THE VERY LAST INTERVIEW

A montage of all the questions the author has been asked in the last 40 years.

Like Reality Hunger—his mashup of numbered paragraphs, mostly unattributed and lacking contextual background, pulled largely from other sources—this book is a delightful and utterly Shields-ian work. According to the jacket description, the author gathered every interview he’s ever given and transcribed every question asked, ignoring his own answers. His collage of these questions creates an absolutely hilarious takedown of the interview process, of his own public persona, and of the journalists themselves, blessedly anonymous, who asked some of the most outrageously mean, out-there, self-important, stupid, and simply impossible questions imaginable—and then doubled down with prodding follow-ups. Organized into brief chapters ("Childhood," "Envy," "Jewishness, "Suicide," etc.), this theater of the absurd derives its humor from questions like these: "Can you define ‘truth’—preferably in one good long paragraph?" "You have only one child—is there a cruelty involved in such a decision?" "Are you competitive at all with your daughter (whose graphic memoir I've read and like at least as much as anything you've done of late)?" "Seriously then: How do you get through the day if you ‘know’ life is utterly bereft of purpose?" "Do you still think that, very briefly, in the early-to-mid-1980s, David Letterman was actually quite interesting?" "Do you feel like a tertiary character in a Henry James novella?" "Is the overexamined life worth living?" (Follow-up: "By which I guess I mean, you've analyzed your life to death, but will you have lived your life at all prior to your death?") "So—not to put too fine a point on it—has it been an utterly wasted life?" "Were you disappointed that some of the critics didn't pick up on the humor?" Not this time.

Revenge is a dish best served with helpless laughter. Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious.