June 8, 2015
David Shields and UW alum publish new collaborative memoir
The prolific David Shields, New York Times best-selling author and University of Washington professor of English, has a new book out, titled “That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields.”
The book is an extended monologue by Matthews — who is Shields’ cousin once removed — examining her sexual history “from her abuse at the hands of a family member to her present-day life in Barcelona, where she once moonlighted as a dubber of Italian pornography into English,” publicity notes state.
Shields writes in the introduction that 18 months of interviews and emails between them produced more than 700 pages of text. “My goal was to shape all these pages into a narrative that explores what is for Samantha and for me and for many people a crucial or even the question: How and to what degree is it possible to get beyond early trauma?”
Shields will read from and discuss the book at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 9, at the University Bookstore, and will play a 10-minute audio of Matthews, who is a UW alumna writing under a pseudonym. He will give a similar reading at 7 p.m. June 16 at Seattle’s Couth Buzzard Books.
The book is Shields’ second collaboration of 2015 alone. In January, he published the book “I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel,” written with his former student Caleb Powell, which was made into a film featuring the authors and directed by James Franco.
The Huffington Post named “That Thing You Do With Your Mouth” one of the seven “moving, must-read memoirs” of the summer.
