How Literature Saved My Life - Softcover

Amazon Guest Review of “How Literature Saved My Life,” by David Shields

By Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the best-selling memoir Wild. Strayed writes the “Dear Sugar” column on TheRumpus.net. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Allure, Self, the Missouri Review, Brain, Child, The Rumpus, the Sun and elsewhere. The winner of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, her essays and stories have been published in The Best American Essays, The Best New American Voices, and other anthologies.

Great books are born of grand passions. The best literature is made when authors refuse to rest easy, but instead dig into their obsessions in order to express not just what’s true, but what’s truer still. This greatness is apparent on every page of David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life, a culturally searching declaration of the power and limitations of literature that’s also a highly idiosyncratic, deeply personal soul search by one super smart man who consumes and considers books as if his life depends on it.

Part memoir, part manifesto, How Literature Saved My Life is as wide-ranging as it is intimate, and much of its power lies in the ambitiousness of Shields’s reach. It’s a book that defies definition. My category for it is simply a strange book that I love. It’s a serenade wrapped inside a cross-examination; an intellectual book that reads like a detective novel. In its pages, one reads about subjects as diverse as Tiger Woods, the theory that someday tiny robots will roam inside our bodies to reverse the damage caused by aging, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and the private journals of Shields’s unsuspecting college girlfriend.

This is a long way of saying that How Literature Saved My Life is a book with balls. It doesn’t ask for permission to be what it is: an original, opinionated, gentle-hearted, astonishingly intelligent collage of the ideas, reflections, memories, and experiences of a writer so avidly determined to understand what literature means that the reader must know too.

AUTHOR'S STATEMENT:

Samuel Johnson said that a book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it; my book aims to be theorem and proof of the last half of this equation. How Literature Saved My Life is simultaneously a praise-song to the saving grace of the act of reading and a candid acknowledgment that all criticism is self-portrait in a convex mirror. I aim to combine the strongest aspects of autobiography and criticism without succumbing to the characteristic pitfalls of either genre (respectively, narcissism and pedantry). How Literature Saved My Life undoes the imperial tone of my previous book, Reality Hunger--which Chuck Klosterman said "might me the most intense, thought-accelerating book of the last ten years"--and replaces it with a serious, intimate, unguarded sadness that I've never quite gotten to before. How Literature Saved My Life is a meditation on the fate of reading in the digital age, arguing for and embodying a way to read and write that is deeply intellectual and literary but not a retreat to the orthodoxies of the past. In a sense, my new book "solves" the problems that my previous book raised. How Literature Saved My Life is very passionate/optimistic about the possibility of contemporary work (including, I hope, my own) to capture what it feels like to be alive now.

AUTHOR'S SELF-INTERVIEW: 

Why did you write this book?

I wanted to explore and celebrate how literature has saved my life.

That's a pretty strong statement. Has literature really saved your life?

Yes. At every stage of my life, books, reading, writing have rescued me.

How so?

The most obvious example is that I was a boy who stuttered so badly that he came to worship words. In a lot of other ways, too, though.

Such as?

After writing three novels, I grew disenchanted with the form, or it grew disenchanted with me. Novels very, very rarely give me what I want from literature. Samuel Johnson said that a book should either allow us to escape existence or teach us how to endure it. The books I love aren't kidding around; they are manifestly exploring the meaning of existence.

What are some examples?

In my book, I rhapsodize about dozens of such books, but the book that is foremost in my mind right now is Simon Gray's four-volume Smoking Diaries, which I'm rereading now for the third time in five years. A man, whose friends are dying and who by the final book of the tetralogy is dying himself, stands before us utterly naked and takes account: Rembrandt's late self-portraits, in prose. Each entry is typically only a few paragraphs, the entries connect in beautifully oblique ways, and each volume is held together by an understated but brilliantly deployed metaphor. Having read the diaries, I feel less lonely.