Childhood

An excerpted chapter from David Shields’s The Very Last Interview (NYRB, 2022).

Anyone who survived childhood has more than enough material to write about for the rest of her life.—Flannery O’Connor

What’s your background?

Yes, just in general—what is your background?

Where did you grow up?

What were your parents like?

Are they still alive?

Do you have siblings?

Were you raised in a religious family?

Standard West Coast deracinated, detribalized Jewish secularism?

This is a photo of the rather humble house in which you grew up?

You may be weary of this line of questioning, but why do you keep writing about the same material over and over?

Is this art or repetition compulsion, if you know what I mean?

Essay or therapy?

If you’re remembering something from fifty years ago, to what extent are you comfortable calling that “true”?

Now your father—he wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, right?

And your mother wrote for the Nation, right?

Were you as obsessed with the “Cyclops” TV column in the Times in the early 1970s as I was?

When did you realize that John Leonard was writing that column?

Didn’t your cousin know him or something?

They worked together on the Daily Cal during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley? Sounds so mythical.

Did Joan Baez really sing at your sixteenth birthday party?

You guys knew Tom Hayden and that crowd?

Mario Savio and his posse?

Alan Cranston—didn’t your dad work for him briefly?

So, amidst Golden Gate Park anti-war demonstrations and flower power and R. Crumb and DROP ACID NOT BOMBS, where were you?

Who was little Davy Shields?

Card-carrying polemicist or incipient satirist?

Another way to say this is, your politics are a curious mix of lefty insurrection and rightist disdain—where are you in all this?

Are you William F. Buckley or William Lloyd Garrison?

Are you hanging out or a hanging judge—get my drift?

Do you share with me a profound antipathy toward everything Didion has become?

Was she an important influence you had to shed?

What influence if any were all the New Journalists you were assiduously reading in the then Bay Area-based Rolling Stone?

Hunter Thompson?

Joe Eszterhas?

Sara Davidson?

Et al.?

Paul Beatty says that everything that has made life even slightly livable in the 21st century was invented on the West Coast. Do you think this is true or do you just love anything that animates in you the East Coast/West Coast dialectic?

You like to say you peeked behind the domestic curtain to spy a very vulnerable and weak Wizard of Oz; what does that mean, in a political context?

How, for you, is it somehow connected to Kundera and his rabid anti-Communism?

What mind of kid were you?

“Mind”?

Did I say “mind”?

What kind of kid were you?

Jock?

Basket case?

Both of the above?

How did your parents process the fact that you were becoming a writer as well?

Did they live long enough to see you become the perpetual enfant terrible you’ve become?

Were they proud of you?

Competitive in what sense?

Are you competitive at all with your daughter (whose graphic memoir I’ve read and like at least as much as anything you’ve done of late)?

Is there a sense in which your work is prima facie evidence of untreated PTSD?

You’ve now written at least two—and one could easily say more like several—books about growing up, more or less; inevitable question: what gives?

You weren’t raised in a gulag or Nazi Germany or by wolves. When are you going to grow up, some might ask?

Your father’s name was Milton Schildkraut—that’s for real?

That was his name until he changed it after the war?

Due to anti-Semitism or anti-German sentiment or both?

Do you see yourself as a German Jew?

A Jewish-American?

Your mom’s “maiden name” was really Hannah Rochelle Schevill?

Is your personality—to the degree you think of yourself having a quite specific one—closer to your mother’s or your father’s?

Your so-called work ethic—where does that come from?

How about your “humor”—Mom or Dad?

Whence the angst?

Could you see ever being able to flip that feeling (or perhaps lack of feeling) into something truly positive and productive?

I seem to recall one reviewer saying you “articulate and exemplify the endemic disease of our time—the difficulty of feeling.” Touché?

Ever think you’ll feel anything again for real?

Would you call yourself a troublemaker as a tyke?

If you hadn’t become a writer, what would you have done?

Would you have survived the regimen required?

Is the Philoctitean wound-and-the-bow your single deepest narrative vector or only your most insistent?

Do you think that each of us becomes, in the end, pure persona?

Does anyone ever get beyond his own mask?

Mask upon mask? I get it.

Where do you fall, by the way, on the paranoia meter vis-à-vis coronavirus? So far you don’t seem to me insanely trepidatious.

Are you seeking an exit strategy?

How aggressively?

How self-destructively?

That incredible photo of you hitting the tape at the end of the 100-yard dash—where did all that light in your eyes go, Mr. Shields?