david foster wallace essay on depression

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David Foster Wallace Wrote the Best and Worst Thing About Depression

I probably read David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Depressed Person” for the first time in 2008 or 2009, if memory serves. The story roughed me up in various ways, and when I was done processing what I had just experienced, I was left with two thoughts:

— That was maybe the best thing I have ever read about mental health.

— I never want to read that ever again.

Luckily, I have never experienced major depression firsthand. But it has affected people close to me, and Wallace’s story took me so brutally, unflinchingly inside the illness, and so effectively transported me into a severely depressed person’s brain, that I felt knocked out afterward. Plus, I have some pretty bad stuck-in-my-own-head tendencies, and that’s partly what “The Depressed Person” — and, well, depression itself — is about.

All of which is why I quickly decided not to read “The Depressed Person” again, and I didn’t. Not until today, when the anniversary of Wallace’s 2008 death by suicide snuck up on me and I decided it was time. You should read it too, right here . It’s hard but it’s worth it. (I’m about to spoil some stuff in the story, to the extent a story like this can be spoiled.)

“The Depressed Person” isn’t exactly the equivalent of a literary deep cut. The story ran in Harper’s , after all, back in 1998, and most Wallace aficionados are familiar with it. It follows, well, a depressed person who remains nameless throughout. The first sentence gives you a pretty good idea of the whole thing’s tone: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

Wallace is going to do the best he can to communicate that pain and horror, of course, and he does so by taking the reader deep — much, much too deep — into the depressed person’s psyche, drubbing him or her with detail after detail about the innermost contours of the depressed person’s existence over the course of just eight pages (including the Wallace-obligatory footnotes, of course). The reader quickly learns that the depressed person views her childhood as a parade of humiliating traumas connected to her parents’ divorce, that she’s in therapy, that she has a “Support System” of a “half-dozen friends … who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long distance” to talk about how much pain she was in. These aren’t, in actuality, close friends — they’re just the only people, other than her therapist, she feels she can call, and she does so constantly.

“The Depressed Person” works because it locks the reader in the same cell as the depressed person. She is someone who is buried so deeply under her own sadness and anxiety that nothing that happens to her can have any meaning except in the context of her illness. Even simple exchanges risk sending her into a tailspin:

The former acquaintances and classmates who composed her Support System often told the depressed person that they just wished she could be a little less hard on herself, to which the depressed person responded by bursting involuntarily into tears and telling them that she knew all too well that she was one of those dreaded types of everyone’s grim acquaintance who call at inconvenient times and just go on and on about themselves.

The story also works because it is rather frank about the effects mentally ill people can have on their, well, support networks. It quickly becomes clear that Wallace’s depressed person is an almost impossible person to have a normal conversation with; it’s hard not to wince imagining her former friends — if they ever were really her friends — hearing the phone ring after dinner and knowing what they’re in for. She’s a black hole: She’s incapable of discussing or thinking about anything but her own sadness and wants and needs.

And she knows this, too: The depressed person realizes that she has basically lost the capacity to empathize with or even have a regular friendship with other human beings, so consumed is she by her own suffering. After her therapist dies of what appears (at least to the depressed person herself) to be a suicide, the depressed person is terrified by her reaction to the tragedy: “[A]lthough the depressed person had had agonizing feelings aplenty since the therapist’s suicide, these feelings appeared to be all and only for herself, i.e., for her loss, her abandonment, her grief, her trauma and pain and primal affective survival.” She is a shell and she realizes it.

Okay, deep breath: This is a rather extreme portrayal of major depression, and one which isn’t by any means representative. Wallace’s point isn’t, of course, that every depressed person is as difficult to deal with as his titular character, or that they experience as horrific a level of pain: His point is to attempt, as impossible a task as it may be, to capture a fraction of the agony of what it’s like to have depression in its worst, most ravenous and bottomless forms. The visceral reaction I had to “The Depressed Person” — and which I bet you’ll have too, if you read it — suggests he pulled it off. That shouldn’t be surprising, given Wallace’s virtuosity and his own terrible struggles.

• david foster wallace
• the depressed person
• mental health
• science of us

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Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, i lay on my sofa. only david foster wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does.

by Mala Chatterjee   + BIO

In the surreal aftermath of my suicide attempt and amid the haze of my own processing, my best friend visited me in the hospital with a (soft-bound and thus mental-patient-safe) copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm. It was the spring of 2021. A couple months earlier, I had slipped in a tub, suffered a concussion, and triggered my first episode of major depression, and those had been the most difficult months of my life.

Though a lifelong ‘striver’ and ‘high achiever’, nothing I’ve ever done was harder than waging that war against myself while catatonic on that Brooklyn sofa. This was an inarticulable and so alienating war, one during which, at every moment, it was excruciating and terrifying to exist at all. I thought I knew the extent of my own mind’s capacity to torture itself, to hurt me, and what this thing we call depression can really be like. But I had been wrong.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced it at its worst, I now think it is psychologically impossible to imagine. It may even prove impossible for those who have experienced to still remember it after the fact, just as someone who temporarily perceives a fourth dimension wouldn’t really, fully remember what it was like once the perception is lost, only facets of the larger, unfathomable thing.

