self-reflection, self-absorption, full-blown narcissism, and the impulse to write about oneself. In a world awash with memoirs and tell-alls, Shields has created something unique:  he invites the reader into his mind as he turns his life into a narrative.  With moving and often hilarious candor, Shields ruminates on a variety of subjects, all while exploring the impulse to confess, to use oneself as an autobiographical subject, to make one’s life into a work of art. Shields explores the connections between fiction and nonfiction, stuttering and writing, literary forms and literary contents; art and life; he confronts bad reviews of his earlier books; he examines why he read his college girlfriend’s journal; he raids a wide range of cultural figures (from Rousseau, Nabokov, and Salinger to Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, and Bobby Knight) for what they have to tell him about himself; he quotes a speech he wrote on the occasion of his father’s ninetieth birthday and then gives us the guilt-induced dream he had when he failed to deliver the speech; he also writes about basketball and sexuality and Los Angeles and Seattle, but he is always meditating on the origins of his interest in autobiography, on the limits and appeals of autobiography, on the traps and strategies of  it, and finally how to use it to get to the world. The result is a collection of poetically charged self-reflections which reveal deep truths about ourselves as well.

For Discussion

1. Return to the prologue and revisit the line: “Here, also, is how I give you you. Here, finally, is how you give me me.” In what ways is Enough About You written by the narrator and also written by what the reader brings to its contents?
2. How do the concepts of written and spoken language function in the book? In what ways is language both a prison house and a paradise? In what ways does it connect us and also keep us apart?
3. On page 28, during the narrator’s dream about his father, the narrator fails to recognize a picture of himself in the dream. Compare this scene to the one of page 40 when the narrator reflects on the picture taken of him by Renée. In both cases the narrator fails to recognize certain aspects about himself. How does this inform the book as a whole?
4. What myths do you hold about the East and West coasts of the United States? Return to the chapter “Remoteness” and look for similarities and differences between the narrator’s views and your own.
5. Shields writes,  “… for me 1981 is the year America became the America as we know it—the year everyone suddenly started breathing the same air.” Do you agree? Disagree?
6. Consider the collage form of the book and the narrator’s own admission of his love for this form.
7. Rachael plays a central role in the book. How do her story and the interlocking details of Butterfly Stories inform the book as a whole? Does Butterfly Stories explain, possibly, why the narrator continues to miss Rachael?
8. On page 124, Shields writes about celebrities: “We resent that we’re members of a religion with such flimsy gods.” Discuss.
9. In Enough About You, Shields often revisits previous nonfiction books of his own and revises (or amends) the details of his life. In what ways is he “sneaking” in an attack on the traditional lines between fiction and nonfiction?
10. How does the narrator, by way of Adam Sandler, address his own conflicted relationship toward Jewishness?
11. Why is Shields drawn so powerfully to the qualities in Bill Murray that he himself does not possess? Can you think of any celebrities you admire for the same reason? How does this inform your own character?
12. Consider the contradiction between the narrator’s attempt at discovery and the ways in which, at the end of the book, this endeavor turns back on itself toward self-destruction and blindness?
13. Why is the book called Enough About You?
14. Who is this book about? Is David Shields the author or are we all?
15. Before reading Enough About You, had you ever read any of David Shields’s other books? Do you see any connecting threads?

About the Author

David Shields is the author of ten books, including The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller; Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. A new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is forthcoming from Knopf in January 2010.

His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, he is a contributing editor of Conjunctions magazine and lives with is wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.  Shields’s work has been translated into ten languages.