Like many David Foster Wallace admirers, I was disheartened by his suicide in 2008. I have everything he wrote on my bookshelves, but I feel the need to parcel them out to myself slowly, to savor them. A friend introduced me to Wallace's work just before my husband and I were going on a cruise with my in-laws (for their 50th anniversary, paid for by them, appreciation mandatory). With enormous delight, I read the title essay (originally published in Harper's Magazine) from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Reading that long piece, I felt a rare kinship with Wallace.
Although I'd read hints that the new book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky, an award-winning magazine writer and contributing editor for Rolling Stone, isn't great art, I was determined to read it to glean whatever nuggets of insight were possible. And I loved it.
I marked way too many paragraphs to share in a blog post, so let me give you a few hints of what I found in the book, particularly what relates to Wallace's creative process. Keep in mind that this intensive several-day road trip Wallace took with Lipsky was during the book tour for Infinite Jest, the book that made him famous. The lengthy interview was for the purpose of a piece that was assigned to run in Rolling Stone (though it didn't). It took place in 1996, a dozen years before Wallace killed himself due to untreatable depression. (I've removed some of the ums and conversational repetitions that Lipsky kept.) Lipsky was 30, Wallace 34.
I really enjoy a sense of play when I'm doing it. And the nice thing about teaching is that, I feel like teaching is my livelihood. And this I do--and it's found money if I get any money for it.
I really got into it. I don't think I'm the most talented person on the planet, but I work really hard, you know? And part of what's really hard is I work really hard at getting better at stuff.... I'm really into the work now. ... Because we wanna be doing this for forty more years, you know? And so I've gotta find some way to enjoy this that doesn't involved getting eaten by it, so that I'm gonna be able to go do something else. Because being thiry-four, sitting alone in a room with a piece of paper is what's real to me. This (points at table, tape, me) is nice, but this is not real.
The way to finish the book is to turn down the volume on the stuff that's all about how other people react.
There's a set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.
For me a fair amount of aesthetic experience is--is erotic. And I think a certain amount of it has to do with this weird kind of intimacy with the person who made it.
The book is primarily a transcript of the interview, with some of Lipsky's thoughts at the time added in, and a few notes about which bookstores were now defunct. It might have been a better book with more (some?) shaping. As it is, I felt sad, almost queasy, at those times when Wallace expressed his self-consciousness, his wish that he could edit the article before it ran. But Lipsky kept everything in. So we are voyeurs to this raw conversation between two young writers, accessories after the fact.
For those of us who will never get enough of Wallace's brilliance, this will have to do.