So maybe I can’t really remember, either: but I can recall thinking again and again these staggered reflections I’m writing now. Some of the swirling emotions that distressed and disoriented me on that sofa also remain faintly accessible, like the crippling inability to make any decisions, no matter how small, such that even contemplating a choice among some host of mine’s warmly offered selection of teas would incapacitate me with self-loathing and breathless, gushing tears. I remember hopelessly trying to make myself feel even the glimmer of anything good, turning to everything – the music, the friends – that had brought me so much joy before, only to find that I could no longer feel any of it but rather just, from somewhere afar, see and long for it while watching as the ever-darkening blackness in me instead consumed it all.

I remember the debilitating guilt and shame that emerged for everything I had ever done, including for having the audacity to keep existing for so long. And I remember an overwhelming empathy as I wondered how many others felt this way in the history of the world, imagining the vastness of all these solitary confinements within our minds across space and time. At the same time, it was unfathomable to me that anyone had ever felt like this, or that there could even be enough darkness in the universe to realise the experience more than this once.

F rom the days following my injury through the several months after, my ultimate challenge on that sofa was finding a way to endure the passage of time. I needed something to help me get through each moment and make it to the next one while still intact. I couldn’t actually do anything , but staring into space (or even watching TV) kept me vulnerable, as the cognitive passivity left ample room for the darkness to seep in and swallow me away. After a few desperate weeks, I eventually found that reading fiction – filling my head with another world that left room for little else – was the one thing that made it more bearable to exist. My best friend then suggested (after having gently and generously recommended the book to me for years) that perhaps this was the moment to read Infinite Jest. I think every day about how grateful I am that he did.

I started reading and it soon became the case that so long as Infinite Jest was in my hands, it was possible, okay even, for me to stick around. The core themes of the book that would soothe and sustain me over the coming weeks can be conveyed, I think, by its two dominant and contrasting venues – a halfway house for addicts in recovery on the one hand, and an elite and high-pressure tennis academy on the other – in conjunction with an underlying and unifying thesis: all of us, whether we’re chasing substances, achievements or whatever else we hope will satisfy us and make it bearable to exist, are afflicted. We are all, for lack of a better word, fucked in the head in the very same ways.

With Infinite Jest in my hands, I was suspended afloat by a contradictory catharsis, this evanescent insight that I could hold on to so long as I just kept reading and rereading the book’s (blessedly many) pages: that I was not crazy, nor alone, precisely because I really was crazy, which is to say that this all wasn’t me but rather it – it was a human condition. The book assured me that this was just what it was like to be crazy in this way, was exactly how others crazy in the same way were made to feel, a crazy that made them feel just as alone as I now felt. The book witnessed me, affirmed me, and assured me that my experience was familiar to the world. I can’t put it any better than just saying the book was my friend.

The book’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along

Some passages can only speak for themselves, as they so articulate (and help me remember) facets of the thing I was facing on that sofa. On the ‘psychotic depression’ suffered by the character Kate Gompert, the most haunting and compelling personification of depression I have come across:

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul … It … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency – sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying – are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

No description that I’ve encountered has better conveyed, so clearly and directly, the precise nature of that moment-by-moment agony in which I had found myself.

Infinite Jest ’s most famous lines are on suicidality, and the air-tight logic that it brings along. The book analogises it to the choice faced by those trapped inside a burning building and deciding whether to jump:

Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; ie, the fear of falling remains a constant … It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The suicidal person, in other words, is not misguided but rather literally facing different choices – ones unimaginable to those who do not also have flames slowly engulfing them.

I don’t think I can really explain what reading all this meant to me. The book could see me like a mirror at that moment and describe it all right back. More concretely, I can’t explain what it meant to find such forceful validations of my particular sense of this ‘mental illness’, not as some wrong or irrational reaction by me , a misapprehension or miscalculation on my part, but rather as something happening to me; it was a thing inside me – a billowing shape, as the book often calls it – to which all my dread and despair was actually just the reasonable and appropriate response. But I can tell you that, once I finished Infinite Jest , my grip on this self-understanding – and so my self-preservation – quickly started to slip away, and it was only a few days later that I tried to kill myself. By then, I was back to being alone on that sofa, surrounded by those flames the book had managed to keep at bay. I think reading Infinite Jest had been keeping me alive.

So that’s why, when he came to the hospital, my friend knew to bring along another copy of the book. I remember looking up at him then, bleary-eyed with anxious shame for what felt like my most monumental failure, a profoundly self-absorbed act of weakness on my part – and, not to mention, a terrible inconvenience for all those I’d dared to drag into my life. He smiled softly while waving Infinite Jest in a silent reminder that these emotions, though compelling in their presentation and thus reasonable to be so compelled by, weren’t really reflecting the reality of the matter. And with a copy to share, in that secured visiting area, we then had our own little pop-up book club.

I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him

It all felt a bit like Bible study or something, in the fluorescent sterility and chaos of that strange space, and I remember my friend making some fittingly dark joke about how this was probably how DFW would’ve most wanted the book to be read anyway: like the word of God, among rock bottoms, being involuntarily held. It was a glimmer of Wallace’s raw hilarity, which fills so much of Infinite Jest (1996) – a grotesque humour, one that could punctuate my otherwise continuously unbearable tenure on that sofa with stitches of transcendent laughter, and which not only kept me alive but sometimes feeling alive, wanting to be , hoping I do somehow make it through it all, if for no other reason than because laughing still felt like something worthwhile. I was reminded, in our pop-up book club, that maybe this was still worth doing. In truth, the reality of what had happened was only beginning to crash down upon me, and it was going to be a very long road ahead. But we at least managed to make it all a bit gentler and more intelligible in that moment.

