David Shields’ brilliant memoir/reflection, now out in paperback, is the perfect antidote to careless and frivolous summer reading. Although it’s eminently readable, the book is a fascinating combination of personal history, facts about life, death, love, sex, and just about everything else you can think of, and may well provide a jump start for your autumn serious thinking - without completely letting your brain rot this summer.
The national bestselling book may have slipped under the radar of many readers. Its title is not, perhaps, the most encouraging. But it’s true and author Shields seems bent on telling the truth - no matter how hard it is to take (for him, his father, the other subject of the book, or the audience).
What Shields does that is so wonderfully effective is to contrast his own, somewhat cranky middle-aged self, with his father who, in his late nineties, is only just beginning to slow down. Part roué, part rake, all man, Shield’s father’s lust for life both baffles and impresses his son and the author sets out in The Thing About Life Is One Day You'll Be Dead to explore the similarities and the differences between his father and himself, as well to examine the fragile nature of life itself. “Let the wrestling match begin: my stories versus his stories,” the book opens.
In the midst of his storytelling, Shields takes the adventurous route of detailing all kinds of things about all kinds of things, which could be tedious but winds up being absolutely fascinating. Where else could one learn that we share 99.9 percent of our genes with everyone else in the world, the details of octopus breeding, your IQ is highest between the ages of 18 and 25, and no one knows what causes puberty to begin. He also tells the reader that “As soon as your reproductive role has been accomplished, you’re disposable…Once a body’s mission is accomplished, nature has little interest in what happens next.” Nature, perhaps, but both Shield’s interest is in everything that happens first, second, third, next, and on until the end. And his research is prodigous.
The book is divided into four sections which carry us from infancy till death, and in those sections Shield’s chapters range from Decline and Fall (three entries) to Sex and Death (four entries) to Boys and Girls (four entries) to the improbable Hoop Dreams and hysterical Bloodline to Star Power where Shields traces his father’s obsession with an actor who he thinks bears the same original family name.
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