Life's Work

A Memoir

By: David Milch

Narrated by: Michael Harney, David Milch

Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction. Life’s Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimer’s loosens his hold on his own past.

“This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews

“I’m on a boat sailing to some island where I don’t know anybody. A boat someone is operating and we aren’t in touch.” So begins David Milch’s urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch’s life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace.

Betting on racehorses 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 with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the most lauded television series of all time, made a family, and pursued sobriety, then lost his fortune betting horses just as his 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 with those we love, and how you keep living. It is both a master class on Milch’s unique creative process, and a distinctive, revelatory memoir from one of the great American writers, in what may be his final dispatch to us all.

©2022 David Milch (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Life’s Work is one of the best books about television I’ve read. It’s funny, discursive, literate, druggy, self-absorbed, fidgety, replete with intense perceptions. . . . You finish feeling you’ve really met someone. Milch was his own best creation.”—The New York Times

“David Milch’s memoir is a heartrending cry from the horizon line of consciousness, a hilarious yarn of the truth-telling variety, and a brutal case history of addiction and self-destruction, written in the most gorgeously humane voice I’ve encountered in a work of nonfiction in a long while. I can think of few recent books that have pulsed with life this transparently, this powerfully.”—Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

“Like the best memoirs, Life’s Work is intimate, exquisitely observed, and intense. But unlike most—and what sets it apart—is the heartbreak it embodies, the finality it signals. This is David Milch’s farewell, and it will rock you.”—Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

Loved Getting to Know Milch

I have admired David Milch’s work, and I am always curious about writers and what drives and inspires them. This book does not disappoint. Written in the familiar Milch narrative voice, this memoir reads like a monologue from the most gifted of playwrights. And the reader, Michael Harney, was perfectly cast! Almost sounded like Swearengen himself. Enjoy!

Being there.

If you had the fortunate experience of working for the man, this revisitation to his singular expressive consciousness and process of storytelling is like being back in a
trailer or soundstage at Deadwood, listening to him reveal and illuminate the drama of the scene at hand, rapt in the journey upon which he is taking us.
The further sharing of his personal life and struggles especially the contribution of his wife, Rita give a keen emotional context to this self summation of a true artist.
Thank you, David.

reader

great reader. bxc go do j c b

r y v co b can m m m.

A valuable testament

This book is as good a thing as we are lucky enough to receive. Thank you David.

Harrowing and revelatory

Great reader makes this. Deep insights into writing and life that can at times be a self sabotaging mess to a degree that it is unsettling, but also more honest and less performative than many memoirs.

Buffalo Boy’s Brave Truth

Wow! Proof again that we don’t know what another family is like until we are someone inside draws the curtain.

Like all the girls at school #64, I had a wild crush on Judgie and was shocked by his death. I remember well my father extolling the other “Milch Boy,” favored son of his friend and colleague, Elmer. This painfully honest book show how blind we are to the trauma children face. I kept asking, “Where were the adults who could have intervened. It takes a lot to stand up for children of powerful people. I hope today that the other adults in the lives of emotionally abused children such as Milch and Judgie find a way to protect them.

Milch has my deepest admiration for telling his truth as does his family for their help. It can’t have been easy on anyone.

His is a riveting story well written and read. My only wish is that the narrator’s accent were more Buffalo than Brooklyn. A small point.

Linda Safran
Class of 1960 P.S. 64, Buffalo

Extraordinary

One of the best memoirs I’ve ever listened to. Great narrator who sounds a lot like Milch. One doesn’t have to be in the entertainment business or even haven’t seen any of his shows to appreciate this work.

Great writer

David writes magnificently. He is a genius with storytelling and dialogue and creates interesting characters. At time he expounds for too long and deeply that I found my focus trailing off. I love Deadwood. Wish he talked more on that show. It is a testament to his natural craft and gift to write this autobiography while in the midst of Alzheimers.

Fantastic

By far the VERY best memoire I’ve read in a few yrs. Highly recommend. Listened on books audible and read the book multiple times. Beautiful

Amazing life of an absolutely amazing figure

This was an incredibly vulnerable and highly detailed look back on the life of a modern literary and cinematic genius, David Milch. Milch is the creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, among many other projects. He has, for nearly the past decade, been living with dementia after a life filled with incredible stories both lived and those that he dreamt. This book was written by him with the help of his family, who have been along for the ride with a man whose incredible charisma and skill has kept him in the good graces of the incredibly generous and caring individuals his vices regularly harmed. In spite of himself, he’s managed to maintain this undeniable sphere of family and friends who love him for the mind, ironically the thing which causes himself so much pain.

He is no stranger to revealing his disappointments in himself, but he also goes into what makes him tick and sheds light on lessons I think any adult could find value in, but especially those of us in our mid 20s and older. The reflections on his personal growth and philosophy on life in general are interwoven with reflections on his writing process, his time in Hollywood, the inspirations for his TV projects, and much more. Quite a hard listen at points due to the incredible emotional resonance of hearing a man’s self-aware thoughts on his own dementia, but quite reassuring at the same time in that there is a quality of “a life fully lived,” which Milch truly embodies in spite of it all.

I’ve been moved by a book like this one before, Christopher Hitchens’ book Mortality, which is the author’s thoughts on his death as he is contemplating it while dealing with the practical realities of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Unlike that one, but this book is much more a celebration of Milch’s whole life and starts in childhood rather than only focusing on the end. Further, this is about a man losing his mind and knowing it more than a man dying with his capacities intact, so take that for what you will.

There are some laugh out loud moments, it’s poignant, incredibly candid, and a truly beautiful work from someone whose writing on Deadwood has impacted my own life with some of the lessons it imparts from character to character, and to the viewers by extension. To quote perhaps his most quotable character of all his work, Al Swearengen, “Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair, or f-cking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you've got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back.”