This doesn't have anything to do with the rest of what this blog has been about, so I'll keep it brief:
The Washington Post is reporting that David Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday.
My best friends and I discovered DFW when we were in college, just before he published Infinite Jest. I lugged the book around on a 6-week trip through Europe after I graduated, and there were actually times where I stayed on the train past my stop and ended up in random cities I hadn't planned on because I was so engrossed in it. His writing put two opposing forces on me in my nascent career as a writer: It inspired me more than ever to keep writing, and at the same time made me feel like my writing would never be adequate in comparison.
Over the years I obsessively read everything he ever published: Fiction, non-fiction, magazine journalism, essays, anything I could find. He was one of my all-time favorites, and he will be missed. Can we at least hope he left a trove of work for us yet to discover?
Please join me in celebrating his life by going out to your local independent bookstore, buying one (or all) of his books, and spending some serious time devouring his work. (If you insist on shopping online instead of at your favorite local indie bookstore, consider buying online from my favorite local indie bookstore).
– Colin Bane
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Kerry Lauerman
Louis Bayard
Kirs
Liz Emrich
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Comments
I read a review of Infinite Jest in the 90's.......I am picking it up this week to continue where I left off.
It's probably a failing within myself that I found everything else he wrote kind of inaccessible.
But Jest blew me away for a different reason. I don't know where but Wallace lived in my neighborhood when he conceived of it.
He describes an area of Boston known as Brighton, Most of the places he mentions, Like the Palace Spa, exist.
The Tennis school lived in an area that was dominated by Brighton Marine Hospital, where I worked in a methadone detox clinic. Hanniman Hospital specializing in anorexia (where I also worked for a while) and one of the top three worst public housing projects in the city of Boston.
He had an eye for detail. He wrote of all the minutia of an urban neighborhood. He bathed it in a story of stupendous satire. When I was reading Infinite Jest I made a point to walk the places his characters walked. And you know, I swear I could just see his hallucination.
To you or anybody else who finds David Foster Wallace's work inaccessible, allow me to suggest trying "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" as better entry point.
And I am sorry for your sorrow.
I'm always really sad when someone simply can't go one more day. When there isn't something, something, in his life keeping him alive. When I reread some of his interviews, I hear the sadness and wonder if it was there all along and how we all missed it.
Which book first?
AS I try to shelve my anger, I realize how sad this makes me, how his artistry was so unique, how he reached inside psyches and pulled out the complexities and failings within us all. I mourn his passing and wish things could have been different.