Life’s Work

‘Illuminating . . . there is never a dull moment’ – The Times
‘Marvellous . . . full of riches’ – New Statesman

David Milch is the critically acclaimed writer of the iconic TV series Deadwood and NYPD Blue. As he descends into a dementia from which there’s no return, Life’s Work is his account of his increasingly strange present and his often painful past.

Betting on race horses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law School only to be expelled for shooting out streetlights. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to manufacture acid. He created some of the most lauded television series of all time, started a family and pursued sobriety, only to lose his fortune betting on the horses – just as his successful but drug-addicted father had taught him.

Like Milch’s best screenwriting, Life’s Work explores how chance encounters, self-deception and luck shape the people we become, and wrestles with what it means to have felt and caused pain, even and especially to those we love, and how you then keep living. A compelling masterclass on Milch’s unique creative process, this is a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, and quite possibly his final dispatch to us all.
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‘Funny, discursive, literate, druggy, self-absorbed . . . You finish feeling you’ve really met someone’ – The New York Times
‘A searing, brutally honest memoir’ – The Independent