READERS GUIDE

“There are paragraphs so finely wrought, so precisely tuned to the narrow-band channels between reader and writer, that the caught breath of inspiration and the sighs of expiration leave us grinning and breathless. Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born. They made a great model when they made his father, and a reliable witness when they made the son. This diamond of a book—brilliant with homage and anecdote—might outlive them both.”
—Thomas Lynch, The Boston Globe

The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are intended to enrich and deepen your group’s reading of David Shields’s The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a book which begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about Shields himself, and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, and old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers—from Lucretius to Woody Allen—yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family.

Introduction

Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion—an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

A book of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead will move readers to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. The book begins with this sentence: “Let the wrestling match begin: my stories versus his stories.” Do you see this book as a battle between David Shields and his father? If so, what are they arguing about, and who wins in the end?

2. Shields emphasizes the idea that people should face the bare facts of life, including our inevitable decline and death. However, he does not find his own unflinching investigation of the limits of our mortality upsetting. How does his perspective enable him to incorporate but move beyond gloom? How does his father’s perspective differ?

3. The book is a mixture of anecdotes from various stages of David Shields’s life and his father’s life. In addition, the reader is given dozens of quotations, and entire sections that are focused on scientific data about the aging process. What holds all of these different forms of writing together? What did you think of this structure for the book?

4. The book charts the various stages of life. Do any parts of this aging process, as described in the book, frighten you or make you feel other emotions? As you read, how do you relate, personally, to the different stages of life being described? How does this book make you feel about your own aging process?

5. The title of the book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead is, in a sense, flippant or humorous. It’s also a harsh truth. How does humor work in the book? How does harsh truth work in the book?

6. Over the course of the book, the author provides dozens and dozens of quotations from historical figures, and from other writers. What did you notice about this collection of people, all together? Which individual quotations most resonated with you?

7. What is the role of sports in the book? There are eight sections named “Hoop Dream.” How do these sections, specifically, and sports in general, interact with the themes of the book?

8. Another running theme in the book is fame and popular culture. How do Shields’s discussions of fame and popular culture touch on the central themes of the rise and fall of the human body?

9. The book is filled with coexisting dualities: Peter Parker vs. Spiderman, Milt’s tough exterior vs. his emotional vulnerability, the urge humans have for our offspring to be like us vs. the hope that they will be nothing like us. How else do you see this theme surfacing in the book? What do you think the author is getting at with these dualities?

10. How does the author incorporate scientific evidence into this book? How does science function in the work for you, the reader?

11. Of all the biological data in the book, which pieces of information have become most clearly lodged in your mind? Were there pieces of this kind of data that you wanted to share with other people? If so, what were they, and why did you want to share them?

12. How would you quantify this book? Is it nonfiction; is it memoir, biography, literary criticism? How does it affect your experience as reader that it is not easy to categorize? Why do you think that the author wrote it this way?

13. In the chapter “Everything I Know I’ve Learned from My Bad Back,” Shields talks at length about his bad back. What does he mean when he says that “everything” he knows he learned from his bad back? What, in this context, is “everything”?

14. How do you think Milt Shields felt about this book, its publication, and the fact that it became a bestseller? What do you imagine he said to his son about it?

15. The book ends with notes for five different eulogies Shields might give at his father’s funeral. Why five eulogies and not one? How do the eulogies differ from one another?

About this Author

David Shields is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Black Planet (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). A contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Yale Review, The Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

www.davidshields.com