I Think You're Totally Wrong by David Shields Page B

she started having faints and seizures and was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic. She went to college and found a husband. When she married Bob, they tried to have children: the first one was a stillbirth and the second was delivered alive but died a few days later, due to doctor error. At the time, doctors used forceps, and it was a—what do you call it?—a feet-first delivery.
    DAVID: Breech birth.
    CALEB: The doctor crushed the baby’s skull.
    DAVID: That enough suffering for you?

    DAVID: You say that I wish I suffered more, that I wish I’d survived the Gulag or something. I’d say I’ve taken my obsessions—miscommunication or mortality or whatever—and gone as far as I can with them. The goal is to face your own contradictions and blow them up until they become emblematic of human tragedy. It’s all anyone does—from Pascal to Maggie Nelson. The Montaigne thing: “Every man contains within himself the entire human condition.”
    CALEB: Every person has a novel inside.
    DAVID: Well, to me, not a novel. I’m not interested in your dream life. I’m interested in your sadness, your self-knowledge. I don’t think you have to have survived the Khmer Rouge or come back from Vietnam or served in Churchill’s cabinet or been a member of the Mafia. That’s history; that’s journalism.
    CALEB: Does suffering make a person noble or petty?
    DAVID: Well, in my case, it’s obviously made me incredibly noble.

    CALEB: Would you agree that life, condensed, has plot?
    DAVID: Sure, you’re born, you live, you love, you die, but who cares about that story? That’s—
    CALEB: I—hey, hey, how’s it going?
    FIRST HIKER: Pretty good. How far to the lake?
    CALEB: You got another half hour.
    SECOND HIKER: Sweet.
    DAVID: It’s really beautiful.
    FIRST HIKER: After Lake Dorothy, we’re going on to Bear Lake.
    CALEB: Wow.
    DAVID: You guys going to camp?
    FIRST HIKER: Two days.
    CALEB: Awesome.
    DAVID: Nice. Stay warm.
    CALEB: That recorded. I’ll insert them.
    DAVID: Great! Add them for drama. Plot!

    CALEB: In
How Literature Saved My Life
, you graphically describe an erotic relationship, and how you wore an earring because of her.
    DAVID: You’re mixing up girls.
    CALEB: The last line—
    DAVID: I’ve changed that.
    CALEB: But in the last line you say she’s a fictional character.
    DAVID: I don’t say that.
    CALEB: Then you say she was quite the tiger in bed, but “there wasn’t an ounce of genuine feeling” in her performance.
    DAVID: I don’t think I say that. I can dig it up later on my laptop.
    CALEB: Your point, at least in the draft I read, was how her erotic self was her fake self. That in bed she wasn’t “real.” But I’d say the opposite. People suppress their erotic selves in life and in bed they become their true selves.
    DAVID: I don’t know if you do this—google people?
    CALEB: Old-girlfriend-google?
    DAVID: You can’t help be curious. What do they look like now? How have they aged? I googled Jessica Nagel. I found a video of a little interview she did about a novel she wrote. She was a debater in high school, and she’s written a couple of novels about debate.
    CALEB: Published?
    DAVID: Yes, but I haven’t read them. All her limits as a person are grafted directly onto her writing. She’s deeply shallow—“deeply shallow”? whatever—but that was the very quality, of course, that made her so sexy to me. I last saw her more than twenty-five years ago, but suddenly, watching this interview, my whole body was plugged right back into her: the things about her I was drawn to, the things about her I was put off by, and it was all pretty overwhelming. I just started taking notes. At one time I thought I might write a whole book about her, but that little riff is as far as I got.
    CALEB: Writing about sex is just—no matter what—it’s