The Assay Interview Project: David Shields
April 1, 2021

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-three books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and the PEN/Revson Award and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
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About David Shields’ The Very Last Interview: A centuries-old tradition: in late middle age or early old age, a writer—confronting his own spiritual exhaustion and impending mortality—ruthlessly interrogates himself. Innumerable examples: Anne Carson, Alphonse Daudet, Annie Ernaux, James Baldwin, Michel Leiris, Hervé Guibert, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, John Cheever, Cyril Connolly, Camus. Rembrandt, Adrienne Kennedy, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth. Thomas Bernhard, Margo Jefferson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Simon Gray, Spalding Gray, Renata Adler, Eduardo Galeano, David Markson, Beckett, Michel Leiris, Rousseau, Emerson, Montaigne.
 
A writer is supposed to try to tell “tell the truth” about everything. What if an author were to try to tell the truth about his own work? What if he were to “read against” the affirmations offered by his previous books? Burning himself and his work down to the ground, is he conducting a mad lab experiment, opening up a new space for himself, or weirdly, agreeing with his most benighted critics? Could a writer survive such a self-dismantling? Would he be left all alone? The increasingly loud threat of suicide begins to echo.

The Very Last Interview (New York Review Books, March 2022) was adapted into the anti-holiday classic of 2020, the alt-film to get depressed people past Christmas of 2020 to 2021. The film depicts an interviewer who pummels “David Shields” with increasingly personal, scathing, and troubling questions that he never answers.
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Šukys and Shields conducted this conversation in the days following President Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. Their exchange took place via email, and, although Shields’ forthcoming book, The Very last Interview, was its organizing principle, the discussion proved to be wide-ranging.

"The Very, Very Last Interview:
​A Conversation About Silence, Brokenness, and Literary Collage” 

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Julija Šukys: David, congratulations on The Very Last Interview. I’m not going to lie: it’s a tall order to interview you about this project, which does so many things at once.
 
David Shields: Thanks, Julija.
 
The book consists of a series of questions without answers. Some of the questions are petty and mean; others are aggressive; some are probing and even insulting. It’s a bit of a send-up of the author interview, of course. At first, it feels quite light and funny. A few examples:
 
            Are you finally an artist or an archivist?
 
            A creator or a collector?
 
(Of course, no surprise, I love these questions.)
 
So much of what I admire about your work: it’s highly thematized curation.
 
Thanks, David. Then, we turn to the nature of your work:
 
           Have you ever written anything that couldn’t be interpreted as crypto-autobiography?
 
           Do you ever think of publishing your books without your name?
 
(Clever. Incisive. Still fun. I mean, who hasn’t thought about publishing anonymously or under a pseudonym? For all kinds of reasons.)
 
But then, at a certain point, there’s this turn. It ceases to feel merely like an intellectual game and becomes something darker. The target of the critical gaze, if I can put it that way, shifts. It’s no longer really about the interviewer. Soon, the text reveals itself to be hardest on its author. That is, on you.
 
Exactly so.
 
Over the course of the book, there’s this cumulative, deeply melancholic effect that I hadn’t expected. The film version of the book (The Very Last Interview, adapted by Rachel Kempf and directed by Nick Toti) only heightens this sense of grief. It’s brutal to watch: the camera focuses on the writer as the interviewer bombards him with questions that he never answers. Toward the end of the book, we’re probing themes of depression, fidelity, betrayal (of loved ones, of oneself, of one’s work, of the truth), and questions of whether a life lived writing books is worth much, if anything at all:

          When you imagine the future without yourself in it, how does that make you feel?
 
          What is it like being old, or at least older?
 
          What does that feel like?
 
Tell me about this sense of melancholy. And what it was like to watch the filmed version. (You see? I’m very cleverly trying not to pose my questions as questions.)
 
The book began with my having the bright idea of looking up every interview I ever did, going back to my first book in 1984. I quickly realized I wasn’t interested anymore in my answers. But the questions intrigued me: the passive-aggression of the questions. So I gathered all 2,700 questions, which I culled and curated down to 1,700, and I poured these questions into silos or rubrics or chapters.
 
So, too, I hugely rewrote and reconceived and remixed and reinvented the questions. I barely remember how many if any are based on the original questions and how many are my own inventions. For the longest time the book was, as you say, Julija, a bit of a prank or lark or one-off experiment: Hey, what happens if I play around with all of these questions?
 