As of this September, it has been 15 years since Wallace’s suicide and two and a half years since my attempt. Like Wallace’s, my own decision to take my life had immediately followed an adjustment to my antidepressants. I remember it clearly: I’d been holding on so long as I’d still been reading, and when the reading was over and the enkindling darkness took its place, there was just barely enough left in me to pull myself up and pick up a phone, to articulate the necessary words and ask the professionals if they could possibly find some way to help me out. I’d still been searching in anguish for an escape as the walls closed in, a way to still win, to stick around.

Sadly, it was the prescribed dosage increase itself that hit me – as it is sometimes known to do – with another dark wave, knocking me back into the depths of myself, right as I’d been treading so very hard to reach a stable surface. I know Wallace’s suicide had been amid choppy chemical changes of his own, which is to say that we’d both still been fighting, and so these disparate outcomes were the product of random chance. There is a tragedy and humanity, I think, for one’s own desperate attempt at staying alive to be the very thing that does one in – and I admit to sometimes feeling guilty for being the one who found salvation in his book instead of him, as though this salvation was itself cosmically predestined to be scarce.

W hen I’m asked what exactly I found in Infinite Jest , I limit myself to noting two things. I found powerful portraits of mental illness, and I also found empathy. Like I said, the book was my friend. But the thing is, I know that many others have very different things to say about Infinite Jest – about the book, its author, its ‘prototypical’ readers, the very idea of it, and the ethos it has come to represent. In her chapter ‘On Not Reading DFW’ (2016), Amy Hungerford defends her choice never to read it by arguing (among other things) that there’s no reason to think DFW could have anything valuable to say about women. More recently, in the London Review of Books this July, Patricia Lockwood said of Infinite Jest that ‘it’s like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex.’

Hungerford, Lockwood and the mainstream ethos generally dismiss the book’s intended and actual audiences as white, male and not to be trusted, driven by Stockholm syndrome, sunk costs or delusions of self-interested grandeur in calling the book genius or important. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I find these critiques – so often snide or irreverent in their cadence – baffling, gaslighting, disempowering, at times even agonising. I can’t understand what they could possibly have to do with this book that I know as my friend, that I found myself in at my most alienated moment. And the bitter irony is that this ethos all concerns a man who, after writing such an empathetic book about mental illness, took his own life; for it is a collective instance of the very kind of empathy failure that I think Infinite Jest asks us to resist and helped me resist myself. I guess it is the least I can do for it now – and for my own survivor’s guilt – to join this ongoing chorus on the book with my own belting, discordant voice.

Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real

Infinite Jest was life-saving for me, but I don’t just mean when I say this that it had been saving me while I was reading it on that sofa, or even the times that I’ve read the book since. Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time. There’s a recurring motif in the book, a haunting symbol for all of our many mental demons: the Face in the Floor. It first appears in a second-person vignette as an evil presence that only you, the reader, can feel. You wake up from a nightmare, you look around, and you suddenly notice that there is the Face in the Floor beneath you. It is a Face that you know is evil, and you know this evil is only for you. But as soon as you notice this Face in the Floor, you are also convinced that it has actually been there all along. You are certain of this, that its ‘horrid toothy smile [has been] leering right at your light all the time,’ and that it had simply been ‘unfelt by all others and unseen by you’ until now. In a later passage, this evil Face in the Floor – ‘the grinning root-white face of your worst nightmares’ – comes back, but this time, it’s your addiction. It ‘finally remove[s] its smily-face mask to reveal centerless eyes’, and you see that the Face in the Floor – your addiction – has now completely taken you over. The Face in the Floor has become your own. It’s ‘your own face in the mirror, now, it’s you ’ for it has ‘devoured or replaced and become you ’.

I think about the Face in the Floor every single day. I remind myself of it. One of the most harrowing things about mental illness is not anything captured by descriptions of its first-order symptoms, but rather the way it can convince you that these symptoms are just picking up on something that is and has always been the case , that was actually there all the time ; and when you didn’t feel this way it was because you had been blind. Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real, the Face that had always been there in the Floor – which is all to say that your epistemic position has simply been improved. So long as that is what you are being made to believe, then how can anyone expect you to also believe ‘this too shall pass’ (or anything of the sort), or to somehow just stop it from swallowing you up?

I’m no longer on that sofa or surrounded by those flames. But still, I’ll probably always be moving with and managing my own billowing shape. Mine is a synergistic and explosive Molotov cocktail of depression and ‘emotion dysregulation’. This basically means that my internal reality is prone to quickly and intensely turn itself upside down again and again – somersaulting through euphoria, despair, mania, shame, rage, paranoia, guilt, panic, bliss, self-aggrandizement, self-hatred, even within a single day. My challenge in the dissociated midst of these episodes will always be to find something from outside the moment to believe in, or to at least have faith that any such thing could even exist, and so to resist the recurring immersive insistence that only this moment and nothing before it is what’s real.

