In this tour de force on the artist's life, Philip Schultz takes us deeply and intimately into the many perils of the writer's perpetually hovering shadow of self-doubt, of fear and anger and shame and the astonishing truths that can be discovered if only the artist can find a way through--perhaps simply in the voice of another. Erudite, emotionally naked, and profoundly moving, Comforts of the Abyss is an essential and unforgettable work.--Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and Townie A prolonged elegy for the poet Ralph Dickey is woven into sidelong autobiography where Philip Schultz ponders his father's bankruptcies and early death, a story threaded through often hilarious accounts of Schultz's friendships with writers: Allen Ginsberg, Philip Roth, Yehuda Amichai, Denise Levertov, Joan Didion, John Cheever. How to turn pain and humiliation into art? How to be a writer ? The answer, Schultz teaches, lies in imaginative transformation, as he demonstrates in this brave, raw, and inspiring book.--Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob Philip Schultz turned a childhood obsession with masks and personas into a distinctive mode of writing, a compelling method of teaching, and finally an entire school of creative writing. Reading this marvelous and forthright memoir of his journey, a literary struggle, a passageway that has always been powered and impeded by doubt, I kept thinking of a line by Ralph Waldo Emerson: 'I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born.'--Edward Hirsch, author of Stranger by Night.