But life, as they say, intervened. I published a book, The Trouble with Men, which brought my marriage to an end. The marriage was probably destined to end, but the book hastened it, I think. Very intensive psychoanalysis these last two years. Amidst all of this I was facing some relatively serious health concerns. Then, of course, came the pandemic and the cataclysm of the Trump presidency (I wrote another book about the latter, and I’m currently adapting it into a doc-film).
 
Throughout the writing and rewriting of the book, I felt that it needed a stronger through-line, and that is where the suicide thread got pulled ever tighter. My bipolar father was on the verge of suicide my entire life, but I’ve never felt much suicidal ideation. Still, I could access that feeling the last couple of years in ways I couldn’t even have imagined before. And so we are left, Julija, aren’t we, with an incredibly melancholy book? Which is pretty surprising, given that it consists of nothing but 1,700 questions, none of which ever gets answered. I like what Edwin Frank, the editor-in-chief of New York Review Books, said. He called it helplessly human, I think. I can check, but I think that’s what it said. That is the way the book feels to me. Incredibly, scarily intimate.
 
Rachel Kempf did an amazing job taking a 110-page manuscript and compressing it into a 28-page script. Somehow in reducing the length of the book to ¼ the length she amplified hugely the book’s sadness. It’s a rather harrowing film to watch. I think it’s pretty great, but I could bring myself to watch it only twice. This has been the most difficult year and a half of my life, by far, but perhaps most people on the planet would say the same. Overall, I would say that writing the book and working with Rachel and Nick on the film has brought some degree of catharsis. I wouldn’t say I’m doing okay. Is anyone doing okay right now? But I mean to reassure myself and anyone that I’m in no way suicidal. I’ve just entered Dante’s dark forest at a later age than he advised.
 
I love the term “helplessly human” too.
 
I’ve been thinking about trauma survivors and people like my grandmother, who, as you know, was exiled to Siberia for 17 years and, as a result, was ultimately separated from her children for 24. What struck me about her and so many other kinds of survivors was her clarity and calm in the wake of huge suffering.
 
As I read it, your incredibly, scarily intimate and melancholy book reckons with the simultaneous cataclysms not only of Trumpism and your recent divorce (I’m sorry to learn of it) but also of the pandemic. And so, I wonder if one possible result of all this pain has been or will be clarity and maybe even, eventually, calm.
 
That’s a beautiful way to see it. And of course I wouldn’t want to equate my tiny personal cataclysms with larger global crises. I’ve had some challenges of late, but they’re on a fairly minor scale. That said, I was talking to someone who was asked to read a poem at a Black Lives Matter event, and he said he didn’t have anything that merited inclusion, and I said to him that tells you something about your work. If your work isn’t equal to the moment, you probably need to rethink your work. If your work cannot stand the scrutiny of catastrophe, then why bother?
 
It’s an exciting idea to me that my book is scarily intimate, given that it consists “only” of 1,700 unanswered questions. I have no idea how that developed, or I guess I sketched out what began as a mere donnée turned into something weirdly existential. It still seems surprising. I’ve always liked the word “annealing,” which I think means something having to do with being forged in fire-hardened in the process. I feel something like that. I feel like I’m asking myself the most difficult questions I’ve ever posed: through very intensive psychoanalysis, through divorce, pandemic, etc. Who am I? What if anything do I care about? That’s what the book is about, and the film even more manifestly, and those are the questions that I’ve been asking myself in my life (now even more so). It’s way too early for me to feel any sense of clarity or calm, but I see what you mean. In your most recent book, you faced terrible things about your family; do you sometimes wish you had never opened that box? I sometimes feel that way, and yet the best and deepest part of myself feels thrillingly alive now, Ishmael-like, in my haunted searching. I feel alive in a way I hadn’t been perhaps ever before. I even like that corny Steve Jobs line: “Stay hungry. Stay stupid.” That’s definitely me now. I’m “stupid” (confused) and “hungry” (in search), but I feel open. I hope that comes through in the book.
 
“Forged in fire” is exactly how I was thinking. Today feels like an especially hard pandemic day to me, and I only hope we all emerge in one piece rather than as ashes.
 
I did, in Siberian Exile, wonder explicitly (in writing) if some things are better left unknown and unseen. The rueful refrain that kept going through my head as I wrote that book was be careful what you wish for (for readers who don’t know the text I should clarify that, over the course of writing that book, I discovered Nazi war-crime accusations against my paternal grandfather). In the end, I did come through the storm with a sense of calm and some kind of clarity but also fundamentally changed. Though I don’t regret having opened that box in the end, a warning I now give my students and other writers who ask for guidance or advice about digging into family history is to be careful. You never know what you may find. All families harbor secrets, so this kind of work is risky. If you start turning stones over, you have to be prepared for what you might discover underneath.
 
