New York Times bestseller
“[One of the] hottest new books of the winter season.” — Jacqueline Blais, USA Today
BookSense Selection
Amazon Significant Seven
Powell’s Books New Favorite, Staff Pick
“A double memoir-commonplace book in which Shields presents his and his father’s life stories, lovingly encrusted with facts about aging and death (it turns out your soul doesn't weigh 21 grams after all, and your hair and nails do not keep growing postmortem) and quotations (‘After 30, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death’—Emerson). The result is an edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage. ‘I want him to live forever,’ Shields writes, ‘and I want him to die tomorrow.’” — Lev Grossman, Time Magazine
“Mr. Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer. Approaching the flatline of the last page, we want more.” — Stephen Bates, The Wall Street Journal
“There are paragraphs so finely wrought, so precisely tuned to the narrow-band channels between reader and writer, that the caught breath of inspiration and the sighs of expiration leave us grinning and breathless. Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born. They made a great model when they made his father, and a reliable witness when they made the son. This diamond of a book—brilliant with homage and anecdote—might outlive them both.” — Thomas Lynch, The Boston Globe
“By rights, The Thing About Life should go straight to the bottom of your bedside table stack, next to that Jacques Barzun slab you’ve been meaning to get to. In fact, this is a daring and even breezy read, rigorous when it needs to be but also wry and dryly tender. And, more than anything else, confessional. For Shields is obsessed not just with Death but with death. His own, of course, and most particularly his father’s. And so, interlaced with all the mortality data is an affecting, if unconventional, family memoir that uses death as the filter for examining past ties and present entanglements. Shields’s prose has an easy gait, but he gets at something hard and thorny: the ways in which some of us needs or parents to die even as we recoil at the prospect. And the way in which our bodies deny the reality of their own extinction.” — Louis Bayard, Salon
“If all this sounds depressing, it’s not. There’s a comfort to be found in this sober investigation of mortality, in Shields’s clear-eyed look at the ways in which we come undone. While we may increasingly live life in our heads, he returns us to the primacy of our bodies. Throughout the work, Shields is a clean and efficient stylist. He weaves into these pages a loving and unsentimental portrait of his 97-year-old father, a man with no interest in dying, a man who will soon die nevertheless. In these sections, Shields’s book reads a little like Tuesdays with Morrie minus the schmaltz, a primer on aging and death for those who take theirs without the sugar. It’s also full of cool shit you’ll want to share over drinks: In the second century the average life span was 25; Karl Marx’s last words were, ‘Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.’ What it all adds up to, the drink that Shields serves stiff and neat, is this: ‘The individual doesn’t matter.’ Death is the great collective experience. What to call this odd book, then? Memoir. Essay. Literary nonfiction. Who cares? Any book worth reading is ultimately a book about dying. And Shields’s book makes this point more explicitly than most. At its best, it functions the way all books should –as memento mori. Reminder of death. If you don’t have one, you oughta. You’re gonna die.” — Benjamin Alsup, Esquire Magazine
“Ultimately, the humanity of Shields’s interior and exterior exploration is what makes The Thing About Life—and life itself—worthwhile. Enthralling, perplexing, illuminating, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead defies categorization.” — Meredith Maran, The San Francisco Chronicle
“A joyous, thrilling, and funny riff on life and the human body. Shields has written a love letter to life, while talking quite a bit about how our bodies march us straight toward death. He counters the scientific with the hilarious, and when he sat down to write, he made a wise and generous decision: to convey what he learned in a confident but self-deprecating manner, the way a smart friend might share facts over the dinner table. And despite the impressive acreage of facts, Shields is really concerned with the rich individuality that makes humans human. Different as we are, we’ll all love The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead.” — Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, The Seattle Times
“Many writers aim to capture the human condition in all its variety, audacity, and contradiction, but few can claim to get as close to their target as David Shields. Equal parts memoir, family biography, anatomy textbook, Darwin crash course, and compendium of literary epigrams, Shields’s ninth book is that rarest of artistic accomplishments: the truly original vision brought to fruition.” — Josh Rosenblatt, The Austin Chronicle
“If the story of Shields and his father is the book’s heart, its bones are Shields’s short declarations of scientific fact. ‘Every decade after age 50, your brain loses 2 percent of its weight,’ he writes. Or, more playfully: ‘Nobody knows what causes puberty to begin.’ The effect of intertwining the personal with the impersonal, human interaction with mortal inevitability, is breathtaking. Shields had us laughing out loud, even in the face of death.” — Jonathan Messinger, Timeout Chicago
“Though written in language that feels entirely liberated from the tradition of letters, from the tone of authority, from the heaviness of history—a language that sparkles not like special stones in the depths but purely on the surface of things—though the writing feels and flows with an energy that is new, sensitive to the thin film of the present, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead sings a very old song. ‘Sing me something,’ said the angel to Cædmon, the author of the oldest poem in English. ‘Sing me frumsceaft,’ sing to me about creation, about the world, its origin and its end. The song that the cowherd sings to an angel is the song now sung by David Shields: the song about the human condition. With Shields, the song of creation speaks of no shelter, or a maker of that shelter; it's a song about exposure. If there is a leading theme in Shields’s work, it is exposure in a world where there is nothing left but humans, their bodies, fears, families. Not even the religion of literature offers us protection from the elements of reality. This is why Shields’s language is so clear, so transparent. Everything from the world makes its way through the words to the reader with little or no distortion. There is a trick to all this—but the trick works. That trick makes David Shields look like he is hiding nothing from the reader. And what he bares in this book is the existential situation of a writer in the middle years, the middle ages, the middungeard—the place between heaven (youth) and hell (old age). ‘In the middle of the journey through life I came to find myself within a dark wood,’ writes Dante. At this point in life, Shields, who is 51, decides it is time to sing about what it means to be a human being.”” — Charles Mudede, The Stranger
“Examining his own body as the wheels start falling off, Shields rattles off great swarms of ineluctable disorders, diminishments, and declensions that attend the human passage from plum to prune. A finely crafted exploration of aging from gimlet-eyed Shields—lively skirmishes with a deathly topic, giving the loss of life its due. His observations are sensitive, often funny, and occasionally rueful…but he invests the roll-call of dwindlings with a hint of bravado, his prose as exquisitely paced as the patter of a soft-shoe dancer trying to cheat the final curtain.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Inspired by the immense vitality of his 90-something father, David Shields looks at the arc of a human life in order to come to terms with mortality. Shields’s eclectic approach and personal voice make this extended meditation on living and dying a pleasing and occasionally profound read.” — Publishers Weekly
“An informative and occasionally unsettling meditation on Shields’s own aging body and his [97-year-old] father’s seemingly endless vigor and strength. He writes with great candor about the vitality of his father. Also woven into the text are clever quotes on matters corporeal from the likes of Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, and Martha Graham. Shields’s memoir is a sobering, at times poignant, reminder that none of us gets out of this life alive.” — Booklist