Maybe that’s why I needed to say all of this, to give my experience this reality and write it all down, and paper over at least one of the Floor’s Faces and preserve this here instead for myself; and maybe these revelations are also my redemption for that audacity to have been the one saved. But when I say that Infinite Jest is saving my life all the time, what I mean is that I still keep trying my very best to tell myself – because I still need and will keep needing to tell myself – what has become both my mantra and my prayer: it’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor. It’s the Face in the Floor.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Or text HOME to 741741 to reach Crisis Text Line .

In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected] or [email protected]

In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14

Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

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8 David Foster Wallace Essays You Can Read Online

If you've talked to me for more than five minutes, you probably know that I'm a huge fan of author and essayist David Foster Wallace . In my opinion, he's one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers that has ever lived, and he possessed an almost supernatural ability to articulate the human experience.

Listen, you don't have to be a pretentious white dude to fall for DFW. I know that stigma is out there, but it's just not true. David Foster Wallace's writing will appeal to anyone who likes to think deeply about the human experience. He really likes to dig into the meat of a moment — from describing state fair roller coaster rides to examining the mind of a detoxing addict. His explorations of the human consciousness are incredibly astute, and I've always felt as thought DFW was actually mapping out my own consciousness.

Contrary to what some may think, the way to become a DFW fan is not to immediately read Infinite Jest . I love Infinite Jest. It's one of my favorite books of all-time. But it is also over 1,000 pages long and extremely difficult to read. It took me seven months to read it for the first time. That's a lot to ask of yourself as a reader.

My recommendation is to start with David Foster Wallace's essays . They are pure gold. I discovered DFW when I was in college, and I would spend hours skiving off my homework to read anything I could get my hands on. Most of what I read I got for free on the Internet.

So, here's your guide to David Foster Wallace on the web. Once you've blown through these, pick up a copy of Consider the Lobster or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again .

1. "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Technically this is a speech, but it will seriously revolutionize the way you think about the world and how you interact with it. You can listen to Wallace deliver it at Kenyon College , or you can read this transcript . Or, hey, do both.

2. "Consider the Lobster"

This is a classic. When he goes to the Maine Lobster Festival to do a report for Gourmet , DFW ends up taking his readers along for a deep, cerebral ride. Asking questions like "Do lobsters feel pain?" Wallace turns the whole celebration into a profound breakdown on the meaning of consciousness. (Don't forget to read the footnotes!)

2. "Ticket to the Fair"

Another episode of Wallace turning journalism into something more. Harper 's sent DFW to report on the state fair, and he emerged with this masterpiece. The Harper's subtitle says it all: "Wherein our reporter gorges himself on corn dogs, gapes at terrifying rides, savors the odor of pigs, exchanges unpleasantries with tattooed carnies, and admires the loveliness of cows."

3. "Federer as Religious Experience"

DFW was obviously obsessed with tennis, but you don't have to like or know anything about the sport to be drawn in by his writing. In this essay, originally published in the sports section of The New York Times , Wallace delivers a profile on Roger Federer that soon turns into a discussion of beauty with regard to athleticism. It's hypnotizing to read.

4. "Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise"

Later published as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in the collection of the same name, this essay is the result of Harper's sending Wallace on a luxury cruise. Wallace describes how the cruise sends him into a depressive spiral, detailing the oddities that make up the strange atmosphere of an environment designed for ultimate "fun."

5. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction"

This is definitely in the running for my favorite DFW essay. (It's so hard to choose.) Fiction writers! Television! Voyeurism! Loneliness! Basically everything I love comes together in this piece as Wallace dives into a deep exploration of how humans find ways to look at each other. Though it's a little long, it's endlessly fascinating.

6. "String Theory"

"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

Originally published in Esquire , this article takes you deep into the intricate world of professional tennis. Wallace uses tennis (and specifically tennis player Michael Joyce) as a vehicle to explore the ideas of success, identity, and what it means to be a professional athlete.

7. "9/11: The View from the Midwest"

Written in the days following 9/11, this article details DFW and his community's struggle to come to terms with the attack.

8. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage "

If you're a language nerd like me, you'll really dig this one. A self-proclaimed "snoot" about grammar, Wallace dives into the world of dictionaries, exploring all of the implications of how language is used, how we understand and define grammar, and how the "Democratic Spirit" fits into the tumultuous realms of English.

Images: cocoparisienne /Pixabay; werner22brigette /Pixabay; StartupStockPhotos /Pixabay; PublicDomainPIctures /Pixabay

Unending Narrative, One-sided Empathy, and Problematic Contexts of Interaction in David Foster Wallace's "The Depressed Person"

Affiliation.

• 1 Department of Communication, 1117 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, 4200 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA. [email protected].
• PMID: 28956347
• DOI: 10.1007/s10912-017-9478-9

In 1997, David Foster Wallace published "The Depressed Person," a short story about a privileged, deeply unhappy woman dedicated to exploring and recounting the texture and etiology of her chronic depression. This essay argues that "The Depressed Person" challenges the long-standing assumption that narrativizing the pain of depression is crucial to overcoming it, and the contemporary view that empathic responses from others promote recovery of the depressed. Taken together, these two critiques inform Wallace's portrayal of chronic depression as an interactive phenomenon that is articulated, sustained, and regenerated through problematic contexts of interaction. Written at a time when public knowledge of and talk about depression was surging, "The Depressed Person" holds an important, if presently under-recognized place, in the expansive corpus of depression texts that emerged in the 1990s.