Let’s talk about stuttering, which is a theme that we see return again and again in this book. Some questions I gathered from various sections of your text:
 
          Which was the bigger influence – both of your parents being journalists or your childhood stutter?
 
      Would you connect your interest in “collage” – its polyphonic Cubism – ​to your lifelong battle with stuttering?
 
         So how badly did you stutter as a child?
 
         Stop writing, because language is the enemy, etc.?
 
         Did you consciously use writing as a tool or shield in the face of stuttering?
 
         I think this problem of language points to a recurrent motif in your work: the difficult beauty of human communication. Do you concur?
 
         Does writing still come fairly easily to you?
 
         How about speaking?
 
I’m interested in the various gestures that you make above regarding stuttering: the connection between collage and stuttering, the notion that language is an enemy, that writing is protective, and that it’s in writing (not speaking) that difficult beauty resides.
 
I wonder to what extent stuttering has been a kind of poisonous gift for you – a way of being in the world that marked you in childhood and that has shaped so much of your work and aesthetics, especially your almost conceptual-poetic technique of using found, borrowed, and stolen text that you rewrite and rearrange. You do this most famously in Reality Hunger, and in the essay “Life Story” (which consists of bumper sticker slogans) that John D’Agata anthologized in The Next American Essay. Even here, in The Very Last Interview, we see similar techniques: the process of collecting, selecting, and rewriting of questions that you describe undertaking seems in keeping with earlier work.
 
Long ago, in my dissertation, I borrowed Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of stuttering language to write about francophone Algerian literature – that is, a minority culture writing in the majority’s (and is this case, the colonizer’s) language. Their idea that minor literatures vibrate or stutter within major ones to create something new, beautiful, and even kind of revolutionary was important to me (this notion appears in their book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and in Deleuze’s “He Stuttered,” in Essays Clinical and Critical).
 
I wonder if working with found/borrowed/stolen text couldn’t be another way of making language stutter, in Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding. Maybe your approach to the conceptual essay, if we can borrow this modifier from the poets, is a form of minor literature and stuttering language. It does its work in relation to the body of literature inside which it resides, vibrates, and against which it fights.
 
Wow, Julija. I was just lecturing about this yesterday, via Zoom, of course. I love all these connections that you’ve made, rather brilliantly and intuitively. Remind me what your current book-in-progress is; is it also something of an archival project? In any case, I think you and I are onto something here. Stuttering is everything to me. I now have pretty good control of my speech: I give lectures, appear on TV, radio, teach, etc. But until I was 20 or 30 or even 40, I was mortifyingly paralyzed by my stutter. I have had huge amounts of speech therapy. The best part by far of being in Iowa City for five years had nothing to do with the Wrtiers’ Workshop and everything to do with the University of Iowa Speech and Hearing Clinic.
 
The wound and the bow: this is my basic metaphor for brokennness and art. It’s the title of an Edmund Wilson book about an artist’s wound and her/his transformation of the wound into art. It just seems to me to be true. No wound, no art; no art, no wound.
 
For a long time I was committed to a very loud voice on the page. My second novel, Dead Languages, say, has an aggressively self-reflexive, 1st-person narrator. Maybe as my interest in fiction receded and/or my speech impediment became less, as it were, pronounced, I got much more interested in a sort of radical minimalism, a.k.a. conceptual art. This began with Remote in 1996 and has continued all the way through to, say, this new book, The Very Last Interview (2022). That’s a quarter of a century (!?) in which I’ve tried various conceptual approaches to literary and cinematic art: found material, remixes, scratches, oral histories, as-told-tos, appropriation, genre-emptying trouble-making, co-authored anthologies, films made entirely of found footage, remixes of found photos, books built heavily upon stuff that other people said, raw confessionality on my part, etc., etc. Point being is that it all feels very stuttery, don’t it, in that D&G sort of way?
 
That is, the key here is the disfluency, the jamming of the wires, the refusal to participate in the usual information flow. I’ve always loved Manny Farber’s distinction between “termite art” and “white elephant art.” Try though I did for nearly twenty years to write conventional fiction – white elephant art – finally I succumbed to my true self, my termite self, my stutter-self, my radically undermining outsider-art self, that self that both loves language with all his heart and soul and mistrusts it entirely. Hence the books and films I’ve composed since 1996. As you say, Julija, they feel like a revenge on stuttering (whee I can say anything I want on the page and be wildly transgressive of social norms) and in a strange sense a revistitation of the originating wound, since the works feel so shape-shifting, channel-changing, stutter-textual.
 
