Is it possible to truly know another person? If not, can art fill that gap? Grappling with these questions, the author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead presents a characteristically unconventional collection of more than 70 essays written over 35 years, a sustained meditation on otherness. Here David Shields profiles Bill Murray, Howard Cosell, George W. Bush, Robert Capa, and Kurt Cobain, but his restless intellect also find new angles on Greek tragedy, high school journalism, women's eyeglasses, the agony of first love, and the Donner Party.