David Milch, the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning writer and creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood, will trace his bumpy personal journey in Life’s Work, a new memoir set to be published by Random House on Sept. 13, 2022.
The book, from a “noted heroin and gambling addict,” a statement from Random House says, features “a ferocious mind [grappling] with the bewildering effects of Alzheimer’s by looking back, making what sense he can of a life of addiction, recovery, loss and creation, abuse and life-saving kindness, and the increasingly strange present and future he now faces.”
Milch, 76, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2019 after he began to notice “imperfect recall and tardy recall and short temper” in himself. The diagnosis led him to dial back his involvement in the then-filming Deadwood movie.
A 2016 Hollywood Reporter cover story detailed how Milch, a former English literature professor at Yale, lost approximately $100 million to a crippling gambling addiction. He was a regular at Santa Anita racetrack — the location of his ill-fated HBO series Luck, canceled after one season following the death of three horses used in the series.
In the 1980s, Milch battled what he once told an MIT communications forum was a “bitter” heroin addiction.
“From the writer whose work changed our understanding of what television could be, this is a memoir about the transformative power of art, effort, collaboration, and family, and what holds on as you lose it all,” says Random House.
Source: Hollywood
