Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography

Rating:
Summary: Enough About You
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Enough About You
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Painfully self-revealing...
Review: Halfway through this book I lost myself somewhere in the story: I found that I was learning something there by heart. Enough About You is not only a painfully self-revealing illustration of its author, David Shields, but also a portrait of our universal givings and misgivings. Despite his (our) flaws, he is still able to embrace himself, his relationship with others, and the world. Woven throughout these stories (the chapters can be read as independent essays or as a novel exploring the same theme) are reflections on the interactions between reader, writer, and human beings in general. The book works on a number of different levels: as simple stories of a boy growing up, as reflections on the authorial process, and as a more complex statement of the nature of life and love.

Rating:
Summary: Painfully self-revealing...
Review: Halfway through this book I lost myself somewhere in the story: I found that I was learning something there by heart. Enough About You is not only a painfully self-revealing illustration of its author, David Shields, but also a portrait of our universal givings and misgivings. Despite his (our) flaws, he is still able to embrace himself, his relationship with others, and the world. Woven throughout these stories (the chapters can be read as independent essays or as a novel exploring the same theme) are reflections on the interactions between reader, writer, and human beings in general. The book works on a number of different levels: as simple stories of a boy growing up, as reflections on the authorial process, and as a more complex statement of the nature of life and love.

Rating:
Summary: Hard not to like this book
Review: I fell in love with David Shields's <Remote> when it appeared in 1996 for its hip, critifictional meditations on avant-pop irreality. What's wonderful about <Enough About You> for me is much of the same I found wonderful about that earlier book: its richly, painfully conflicted simultaneous engagement with/distance from the media-sphere and thus the world, its sharp and eccentric and ultimately revealing readings of everything from Renata Adler to Bill Murray and back again by way of basketball, some paragraphs to simply die for. What separates <EAY> from <Remote>, unless maybe I remember <Remote> wrong after all these years away from it, is how <EAY> moves through the self, through the self's remoteness, in an attempt to reestablish connection by means of its trope that "I am you. We're all just us." Granted, it a strange, sometimes desperate, even quaint humanist gesture, but in the end in this admirable work it feels funny, engaging, and right.

Rating:
Summary: Give Yourself a Chance
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Shields on Shields
Review: Take the introspection of Montaigne, add healthy dollops of personalized social commentary in the vein of Henry Adams, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and leaven with sprinklings of humor ala Woody Allen, and you begin to understand the genius of David Shields' Enough About You.

You might ask if this is some kind of joke. But as Robert Frost once noted, "I am never more serious than when I am joking." But Shields' engaging humor -- whether goofing on his own ambitions as writer, as athlete, as child of Jewish liberals -- is at heart an engaging masks for his profoundly deep ambition and serious desire to show us something about both himself and ourselves.

The book is fun to read -- not just as a series of pieces, but as a flowing, lucid narrative examining Shields' various obsessions. Rarely have I read something that so eloquently explores how writers become who they are. I'm not talking about the craft of writing (though Shields is extremely polished), but about the intoxicating scent of desire that enters the soul of an aspiring writer: the goal of making an impact on the world. Through his tales of basketball and school, of his perceptions of both private friends and public icons (the Bill Murray piece is keenly insightful, not just into Murray, but to everything from comedy to acting and why this matters), Shields brings to life George Bernard Shaw's notion that "the man who writes about hismelf and his time is the only man who he writes about all people and all time." It's a delightful book.

Rating:
Summary: Give Yourself a Chance
Review: This book is the most self-absorbed bunch of nonsense I've ever read. It was a struggle to read it. It was a struggle to finish it.

It seems to be about three things:

1) Showing that David Shields is in touch with pop culture, for he goes into an in-depth analysis of an Adam Sandler SNL song.
2) Showing that DS has read a lot of books and can write plot summaries of them -- there's more of that here than on Amazon.com. Well, perhaps an exaggeration.
3) Showing that DS is cool about his sexual past.... Such false modesty.

It was a waste of time reading it, and I only finished it because I hate not finishing a book more.

Rating:
Summary: Enough About You
Review: This is an honest "autobiography," but it's not the sort of honesty that we normally associate with autobiographies. This honesty isn't about getting all of the details right. In fact, Shields admits that some things just seem right to him, regardless of whether or not they actually happened. They seem right to the reader, though, too, and that's where the honesty lies. Shields promises in his prologue that as he presents his own self, he will also "give you you," and he does. We can find ourselves in each chapter - the stories we tell and why we tell them, what we think about ourselves and how we try to communicate that to the world.

Shields does not separate himself or his readers from the process of writing about his life, and I found myself immediately absorbed. I definitely recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: The Future of Personal Narrative
Review: This slim, smart, and funny book might at first glance strike you as yet more ironizing and self-advertisement from the hipper precincts of literary formalism. But Shields is a serious writer in the best possible sense of the term. He's set out not merely to remind us yet again of the difficulty of saying anything-especially and particularly about "selves" (our own or anybody's)-- in postmodern times, but to engage that difficulty head on, to make it yield some truth about us in spite of itself. Shields is thinking hard and writing beautifully about what most contemporary writers only sense: That both fiction and non-fiction as represented by the memoir and the essay have credibility problems; that the "truth" contained in fiction has been undermined by its very success at producing verisimilitude; that the veracity of non-fiction-the authenticity of both the authorial subject and its object--has been rendered suspect by its adoption of the story-making machinery of fiction. Enough About You is, for all its humor, feeling, and lightly worn wisdom, a profound attempt to discover a kind of prose that can speak of, through, and beyond those dilemmas. Shields is a pioneering writer, breaking new ground. The future of personal narrative looks a lot like this book.