I Think You're Totally Wrong

Salinger
,
coauthor with Shane Salerno

How Literature Saved My Life

Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, “Found” Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts
,
coeditor with Matthew Vollmer

Jeff, One Lonely Guy
,
coauthor with Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan

The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death
,
coeditor with Bradford Morrow

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine

Enough About You: Notes Toward the New Autobiography

Baseball Is Just Baseball: The Understated Ichiro

Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity

Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories

Dead Languages: A Novel

Heroes: A Novel

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2015 by David Shields and Caleb Powell
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.: Excerpt from
My Dinner with André,
copyright © 1981 by Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc
.
Any third-party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited
.

Revolution Films, Baby Cow Films, and Arbie: Excerpts from
The Trip,
copyright © 2010. Reprinted by permission of Revolution Films, Baby Cow Films, and Arbie
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shields, David, 1956–
I think you're totally wrong : a quarrel / David Shields and Caleb
Powell.—First edition
.
pages   cm
ISBN
978-0-385-35194-2 (hardback)—
ISBN
978-0-385-35195-9 (eBook)
I. Powell, Caleb. II. Title
.
PS
3569.
H
4834
I
3 2015
814
′
.54—dc23     2014020754

Jacket design by Chip Kidd

In the conversation between the authors, certain names and identifying characteristics of persons mentioned have been changed to protect their privacy.

v3.1

CALEB POWELL:
(speaking into digital voice recorder)
Current time: 6:30 p.m., Thursday, September 29th, 2011. Place: Seattle. My driveway. David has arrived. I'm going out to meet him.

DAVID SHIELDS:
Where do you want me to put my stuff?

CALEB:
Back of my car. I'm looking forward to this.

DAVID:
Definitely, but did you see the article in the [University of Washington]
Daily
?

CALEB:
It's out?

DAVID:
(pulling up the article on his phone)
I must admit I'm a bit flummoxed by your quotes.

CALEB:
(reading the article)
Hmm. I don't see the big deal. She asked me my first impressions of you, and I told her.

DAVID:
Do you feel that much animosity toward me, or am I completely imagining it?

CALEB:
Animosity?

DAVID:
There's hardly a line of yours whose purpose was to do anything but to undermine me.

CALEB:
You mean when I said, “Your classes wasted time”? I went on to praise you, but she didn't quote that, of course. And your novel classes did waste time—endlessly dissecting Ted Mooney's
Easy Travel to Other Planets
and Marilynne Robinson's
Housekeeping
.

DAVID:
I'd never teach those books now, but still, Caleb—

CALEB:
Come in and meet my family.

CALEB:
(entering the chaos of the house; the girls swarm at the entrance)
That's Kaya, Ava, Gia.

DAVID:
They're adorable.

CALEB:
My wife, Terry.

DAVID:
Hi, everybody.

CALEB:
(entering living room and speaking first to David, then to his parents, then again to David)
My parents, Dave and Beatrice Powell; David Shields. My parents came to help out with the kids tomorrow.

FATHER:
Good to meet you, David.

CALEB:
My parents met at Cooper Union.

DAVID:
The free-tuition school.

CALEB:
(speaking first to David, then to his parents)
All the paintings in our house are my mother's. David's daughter is a freshman at college in Rhode Island.

DAVID:
She goes to RISD.

MOTHER:
Risby?

DAVID:
The Rhode Island School of Design. RISD.

MOTHER:
Never heard of Risby.

FATHER:
Your sister Marilyn went there.

MOTHER:
Where, Risby?

FATHER:
Ris-Dee.

DAVID:
It's the Rhode Island School of Design, but they call it RIS-D for short.

MOTHER:
Risby?

FATHER:
Trice!

CALEB:
(to David)
You wanna beer?

DAVID:
I'm good; thanks.

TERRY:
You're leaving him with your parents?

CALEB:
Why not?

TERRY:
You're having a beer?

CALEB:
One for the road.

TERRY:
You excited?

CALEB:
I'm ready.

TERRY:
What if he makes a move on you?

CALEB:
Ha ha.

CALEB:
(
showing David his shelf of books about Cambodia
) Did you read
The Road of Lost Innocence?

DAVID:
Was I supposed to?

CALEB:
It wasn't a coaster. You've had me read, what, fifty books over the last few years, and I give you one?

DAVID:
I spent an hour with it, thumbing back and forth. It's not very well written. What's the point? I already know people suffer.

CALEB:
It's not trying to be a work of art. Did you get a sense of it at all?

DAVID:
It's horrible—what she endured.

CALEB:
I'm going to come back to this.