Keywords: Depression; Empathy; Interaction; Narrative; Wallace.

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• Narrative Medicine*

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“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace

A true rendering of a mentally ill person in a book or story can be vindicating to someone suffering from the same condition who reads the book. Because of the stigma attached to mental illness, it’s not easy to talk about your mood swings with your friends, or to get your family to understand why you must check—exactly nine  times—that the door is locked. So when I read a story with characters I can relate to, I feel not only a sense of camaraderie—we’ve both been through this together—but also extremely validated when they have the same thoughts, do the same things, things that other people may not understand or even recognise. When a character flinches in the same way, and dreads the same social situations, you feel like yes, this is real . This is how we are . Of course, many authors get it wrong and portray mental illness in misleading or wholly inaccurate ways, but some get it right, and when they do—when the tics and the despondency are as convincing as if they were inside your head—it is especially comforting.

David Foster Wallace’s “ The Depressed Person “, from his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men , is one example. He got it right. Like countless other SNOOTs (“Syntax Nudniks of Our Time”—a term popularised by Wallace to mean a grammar and usage fanatic in his essay “ Tense Present “), I have a deep admiration and affection for Wallace. His portfolio includes the seemingly unending  Infinite Jest ,  a wonderful collection of essays entitled  Consider the Lobster ,  and a commencement speech that was encapsulated in a book called  This is Water . His suicide in September 2008 suggests some of the struggles that plagued Wallace throughout most of his life, which was most recently the topic of conversation in a biography penned by D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story , released in August this year.

Though he never wrote expressedly about his own mental health history, on several occasions he discussed various aspects of mental illness in his work. “The Depressed Person” relays the life of a woman who, though shallow and unlikeable, struggles through a familiar brand of depression with her therapist and her few relatively supportive friends. Independent of the woman’s grating personality (which gathered a fair amount of criticism upon publication), her grapple with depression should resonate with those who have encountered it ourselves. The shame the depressed person experiences when calling members of her support system results in an all too recognisable sense of inadequacy at the formidable challenge of verbalising her anguish. Wallace neatly describes her drama with prescription medications as well as her complicated relationship with her therapist. An especially poignant passage lists the varying treatments that have failed the protagonist:

Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.

The description is so authentic, I suspect Wallace is drawing from his own experience. Usually, the drugs—Wellbutrin, Strattera, Lexapro, Cymbalta—don’t work at all, and they never work at initial doses. You count yourself lucky if your medication of the month doesn’t leave you with a particularly nasty side affect, which could be anything from a rash, to heart palpitations, to tinnitus, to a dangerous speed-like high. More serious cases of depression will require drug cocktails—two Lithium with breakfast, two with dinner, two Seroquels at bedtime, various sedatives throughout the day—to do any good at all.

As for the woman’s relationship with her therapist, it involves a dizzying amount of reflection that begins and ends and begins again with the woman’s own selfishness. It is difficult not to be selfish with regard to one’s therapist, as his or her occupation is to tend to the patient’s thoughts, feelings and progress. The therapist can be the best and only friend a patient has, but as a relationship the patient pays to keep, it cannot be as personal or meaningful as she may wish it to be. It is derived from a business relationship, one whose definition ensures the whole focus is on the patient. The acknowledgement that the relationship is contrived can be damaging to the depressed person. Whether her character is unduly exaggerated, her feelings and experiences are not.

For all these reasons, “The Depressed Person” is, possibly, the most accurate account of depression I have read. You can read it here at Harpers .

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Kathleen Elise is a Cuban-American and a voracious reader from Miami, Florida. She has worked as a news director, a DJ, and as a writer and editor of radio stations and written for publications both stateside and in the UK. Currently living in London to earn her master's at University College London, she spends her time watching TV, listening to records, and internally correcting other people's grammar. She wishes she were as cool as her little sister.

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Suicide Is Not an Act of Cowardice

A radio host’s tweets have resurrected a dangerous myth to disparage a celebrated novelist.

David Foster Wallace, who took his own life in 2008, was a courageous man. He was a university professor, a prolific writer of essays and novels, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, but none of those things made him notably brave. What made him brave was that he accomplished what he did while fighting a major depressive disorder, and survived it until he was 46. He achieved even as he struggled to balance the disruptive side effects of his medications with their life-preserving qualities. Many who face depression know that private struggle.

