I just finished “The Unfinished,” D.T. Max’ fantastic posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace. The article was so sad, but also profound. “His goal,” Max writes, “had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled and meaningful life.” It was also Wallace’s goal to lead that kind of life. But it was elusive. Wallace was engaged intimately with the question of meaning.
Some brief notes:
Wallace had been taking Nardil, an antidepressant, since college. “He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant.” To me, this is among the more important modern questions. Are we distant, or is it the drugs? We have no control group. We need clones to live our lives for us without pills so we can look at them and see if we were more or less, and what the trade-offs were.
The Broom of The System was published while Wallace was in the second year of an MFA program at the University of Arizona. “The day after he handed out copies of Broom he was upset to find one at the secondhand bookstore.” I’ve had this experience twice, both times with my novel What It Means To Love You, which I had inscribed to friends whose copies found their way into used bookstores.
Max also covers the disappointment Wallace felt when Girl with Curious Hair came out in August, 1989, to mixed reviews and little attention. “He thought he’d written a better book than Broom and then the publication was this big fat zero.” Almost every writer I know goes through this. You spend years on a book and nobody 
reads it. You lie to yourself, say it’s enough just to be published. But it isn’t. Because the book comes out and it doesn’t get reviewed, and it doesn’t sell. The honest writer knows that there are better books out there. Why would someone read their imperfect first novel or “really good” story collection when that person hasn’t read 1984 yet, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The White Album, Valencia, Catch-22, etc. There are very few books that demand to be on the top of the pile. So many writers become so resentful. All they see is the more undeserving books, i.e. The Nanny Diaries, that make some author millions of dollars. It’s never a question of admitting your book isn’t as good as On The Road. Instead the author asks, “Why is that other crappy book having more success than my ‘Really Good’ book?” I don’t think I’ve ever known an author who was happier after her book came out than before. I’m not referring to Wallace here. Wallace actually did write books that belonged on the top of the pile. Books that were unique to their time, generous, heavy with genius. Infinite Jest is many people’s favorite book, the ultimate goal of the serious writer. Consider The Lobster is my personal favorite non-fiction collection.
Referring to a time when the writing was going well, “I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later there’d be this mess of filled up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well fucked and well blessed.”
I’m in love with Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr. He tattooed her name on his arm inside a heart. They split up. “One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was ‘the brokenness.’” Later, when Wallace meets his wife, he puts a line through Karr’s name and an asterisk and has his wife’s name tattooed further down, like a footnote.
Regarding Infinite Jest Wallace was uncomfortable with some of the attention. He wrote to Don DeLillo, he had, “tried my best best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the ‘hype’ around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype.”
From a letter to Wallace from DeLillo: “Some writers may have to do 2, 3 books, say in midcareer, before they remember that writing can be fun.”
To DeLillo, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does.”
Toward the end of the profile Max quotes an early short story, “The Planet Trillaphon,” that Wallace wrote while still in college, about a character on antidepressants. “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old earth.”
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More from The Rumpus on David Foster Wallace
“Nothing can’t be made with wood.” 
It’s fall! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling, and I can’t seem to leave my house. 
My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating. “It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed. Secrets of those bearing a Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised; David Foster Wallace had explored the shadows of the psyche of his generation and had rendered them on the page in all of their dark, desperate beauty. As a woman who came of age alongside these men, who has a brother, a father, a lover, and friends, I was intrigued. 
Tom McCarthy’s 
An interview with David Foster Wallace 
