Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Life's Work  By  cover art

Life's Work

By: David Milch
Narrated by: David Milch, Michael Harney
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $14.51

Buy for $14.51

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

I feel like I'm on a boat sailing to some island where I don't know anybody. I'm on 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 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 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, and 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 masterclass 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 Penguin Random House LLC (P)2022 Penguin Random House LLC

More from the same

Author

Narrator

What listeners say about Life's Work

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    2
  • 4 Stars
    0
  • 3 Stars
    0
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    0

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.