"I feel like I'm on a boat sailing to some island where I don't know anybody. I'm on a boat someone is operating and we aren't in touch." So begins David Milch's urgent accounting of his increasingly strange present and often painful past. From the start, Milch's life seems destined to echo that of his father, a successful if drug-addicted surgeon. Almost every achievement is accompanied by an act of self-immolation, but the deepest sadnesses also contain moments of grace. Betting on race horses and stealing booze at eight years old, mentored by Robert Penn Warren and excoriated by Richard Yates at twenty-one, Milch never did anything by half. He got into Yale Law only to be expelled for shooting out street lights with a shotgun. He paused his studies at the Iowa Writers' Workshop to manufacture acid in Cuernavaca. He created and wrote some of the biggest, most lauded television series of all time, made a family and pursued sobriety, and then lost his fortune betting horses just as his father had taught him.--