But John Ziegler, a pundit, radio talk show host, and writer for Mediaite and The Bulwark , thinks that Wallace was a coward whose suicide demonstrates that his work is not credible. Twitter is the perfect forum to say angry, mean, ignorant things, and that’s where Ziegler shared his view of Wallace :

Yep! Only 3-4 blatant inaccuracies in the first paragraph and the author killed himself soon afterwards. Very credible! — John Ziegler (@Zigmanfreud) January 5, 2020

That you used the guy's suicide to discredit him within seconds of some random ass dude commenting on twitter pretty much confirms everything in the story. Btw, it did seem like he liked you more than he expected to. But your lack of empathy comes through as clear here as there. — John Adams (@manleyadams1) January 5, 2020

LMAO the dude selfishly and cowardly chose to kill himself despite having a family. I’m sorry, but in the rational world that is a legitimate fact to consider when evaluating that article he did on me. More important were all the blatant inaccuracies in the first paragraph. — John Ziegler (@Zigmanfreud) January 5, 2020

This is contemptible, but there may be two reasons to give Ziegler a break. The first is that Wallace utterly savaged him in a column here at The Atlantic in 2005, and Ziegler has never gotten over it. In a ruthless and brilliant portrait , Wallace captured the banality and smallness of Ziegler’s life as a bomb-throwing right-wing radio host. Wallace had a rare talent for portraying human frailties, and he limned Ziegler as a huckster selling insipid resentment alongside “male enhancement” pills and hair restorers.  It was a column ahead of its time; it could have been written about half of the programs on the air today. The Wallace who nailed Ziegler to the wall would have had no difficulty recognizing, for instance, Alex Jones. (Ziegler has arguably moved on. Bless President Donald Trump, the safety school for angry pundits of all political stripes and levels of ability: Ziegler has since transitioned to the popular and undemanding anti-Trump-conservative beat and the somewhat more esoteric Jerry-Sandusky-was-framed beat.)

The second reason to give Ziegler a break is that his malice-tinged ignorance is common. Every time there’s a suicide in the news, the Courage Experts appear, explaining that taking your own life—especially if you have a family—is cowardly.  The deaths of Robin Williams, Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and many others all inspired such judgments from people lacking either insight or human empathy. These people have something in common: They haven’t experienced major depression, and don’t care to make the effort to grasp what it’s like.  Like Ziegler, they see suicide as “selfish,” a decision reached through a self-interested calculus of pleasure and pain, with no consideration given to loved ones left behind.

But that’s not what depression is like at all.  Wallace understood it, even though his understanding wasn’t enough to save him.  In the novel Infinite Jest , he wrote this remarkably evocative and accurate description:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Depression lies. It lies relentlessly and seductively and convincingly. The lies, like the fire of Wallace’s parable, separate you from hope, from faith, from your loved ones.  Imagine the worst day of your life. Maybe someone you loved died, or betrayed you. Maybe you lost a job you loved or were publicly humiliated or failed some essential obligation. Remember how it felt? Imagine, for a moment, feeling that way almost all of the time. Imagine it’s always there, a hard angry fist in the pit of your stomach, from when you wake to when you sleep. Imagine that the few moments when you forget and don’t feel that way offer little solace, because suddenly you remember , and the pain and hopelessness surge back like a tsunami. Imagine hearing inexorable lies in your own voice, telling you that you’ll never feel better, that you deserve no better, that if there are people who love you, it’s only because they don’t see how worthless you are, and that they would all be better off without you. Imagine that you can’t conceive of any way that the pain can end unless you die. It’s not cowardly to fall prey to that. It’s human. Resisting that, persevering, excelling, creating art when you feel that way, like Wallace did? That’s goddamned epic. Wallace isn’t a coward for falling; he’s a hero for standing as long as he did.

Inadequately treated depression reaps us mercilessly. It’s the tenth leading cause of death in America.  The suicide rates have climbed steadily for decades. But there’s hope. There’s always hope. You can help your friends and loved ones find their way back to that hope. Talking with depressed people, offering them help and steadfast support, gently but firmly leading them to pursue and maintain treatment, and keeping in touch with them are all effective ways of reducing suicide risk . Depression lies, but you can be the one in somebody’s life who counters those lies with the truth.

Decent people can also help by not making things worse, and by avoiding cruel and thoughtless stereotypes. When you announce that people who have died by suicide are cowardly, you’re sending a message to depressed people fighting suicidal thoughts. The message isn’t one of perseverance. It’s one of worthlessness. When you say that the victims of suicide are cowards, you’re telling depressed people that they’re weak and contemptible for what they feel. You’re reinforcing the lies they’re already hearing in their head. You’re making it less likely, not more, that they’ll seek help, and you’re not facing responsibility for your actions. That’s not brave. That’s cowardly. If John Ziegler can feel shame, he ought to.

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David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral

By Jon Baskin

Before David Foster Wallace died by suicide at his California home, in 2008, he left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words, most of them circling a group of accountants at an office for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. According to David Hering, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has visited Wallace’s archives in Austin, Texas, the material went back more than a decade, to the period immediately after the publication of Wallace’s second novel, the career-making “ Infinite Jest ” (1996). Over the years, Wallace had often referred to the project as the “long thing,” and worried that it was becoming unmanageable. The editor Michael Pietsch, who assembled some of the pages into the book that would become “ The Pale King ,” published in 2011, says Wallace compared writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” In an e-mail to his friend and sometimes rival Jonathan Franzen, Wallace wrote, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.”

