That Thing You Do with Your Mouth is the provocative new title from David Shields, professor of prose at UW, author of dozens of books—many of which he’s written all by himself 😉—and pal of James Franco. He’ll be reading from it tonight at 7 p.m. at the University Book Store, the first stop on his West Coast tour of the book. You should go.
Now, you should know that a lot of Shields’s recent work has been straight-up panned. Salinger, a film and book collaboration between Shields and Shane Salerno, was called “ill-conceived” by the Guardian and far worse by Stranger arts editor Sean Nelson. The Stranger’s former books editor Paul Constant did not like I Think You Are Totally Wrong: A Quarrel; The Stranger‘s Charles Mudede, however, liked the film version.
That Thing You Do with Your Mouth is Shields back doing the thing he does best: remixing someone else’s story. In the book, Shields transcribes into terse, powerful paragraphs the sexual history of the actress Samantha Matthews, who was abused early in life by a member of her family and went on to do English-language voice-overs for Italian porn. These realities, of course, are not the total expression of her sexual being, but they do speak to the range of experiences she explores in conversation with Shields.
Full disclosure: I took a class from Shields when I was a grad student at UW. I have only read an excerpt of TTYDWYM, but from my experience with him I can say that he’s the kind of person to whom people confess everything. He listened without judgement, and he encouraged us to explore the darkest, most selfish parts of ourselves. Midway through the quarter, nearly every member of his workshop was looking a little frazzled, and it was because no one expected to be writing THE MOST personal thing that we’d ever written. It was also because he’s a naturally combative person, but that’s another issue.
Couple things that are weird about this book, though. (1) Samantha Matthews is Shields’s cousin once removed. (2) What does it mean for a dude to be the vessel through which a woman tells her story of sexual abuse? Thing one seems potentially gross, but shouldn’t we be pushing aside our Freudian fears and talking to our family members about sex, especially if one of them is an abuser? Thing two is trickier, but is at least addressed in some way by the first: These people are family. Families often have a scribe figure, a person whose job it is to ensure the legacy of the family through storytelling. Here, Shields seems to be participating in the spirit of that tradition.
