Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography [Hardcover]

David Shields (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 2002

A self-reflective and highly inventive book that is both memoir and meditation on memoir. ENOUGH ABOUT YOU is a book about David Shields. But it is 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 candur, Shields covers a variety of subjects, language, sex, literary criticism, basketball, family, Bill Murray - all while exploring the impulse to confess, to use oneself as an autobiographical subject, to make one's life into a work of art. The result is a collection of poetically charged self-reflections which reveal deep truths about ourselves as well.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

More of a literary adventure than an actual autobiography, David Shields's Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography presents a collection of loosely organized, self-reflective essays, ranging from such disparate topics as the author's past, dreams, and heroes to his thoughts on basketball, Jewish culture, and Bill Murray. Uniting the book is Shields's examination of autobiography, his interest in the way we identify ourselves, and the most effective ways of investigating and communicating our identity.

Shields writes with convincing intelligence and fluidity on the book's more academic topics, such as the effectiveness of Nabokov's structure by memory association in Speak, Memory and Renata Adler's use of collage in Speedboat. Yet when he emulates such works with random glimpses into his own past and character, he doesn't provide enough personal detail to make effective use of these techniques. He's a bit too preoccupied with theory to offer a satisfying self-portrait. Ultimately, Shields seems distracted by the need to cover all his critical bases and make a postmodern statement, consequently distracting and distancing the reader from establishing much of a connection with the author. He writes in the book's prologue that he "wants to cut to the absolute bone" of "his own damned, doomed character," yet admits in the epilogue to having falsified much of its personal information. It's unfortunate that he doesn't let his academic guard down more often, because what personal insight he does provide (accurate or otherwise) is very entertaining. He recognizes the absurd self-absorption inherent in memoir, and that goes a long way in a book about the subject. An interesting if flawed experiment, Enough About You should nonetheless appeal to memoir enthusiasts looking for perceptive and humorous views on our own perpetual self-fascination. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly

Although its subtitle promises a bold and exotic journey through introspection, this somewhat rambling, definitely disorganized work could more appropriately be called "Musings in Partial Autobiography." Novelist and nonfiction writer Shields (Heroes; Black Planet; etc.) delivers a combination of invention and confession, telling his life story in snippets and half-remembered moments. He travels from one subject to another, skimming the surface of his life like an indifferent water bug. Some essays are steeped in standard autobiographical technique, as when he gains insight from memories of being a jerk at his high school newspaper's office, while others use a kind of free association, allowing Shields to discuss his favorite books without revealing too much of his feelings. In the introduction, he states that he wants to explore his own doomed character; he wants to cut to the absolute bone: "Everything else seems like so much gimmickry." But despite his sharp, excellent writing, there isn't a glimpse of bone here; there's barely even blood drawn. Shields succeeds in examining autobiography itself as a genre, sizing it up with an almost scholarly perspective, but in terms of his own life, he presents few details and then implies that even those may be fabricated or poorly remembered. Those who have come to appreciate Shields's fine writing will enjoy his thoughts on Bill Murray, Nabokov and Adam Sandler, but those seeking true adventure in autobiography should travel elsewhere.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (April 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743225783
• ISBN-13: 978-0743225786
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,556,583 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Shields is the author of twelve books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of the year by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include 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. 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; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.

Shields has received 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 now lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College's low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enough About You, June 3, 2002

By 

"potts_christopher" (Exeter, NH United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 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.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Personal essays on an assortment of things, April 15, 2002

By 

Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (Hardcover)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Give Yourself a Chance, July 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (Hardcover)

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.