As usual, Wallace’s choice of words was not casual. The ability to see what’s useful and what isn’t wasn’t just what Wallace believed that he needed to complete his final novel; it was also the virtue of mind he hoped it would cultivate in his readers. The most common rhetorical mode of “The Pale King” is commotion recollected in tranquillity. “I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way. My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’ ” This is from the first page of the monologue of the tax auditor Chris Fogle, who, in the longest continuous portion of the novel, explains to an offstage interviewer the path that brought him to the “Service.” The past tense is to the point: Fogle’s is a conversion narrative that begins with an adolescence during which he “had trouble just paying attention,” and that concludes, following a kind of religious experience in an accounting class at DePaul University, in Chicago, with his deliverance unto his mission as an accountant for the I.R.S.

Fogle’s monologue has now been published as a freestanding novella, christened “ Something to Do with Paying Attention ” (McNally Editions). In the introduction, the bookseller and editor Sarah McNally calls these pages “not just a complete story, but the best concrete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.” McNally is right to underscore the story’s relatively serene narration, which stands out even more now that it can be encountered independently from the larger book. For much of his career, Wallace was known for interminable footnotes, self-reflexive marginalia, and clause-heavy sentences that doubled back on themselves in an effort to represent the convolutions of the American mind—a mind jammed full of bureaucratic jargon, commercial slogans, and therapeutic pseudo-concepts, then wrapped in the trip wire of postmodern self-consciousness. He did not always want to write like this, though. And Fogle’s monologue offers, as McNally indicates, Wallace’s most sustained effort to adopt the plainspoken frankness that he admired in the “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction of his Russian heroes, especially Dostoyevsky .

McNally has less to say about how the novella answers a perhaps more urgent question for Wallace, whose stylistic choices were always connected to moral-philosophical ones: what to use this newly frank moral authority for. Learning to “see what’s useful and what isn’t” may appear to be predominantly a matter of self-discipline or character, and at times this was how Wallace treated it. But Wallace’s late works reveal an increasing awareness that separating the useful and the useless also requires an ethical judgment: it means determining what is, or should be, worthy of our committed attention. Is public accountancy, as some of the characters in the novel insist, a moral vocation? What does it mean to be “useful,” whether as an employee of the federal government or as an artist, in the America shaped by Ronald Reagan? Although Wallace’s final work of fiction raises these questions, it does not exactly answer them, and perhaps for good reason.

Since the publication of D. T. Max’s essay “ The Unfinished ,” in 2009, in this magazine, discussions about Wallace in non-scholarly venues have taken a sharply biographical turn. Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends (including Franzen, in his long-form eulogy for this magazine), his former romantic partners (among them the writer Mary Karr, who reported that Wallace kicked her, stalked her, and threatened to kill her husband), and his editors (the latter two categories combined in the former Esquire editor Adrienne Miller’s 2020 memoir “ In the Land of Men ”). These accounts filled in important blanks in Wallace’s personal history, including aspects of his decades-long battle with addiction and depression, and the grim details of his final weeks in California. They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.

It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.

“Something to Do with Paying Attention,” like any worthwhile conversion narrative, begins with the unconverted self. With shame, Fogle recounts being an unfocussed child of the seventies who drifted between jobs and schools in Libertyville, a suburb of Chicago, where he and his “wastoid” friends smoked pot, traded interpretations of what Pink Floyd “truly” meant, and romanticized their “weird kind of narcissistic despair.” In another convention of the genre, part of Fogle’s problem, he sees now, was that he was not aware he had a problem. That starts to change after a sequence that could only have been written by Wallace—the last major American novelist to be fluent in popular television—in which Fogle, watching soap operas in his dorm room at DePaul, in 1978, is struck by a return-from-commercial tagline. The tagline is “ You’re watching As the World Turns”—emphasis Fogle’s. Fogle begins to apprehend, however foggily, “that I might be a real nihilist, that it wasn’t always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better.” Beneath the theatrical performance of wastoid anomie, that is, lies the real thing.

The transition, for Fogle and for the reader, is from seeing Fogle’s aimlessness as a generic product of adolescent apathy to understanding it as a symptom of a broader social and spiritual deficit. Wallace was an uncommonly philosophical novelist in part because he believed that cultural life was oriented by a set of dominant ideas and pictures, which were both older and more entrenched than any specific trend or technology. The wasteland in which the wastoids live is, then, not merely attributable to the influence of popular media in seventies America; it emerges from the rocky soil of secular, modern ideals. The invocation of “nihilism”—a word that Fogle uses to describe himself five different times—connects his condition to the skepticism so often targeted by modern philosophers, from Kant to Simone de Beauvoir, in their attempt to secure a rational basis for morality after the death of God. Where Wallace believed that this effort had led is indicated by Fogle’s frustration with his humanities courses, which reflect the exhaustion of the search for a moral order and, in its place, the emergence of a postmodern project that tends to reinforce his nihilistic priors. “The whole point of the classes,” Fogle recalls, “was that nothing meant anything, that everything was abstract and endlessly interpretable.”

It is consistent with Wallace’s long quest for countercultural forces in the places his readers might least expect to find them—the role is played most convincingly by Alcoholics Anonymous in “Infinite Jest”—that Fogle’s conversion experience takes place neither in one of these literature or philosophy courses, nor in a traditional religious setting. Rather, it occurs when he wanders absent-mindedly, still thinking about his dorm-room epiphany, into the wrong classroom on the final day of a semester at DePaul. Instead of American Political Thought, he has arrived just in time for the final lecture in Advanced Tax.