I really appreciate the distinction between white elephant art (big, bloated, centrist, “important” art) and termite art (art that lives and thrives along the edges and munches its way through boundaries). In the same way as you describe succumbing to your termite-stutter self, I have made peace with my bookishness, what people call my seriousness, and my obsessions with documents, with the violence of the past, and with research.
 
My book-in-progress (provisionally called Dispatch From Gun Country) is indeed archival. It examines a series of 6 college and university campus shootings between 1966 and 2015. Four took place in the U.S. and two in Canada. I’ve traveled to each campus and to whatever shooting archive exists. I’ve interviewed survivors, visited memorials, attended so-called fun-runs in support of families of the dead, and explored and documented the sites of these attacks. I’ve been writing about tattooed bullet wounds, about the artistic uses and abuses of coroners’ reports, forgiveness and the intersections of gun violence, race, gender, and academic life. Each collection I’ve worked with is really different, so I’ve been tracking what its composition says about the place and event in question, their memory politics, and what remains. Slowly, the book is becoming a sort of plural biography of the campus shooting archive.
 
But as I watched the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it occurred to me that the dynamics I’ve been wrestling with in this book were on full display in Washington, D.C. that day. The sense of alienation and unfairness, the conspiracy theories, the pathological worship of weapons, the suspicion of and disdain for authority and so-called elites – all of this exploded before my eyes in the same way that campus shootings erupt “out of nowhere.” High school and university students were the first to make this connection publicly. Only hours after the Capitol siege, I began to see memes saying, “Been there, done that. Welcome to life in American schools.” Or: “Dear Congress, now that you’re hiding behind chairs and we’ve got your attention…could we finally have that conversation about gun control and school safety?”
 
One of the great advantages to your being such a fast writer, David, is that you manage to comment on events pretty much as they are still happening, as opposed to slower, late-comer writers like me, who stick to things that happened long ago. The Very Last Interview is no exception. It touches on the pandemic, on Trump, and on the crisis of mis- and disinformation that we’re currently living. A few examples from the book:
 
      Let’s get down to it, then: how has the last century of modernism and postmodernism – subjectivity, relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the contested space of “nonfiction,” etc., etc. – paved the way, in a sense for Trump?
 
         To what degree are we all complicit?
 
         To what degree are you perhaps particularly complicit?
 
(David, I will admit that I gasped and laughed out loud when I read that last question for the first time.)
 
         Reversing field: what intellectual chaos have you helped create?
 
         What epistemological shit have you blown up?
 
While I value subjectivity enormously in my own work and in the work of writers I admire, I despair at where we find ourselves as a culture, that is, a place where nothing is real and there is no truth. It feels too easy, too glib, and ultimately like so much bullshit. I’m not sure how to find a way out of this mire.
 
I’ve managed to refrain from asking any questions until now, but every good text needs a point of disruption, and I think we’ve reached ours. So, here you go: How do we deal with this mess of lies and disinformation? To what degree are we all complicit? What intellectual chaos have we helped create? And, indeed, what epistemological shit have we blown up?
 
Right. You’ve zeroed in on the crucial stuff, as you always do, Julija, since you’re willing to put yourself at risk. I think, here, of the two films I’m working on, both of which are very explicitly exploring these themes: disinfo, complicity, and epistemological shit.
 
1) Melville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche: If god is dead, everything is permitted. For well over a hundred years, modernists and postmodernists have been trying to figure out how to conduct a moral discourse when there is no longer any absolute authority.
 
I laid the groundwork for one film in Phoenix, on Nov 1-3, 2018 (a couple of days before the U.S. midterm elections). Julija, you already know about this one, because you’re a crucial interviewee for it.

Robin Hemley, Nicole Walker, Erik Sather, and I asked dozens of writers and professors of nonfiction the following questions: How do you know what you believe? Do you have any absolute beliefs? Is there such a thing as “truth”? What is nonfiction, and is it true? What do you think is the difference between truth and belief? If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in ghosts? And why are you here and not canvassing for Stacey Abrams?
 
The consensus answers: I have no absolute beliefs except in art; there are no absolute truths other than that there is no truth; my sister and I are estranged; there are no ghosts except psychic luggage; I’m not canvassing for Abrams because all I finally care about is art.
 
