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Informationen zum Autor David Milch Klappentext The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction . Life’s Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimer’s loosens his hold on his own past. “This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews “I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating and we aren’t in touch.” So begins David Milch’s urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch’s life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace. Betting on racehorses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law School only to be expelled for shooting out streetlights with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the most lauded television series of all time, made a family, and pursued sobriety, then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him. Like Milch’s best screenwriting, Life’s Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception, and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a master class on Milch’s unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Peace Bridge My folks were married when my mom was twenty-two, young for sure. My dad was, relatively speaking for that day and age, senior, at thirty-four. Mom was a small-town girl, grew up in Batavia, about forty miles outside of Buffalo. Very provincial. Her parents had a furniture store adjoining their house so my grandfather would just walk out one door and in another. The store’s still around. There were six children of whom she was the baby. She had four brothers and a sister. That was an identifiable dynamic—she was spoiled and they were all very protective of her. The boys were much less cosmopolitan than the girls. Batavia in those days, ten thousand people, wasn’t a city at all. There was that fierce parochialism that you get in a small town. They were defensive—sure, it’s a small town, but I’m big enough to beat your balls off. They were very close as a family unit. My dad, and in turn my brother and I, came from a clannish background. It was a knock-around neighborhood my dad grew up in in Buffalo. Tough neighborhood, very much segregated by ethnic groups—Jews were all in one place, Italians in another. His mom, Esther, was the eldest of seven children, though sometimes when I tell this story I say ten children. My dad was an only child. His mom kept having miscarriages because she was diabetic. My dad weighed like sixteen pounds when he was born, too much sugar. Not too long after, Esther’s mother croaked—my dad’s grandmother. So Esther moved back into her parents’ house, and, depending upon how one interprets the data, possibly into her newly widowed father’s bed. I think his name was Jacob. The odd man out was her husband, Morris, my grandfather, who had moved into the house with them. Whatever was going on so radically disempowered him that he tried to kill himself by going over Niagara Falls. They have various impediments in place to k...
