How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields Read Free Book Online

sugar pill with harsh-tasting medicine.
    Delilah
is a relentless valentine for and about the struggling class, a trump card for those holding an empty hand. Delilah offers the possibility of ordinary American female life redeemed by … by what? The sugar rush of over-the-moon sentiment. In five hours at her house one summer day, I ate pancakes and syrup for breakfast, cookies for lunch, and ice cream for an afternoon pick-me-up. The hungry heart will be cured by sweetness itself. Delilah wants every call to end on an “audio hug” of empathy and recognition, and it does, it does. Inevitably she lifts us up where we belong—where the eagles fly, etc.—even as her own life remains obdurately earthbound.
    In 1982, when Delilah, who is white, brought her African American husband home to meet her parents, her father “freaked out, jumped up, and ran to the gun closet, chasing me off with a shotgun.” He disowned her, and when he was dying, he refused to allow her to visit. Most of her children—three biological, nine adopted—have African American, African, or Hispanic ancestry. She’s thrice divorced.
    A disproportionately high percentage of callers are raising two or three children without the father, who has left or was never there. Asked what kind of man she’s attracted to, Delilah says, “You’ve got to be quick, bright, funny—and a mass murderer. Ever since I was a teenager, I’d pick out the guy who would break my heart. Because my father was so passionate and so brilliant and so emotionally not available, that, I guess, is what I’m attracted to.” Delilah and the show are father-fixated, redressing the distant or absent or dead father by positing an all-knowing, all-loving God.
    (My minirebellion against my journalist parents was to become a fiction writer—and then, later, a writer of wayward nonfiction.)
    Delilah embodies the ambivalence her audience feels toward competing definitions of being female. Her voice is half tease, half hug, which is what she looks like: ex-bombshell/Mother of the Year. She wears a low-cut blouse, which emphasizes her décolletage, but she frequently pulls up her blouse and crosses her arms over her chest. She espouses self-esteem to her listeners, but she confides to her executive producer, “My legs are the only part of myself I like.” In most photos, she appears to be an all-American blonde, but she frequently reminds her listeners that her hair color comes from Kmart.
    In
Love Someone Today
, Delilah writes, “I had romantic notions playing in my head of a midnight dance under the spectacular sky. I found him”—her last husband, whenthey were still married—“sleeping soundly in our bed. I tried to wake him. After several unsuccessful attempts, I gave up and walked out. I felt angry and rejected, my feelings hurt that he wouldn’t jump up and enjoy my romantic fantasy with me. I zipped up my coat and headed out to the backyard again. I stood there, frozen in the beauty of the moment, yet still feeling a bit sorry for myself. I uttered a small prayer of praise, thanking the Almighty for this wonderful scene. And then, in a voice that was so clear it was almost audible, I heard God speak to my heart. ‘I didn’t create this moment for you and Doug,’ He seemed to say. ‘I created it for you and me.’ And together we danced in the moonlight.”
    The world is a beautiful place, in other words, but men are oblivious, hopeless. As solace,
Delilah
presents romantic ballads about idealized lovers, narratives about children as cherubim, praise hymns about our Lord, our father.
    Mary calls to reminisce: “Mama’s Nativity had a music box in it that played ‘Silent Night,’ but it was very old. I think she bought it before she and my father met. Some of the chimes were broken, so our ‘Silent Night’ was very strange, but we all liked it.”
    Delilah laughs and says, “It was nearly silent.”
    Mary says, “No, it wasn’t nearly silent. It just was—you