Sam Shepard (1943–2017)

This is like a rich scrapbook or journal unearthed from the glove box of an old pickup in Shepard's yard. Few of the entries are longer than a couple of pages, but they each pack a punch. Then, there is the head-scratching effort to figure how much each one is auto-biographical - like was the starlet in the story from 1981, whom the narrator got drunk and toned with while they were making a movie, is that Jessica Lange?? Regardless of the quotient of autobiography, the stories and poems, show more however short or long, are gilded with an air of absolute authenticity - Shepard's super-power. Sure his plays are great and they won awards, but I wish there was so much more of this.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly Recommended! show less

This was another sad reading experience, as this was the last Shepard published, and it was published posthumously by his children. Shepard is a favorite author with his stripped-down style and keen ear for Western thought and dialog. As per usual, there is an otherworldly elemental to the narrative, as a man spies on his elderly neighbor from across the street, wondering about the man's life while the man himself is lost in thought about that life - it's unclear who either of them are, show more whether they are the same person, whether they are two elements of Shepard himself. Though Shepard seems to answer that question in the affirmative in the last short chapter. There are few living authors writing about the West like Shepard, and only a few deceased who could match him. The world lost a unique and vibrant mind.

5 bones!!!!! show less

The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days

In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on show more the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life. show less

Shepard’s last writing is sad, to say the least. This is as close to a straight-forward chronicle of his impending death from ALS as he could write. It’s not a factual account — that wouldn’t be Shepard. As always, he deals in spare, dusty images, leaving the rest to us as readers to think through.

The image that sticks here is that of an old man sitting on a wrap-around, screened porch, as his physical abilities ebb away. He puts us in the position of someone across the street, show more watching the old man, gradually coming to understand as much as he can of what is going on. And he puts us in the position of the old man himself, what it’s like to be “unable”.

The final part of the book moves much more toward the factual, as Shepard ventures out, in his wheelchair, for an outing with family and friends. It ends that way, with his two sons, even a bit sentimental but in that spare, Shepard way.

Writing like Shepard’s turns around the tired cliche about a picture being worth a thousand words — its the words that conjure a thousand pictures. When, from across the street, watching the old man on the porch, he says, “There’s no telling how deep the house goes,” you feel how little you see from the outside, how much more there is on the inside of the old man’s life.

And when he says, “Everything’s in my head,” it certainly reads as a comment on his condition, but it was always true of Shepard anyway.

This is a book to read if you appreciate Sam Shepard. It’s not one of his best works, probably not even one of his best works of fiction. But it completes the story. show less