The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

“Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“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.”

—The Boston Globe

“An edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage.”

—Time

“A primer on aging and death for those who take theirs without the sugar…. There’s a comfort to be found in this sober investigation of mortality, in Shields’s clear-eyed look at the ways in which we come undone.”

—Esquire

“Enthralling . . . Fascinating . . . Ultimately, the humanity of Shields’ interior and exterior exploration is what makes The Thing About Life—and life itself—worthwhile.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Shields undergoes his midlife crisis and comes out the other side–more accessible than ever before, more tender, ‘nicer.’ And yet The Thing About Life adroitly sidesteps sentimentality–very hard to do when the core of it is a son’s love for his cranky, tenacious, irascible, geriatric, Jewish father. I love this book.”

—David Guterson

“[An] informative and occasionally unsettling meditation on [Shields’s] own aging body and his [97-year-old] nonagenarian father’s seemingly endless vigor and strength . . . He writes with great candor about the vitality of his father. . . Also woven into the text are clever quotes on matters corporeal from the likes of Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, and Martha Graham. Shields’s memoir is a sobering, at times poignant, reminder that none of us gets out of this life alive.”

—Booklist

“David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I think of it almost as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth.”

—Jonathan Lethem

“It’s a bold writer who dares to tackle head-on the subject of what it means to be human–something that David Shields does with an extraordinary mixture of tenderness, humor, and inexhaustible curiosity.”

—Jonathan Raban

“The Thing About Life grabbed me from the start. It’s extremely compelling, gorgeous in many places.  I loved it. And I wish I had written it.”

—Lauren Slater