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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.
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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the coverChapter 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 keep one from accomplishing that feat. He thought he could beat them, but he couldn’t. One suspects it wasn’t much fun for my dad either.
His grandfather Jake, my great-grandfather, whose bed my dad’s mother, Esther, may or may not have been sharing, was not a nice man. Probably his most endearing characteristic was that he was a bootlegger. All the boys in the family—my dad’s uncles, my great-uncles—were enlisted one way or another to assist him. During Prohibition, what you never wanted to do was collar a really powerful man. What you wanted to do was collar a miserable Jewish prick, so the cops came to collar my great-grandfather Jake, and he said, “My son did it!” So one of my uncles had to leave town and ended up living on a houseboat in international waters. I think there was a warrant out for him. We’d visit on the docks and he’d stay on his boat. Another uncle started running a joint in Saratoga, the Piping Rock, a casino. When my dad was seventeen or so, he worked there for the summer as a busboy, and he loved it. But because my dad was the next generation, the edict was he had to go to college, so he couldn’t be involved in nefarious activities. Nobody was allowed to shoot pool with him. Nobody was allowed to do anything bad with him because he had to go to college. One day one of my uncles comes up to the pool hall, and my dad’s shooting pool with a guy. My uncle took the guy, threw him through a window, and broke his neck. He never played pool with my dad again. He never walked again.
What the people of the family said about my dad was, “Elmer can’t get involved in what we’re involved in.” So...
Reviews-
August 8, 2022 Milch, a TV writer and producer best known for his work on NYPD Blue and Deadwood, delivers a warts-and-all memoir. Born in Buffalo in 1945, Milch didn’t have it easy from the start: his prominent doctor father was also a gambler, alcoholic, and philanderer, and his mother was a driven educator who didn’t always keep track of her own kids. Between the ages of six and 13, Milch was routinely sexually abused at summer camp, a trauma he kept secret for decades. He was expelled from Yale after he shot out the lights of a police car during an acid trip, but not before he became a protégé of poet Robert Penn Warren. Milch’s big break came during the TV writers’ strike of 1982 on Hill Street Blues—the show’s producers had to take a chance on a screenwriter too new to have joined the Writers Guild—which paved the way for his later series of “shows known for profanity.” Deadwood fans will relish the behind-the-scenes accounts of casting decisions and the series’s origin story: the concept Milch first pitched, of a power struggle between cops in Rome, morphed into the morally complex western. But his professional success was marred by endemic self-sabotage in the form of erratic behavior and racking up millions in gambling debts. The circumstances of the memoir’s creation—Milch now has Alzheimer’s, so recollections derive from recordings made years earlier by his wife—lend the whole affair a sense of melancholy. It’s an unflinching self-portrait, and one that could just as easily come from the mouths of the unvarnished antiheroes he put on screen. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners/CAA.
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Profanity-laced yet well-written, this audiobook memoir by the creator of "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue" is unique because the author, David Milch, is suffering from Alzheimer's. Milch narrates the prologue with appropriate sobriety and drama; his rough-and-tumble voice matches an equally rough-and-tumble life. It's remarkable and impressive that Michael Harney's bass voice so closely resembles Milch's in his tour-de-force performance of the rest of the audiobook. Despite the author's excellent insights on the art of creative writing, his lifetime of self-destructive behavior is on every page. Harney is highly effective at re-creating the soul and style of Milch, making him simultaneously likable and unlikable. This audiobook requires patience, but the listener is amply rewarded with insights on the creative process. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