Kellyanne Conway, Trump, Giuliani, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have weaponized the last 150 years of intellectual thought, philosophical investigation, post-Einsteinian physics, Saussurean linguistics, and the “crisis” in nonfiction. If the perceiver by her very presence alters what’s perceived, Steve Bannon, et al. quite consciously created – were all quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis – a universe in which nothing is true and thereby Trump, Putin, Q-Anon, et al. attempted to, in effect, end human discourse. Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself, and within minutes Trump tweeted the lie that the Clinton crime family was behind the event. A strategy that goes back to the Underground Man: God is dead; everything is permitted. Or is it?
 
2) The second film came into being shortly before the November 2015 terrorist attacks at the Stade de France and Bataclan Theatre. Rita Banerjee, who is Bengali, and I, who am Jewish, went to Paris to try to understand the current American racial cataclysm from a French perspective (as so many African American artists and intellectuals have done for at least a century). But in the city of liberté, egalité, fraternité, Banerjee and I discussed skin color, class, gender, privilege, and art, and discovered that we disagreed about everything. We couldn’t advance the conversation.
 
Surprisingly antagonistic toward each other, we turned our focus to Barbès, a neighborhood in the northern quadrant of Paris populated mainly by Africans and Muslims. Wandering the streets, we interviewed locals, seeking insight. Instead, we mainly heard received wisdom: “Nothing changes; we evolve a bit and we fall a bit,” said one young man, in a fit of anger and resignation. “I am not a victim of racism, no,” said a woman wearing a leopard-print shirt and pushing a stroller; “everyone has treated me well in France, whether white or black or red or yellow.” There’s hypocrisy in France, to be sure, but racism in the U.S. is more “barbaric,” said a middle-aged man, his head shaved smooth and shiny, a silver necklace shiny at his throat.
 
A few weeks later, the Paris bombing of a suburban apartment building occurred. It became impossible for anyone to deny that even in France, a safe haven of sorts for African Americans since the Louisiana Purchase, there is something profoundly wrong. We human beings do not seem to know how to coexist.
 
After filming in Paris, Rita and I began the process of weaving archival material into the fabric of the story: Foucault and Chomsky arguing (because they seem like archetypes of Rita and me); Yuval Noah Harari defending his controversial theory of race based on genetic coding; scenes from Indian cinema; and installments of an interview with political theorist Hannah Arendt. “I love only my friends, and I’m incapable of any other kind of love,” says Arendt, a German Jew who lived through the Second World War and distrusted groups and collectives of any kind. In fact, she had an affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unapologetically active member of the Nazi party, and yet it is Arendt’s philosophy of intimacy and friendship that this movie celebrates and catalyzes around.
 
Back in the States, Rita and I sought the counsel of renowned documentary filmmaker Guy Maddin about our rough cut, now entitled Burning Down the Louvre (Apollinaire: “The only way for French art to move forward is for us to first burn down the Louvre”). Maddin conveyed to us his belief that the film’s real subject was Rita’s and my thwarted “romance.” At the end of the film, which we are now finishing, Rita and I finally connect; it’s not sexual, but it is curiosity-filled, empathy-filled, love-filled. That is what the film is driving toward—this insight—the scariness of two people actually connecting. Rita and I learn that the space between any two people is the source of all hate and all love.
 
I see deep wisdom and truth in this statement: “the space between any two people is the source of hate and all love.”
 
Thank you for spending this time with me in writing, David. And for giving me the chance to test, interrogate, and inhabit the space between us over these days of conversation. It’s been an enormous pleasure.
 
Same. Thanks ever so.
Julija Šukys is the award-winning author of three books, one book-length translation, and many essays and articles. Šukys’s 2017 book about her paternal grandparents, Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning, won both the Vine Award for Nonfiction and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Book Prize. Her 2012 book, Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė, about the life of a Lithuanian librarian and Holocaust rescuer, won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust Literature. Her essay “There Be Monsters” appears as Notable in Best American Essays 2018. Šukys has been an artist-in-residence at Fogo Island’s Jennifer Keefe House and the Banff Centre for Creativity, and she has held research and writing fellowships with Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Quebec Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. In her off-hours, she takes epic walks with her Shetland sheepdog, tends a controversial front-yard vegetable garden, and travels as much and as far as she can. Šukys is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
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For Further Reading

Sam Cha
Unbearable Splendor:
Against "Hybrid" Genre; Against Genre
Assay 5.2 (Spring 2019)
Esme Weijun Wang
The Assay Interview Project
January 1, 2019
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