This is a fascinating and searingly honest look at a life as a writer for major TV series and how the choices we make affect many lives. Mr Milch has lived quite the life. And he describes it beautifully while allowing us insights into his professional practice and personal relationships and many, many admitted mistakes.

Drugs, gambling, career flukes, imagination, hard work, knowing people, betraying people, annoying people… it’s all here written by the man who gave us NYPD Blue and Deadwood among many other huge hits. He tells how he got into the writers room and how he stayed there and the way he tells this life story is every bit as dramatic and full of cliff hangers as his TV writing.

The ending is sad and moving and I think the author’s wife especially is to be congratulated for her strength and determination. A beautiful book about a very flawed man told as only a writer could tell.

Recommended if you’re interested in behind the scenes of TV writing or how sometimes taking chances can build an incredible career.

I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley

An achingly poignant biography by one of the great writers for television [Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood and others]. When it comes to TV dialogue, I'd put him up there in a league with Aaron Sorkin.

Before dementia finally winds its disgusting and unforgiving way throughout his brain, he has written a memoir that shines with honesty, clarity and courage. An objective and wonderfully lucid story about his upbringing, his work, his successes and failures, his relationships, his family, his dreams and a few of his regrets.

Aside from the rich and entertaining story of his life, you get an insight into his thinking about dementia. To the reader, he talks of "...a series of takings away". He says, "It's awful being crippled like this. Hobbled. It's hobbling. It's an accumulation of the ineffectual" and "Sometimes I feel that I'm walking among strangers".

You sense his foreboding and the isolation he feels as the disease slowly detaches him from our world when, later, he tries to reassure you (and probably himself) by writing, "I'm facing challenges and discontinuities that are new but they aren't complete strangers - the uncertainty, the fear, they have been companions before".

A fascinating and haunting read...the man clearly lived a very full life and I remember well the magic in some of the words he wrote for the HSB characters Frank Furillo and Henry Goldblume. This book is a fitting, self-penned testimony to a great writer and courageous human being.

Many thanks to NetGalley and to the author & publishers for access to this e-ARC in exchange for my review. All opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

Such a charming book! It's so great when writer's write about their own lives.

Even though addiction is recurring theme in the book, it's so subtle and light-hearted, that you don't want to stop reading.

“Life's Work: A Memoir” opens with Milch describing the unbalanced state his world is in now, a tricky memory and distorted sense of reality. He worked on it with the help of his family, relying on recollections they have of stories Milch had relayed in the past .Especially helpful were writings his wife had been composing for years about his writing process.

David Milch is a man of extremes. He graduated at the top of his class at Yale. He was praised by Robert Penn Warren who said, “No one writes dialogue better than you.” While in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop he dropped down to Mexico to manufacture acid. He developed a heroin addiction. Attending Yale Law School passed the time until he was arrested for shooting out street lights with a shotgun and then turning his sights on the flashing lights of a police car. All this before he was even out of school.

Now in his late 70s, David Milch has Alzheimer’s. He still writes, but this memoir appears to have been put together with help from his wife and daughters. However, his voice comes across as totally authentic and totally his, as he covers his New York childhood, dysfunctional family relationships, stellar academic accomplishments, professional successes and gambling excesses, all of it jaw-dropping in one way or another.
The man wrote Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and, latterly, Deadwood, so on a practical level, if you’re an aspiring writer – any type of writer, not just a TV writer – there is a lot you can learn from here. On a more abstract level, although most of us are unlikely to experience Milch’s life of extremes, anyone can learn from his experiences, particularly of mental illness and addiction. Life’s Work is dense, intense and at times hard to read, but it’s also absorbing and rather awe-inspiring.

This was a fascinating book on many levels - a tragic human story of abuse and self-abuse, of learning from great writers, of the power or reading and research, of transforming personal scars into fictional stories that we have embraced. The piece on St. Paul makes me want to go back and read more