On Thursday, August 30, Viking Press will publish Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
Max’ biography appears approximately four years after DFW’s passing. Wallace died by hanging on September 12, 2008: He was found by his wife in their Claremont, California home. He was 46.
Max’ book is a potential landmark not just for the DFW cult — but especially for the subsection of that cult whose appreciation of Wallace is not limited to the author’s own writings.
Other landmarks in this sub-canon have turned out to be unique and rewarding works in their own right. The list certainly includes Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, journalist and author David Lipsky’s account of a road trip he took with Wallace in 1996. At the time, Wallace was touring the U.S. to promote his magnum opus novel, Infinite Jest. Lipsky’s assignment was to write a profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone — although the profile never appeared. Lipsky published his transcription of the Wallace conversations in 2010, after DFW’s death, and it provides a valuable snapshot of the then-young novelist striving to find time for reflection at the height of his renown, when he was famous enough for Rolling Stone. (Well, almost famous enough.)
Another title in this list would be Maria Bustillos’ April 2011 article from The Awl, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library.” After Ms. Bustillos visited the public archive of Wallace’s papers — maintained by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin — she wrote a very searching and sensitive consideration of what it might mean that Wallace owned (and apparently read with careful attention) tomes from popular self-help authors like John Bradshaw, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Specifically, Ms. Bustillos wondered if the contents of these books might throw some light on the deep depression that contributed to Wallace’s demise. Ms. Bustillos’ article was widely discussed: It collected almost two hundred comments on The Awl. But the Ransom Center subsequently restricted public access to that portion of the archive at the request of Wallace’s family.
Max’ book is the first full-length literary biography of Wallace to appear, and as such will give DFW aficionados a chance — perhaps their best chance, given the timing — to ponder at length the final imponderables that the man left behind. These questions can’t possibly have reliable answers, but a reader who still feels bereft at Wallace’s passing might feel compelled to ask them anyway. Could DFW ever have surpassed the literary heights he scaled in Infinite Jest? How strongly did his battle with depression inform his works — perhaps even shorter and apparently cheerier ones like A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? (For example, consider one of the comments on Ms. Bustillos’ Awl article: “[S]o does this mean that we should think of Infinite Jest as a 1000[-]page suicide note now?” The phrasing may be crude, but the question is fair.) And perhaps most fundamentally: How did it happen? Was his suicide survivable, or inevitable? Just how much did DFW’s readership lose, in total?
It would be an exaggeration to describe any reader’s response to DFW’s passing as “grief” — at least for any reader who didn’t know the author personally. But for many the sense of loss is still there, and remains vivid even now: While DFW’s voice is widely imitated today and will likely remain so for some time, there’s virtually no possibility of any other writer producing work quite like his, anytime soon. For this reason alone, D.T. Max’ book promises to be yet another landmark — quite possibly the most memorable one — for every reader who still misses DFW four years after his death, and who still regrets that there will be no more short-story collections, journalistic meditations, or footnote-stuffed mega-novels from him. The publication of Max’ biography is perhaps the best opportunity for parts of the DFW cult to reflect on what it means — exactly, finally — that the author of Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Consider the Lobster, and The Pale King ultimately chose… Oblivion.
Photo by user Benjamin A. Stockwell (“kingbenny“) via Flickr.
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