If the soap-opera tagline has primed Fogle for his conversion, the accounting class completes the job. The course is taught by a Jesuit professor who immediately impresses Fogle with his authoritative bearing. (In a parallel to McNally’s judgment of Wallace’s late writing, the professor expresses a “zealous integrity that manifested not as style but as the lack of it.”) Fogle knows nothing about progressive marginal tax rates and adjusted gross income, but he does note a series of remarks the Jesuit makes in support of his conviction that “the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic.” On one of the professor’s transparencies appears a quotation: “What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war.” (Seeing the attribution to “James,” Fogle assumes the reference is to the “biblical apostle.”) At the end of class, stepping away from his charts for a final flourish, the Jesuit invokes the Kierkegaardian “leap outward” that will be required of the students if they wish to transcend the affectations of their youth and embrace a vocation worthy of an adult. The lecture ends with a corny pun that Fogle registers as a command: “Gentlemen, you are called to account.”

On the level of narrative, all that is left is for Fogle to buy a wool suit and make his way to the I.R.S. regional recruiting office in southwest Chicago—a task that he completes in a subtly haunting scene set amid dazzlingly bright snowbanks left over from the infamous blizzard of 1979, and overlaid with heavy-handed comparisons between entering the Service and signing up for war. The novella ends with Fogle being accepted into a vocation that, based on his comments in the present, has fulfilled all his expectations for it. But to regard Fogle’s conversion as straightforward in this way—that is, in the way it looks to him , post-conversion—is to tell only half the story in “Something to Do with Paying Attention.” For, unlike most of Wallace’s previous works of fiction, which take place either in some fictional future or in intimate settings with little social scaffolding, “The Pale King” is a historical novel.

“All this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself,” Fogle recalls. “I seem to remember in 1976 my father openly predicting a Ronald Reagan presidency and even sending their campaign a donation.” Fogle remembers, too, the subtle marks of distinction that make adolescents such reliable guides to a given era: “Girls wore caps or dungaree hats, but most guys were essentially uncool if they wore a hat”; “I remember everyone pretending to be a samurai or saying ‘Excuse me !’ in all sorts of different contexts—this was cool”; “The smell of Brylcreem in my father’s hatband, Deep Throat, Howard Cosell . . .” Details like these are scattered throughout the first half of the novella, partly so Wallace can establish a generational caesura between Fogle and his father, the Reagan-campaign contributor. Fogle’s father is a “cost systems supervisor” for the city of Chicago, who never misses a day of work before dying in a gruesome subway accident in 1977. (Fogle, due to his “dawdling” behind his father on the platform, is partly responsible.) Only after his encounter with the Jesuit professor does Fogle recognize that his rebellion against what he had considered his father’s mindless conformism had itself been a product of mindless conformism. The father and son were “acting out typical roles . . . like machines going through their programmed motions.”

By choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps and devote his life to public service, Fogle seeks to break with his programming and live what he calls a “human” life. The problem is that public service, in the generation separating Fogle from his father, has itself come to be perceived as less and less human. Fogle’s father is part of the Depression-era Silent Generation, a group often associated with values like thrift, patriotism, and respect for authority. Fogle’s generation, by contrast, came of age during the Vietnam War and Watergate, events that created a breach in trust between citizens and their government. (Fogle recalls this being indicated by the ambient phrase “credibility gap.”) As the scholar Marshall Boswell has pointed out, Fogle’s monologue also contains echoes from a long debate about tax policy and ethics, which Pietsch places right before it in “The Pale King.” The debate is between veteran I.R.S. agents who see the agency as a repository of civic virtue and moral responsibility—the “nation’s beating heart”—and a new guard who seek to transform it into “a business—a going, for-profit concern type of thing.” As Boswell notes, the disagreement pits Fogle’s father’s dutiful civic-mindedness against the ascendent corporatist ethos of Fogle’s generation, which believes that “their highest actual duty was to themselves.”

The whole point of Fogle’s monologue, from his perspective, is that the Service has allowed him to subsume his self-interest in some larger purpose. And neither the novella nor “The Pale King” undermines the Jesuit’s teaching that public accountancy can be a noble calling, capable of inculcating virtues—duty, accountability, the ability to complete repetitive work with no expectation of applause—that run counter to the nihilism of the age. But it is no accident that Wallace also sets the story’s events on the cusp of the Reagan revolution, which, largely through tax policy, would hollow out America’s already ailing public institutions, exacerbating the pessimism about government and collective causes that informs Fogle’s initial “malaise.” The story is simultaneously about the lifesaving necessity of sincere, moral commitment and about the impossibility of finding a worthy object for that commitment in the historical period that immediately precedes our own.

Wallace could never have guessed that his final novel, written in the midst of neoliberal disinvestment and end-of-history disenchantment, would appear at the outset of a decade that marked a return to the ethics of conviction. Only one of several artists in his generation to call for a “new sincerity” (a term that he never actually used, though he is justly associated with the tendency) in culture, he was virtually alone in suggesting, with anything like a straight face, that American civic and political life might offer a proper receptacle for that sincerity. Remarkably, in the years that followed the publication of “The Pale King”—years that included events such as Occupy Wall Street, nationwide social movements for racial and gender equality, and the rise of Trumpism—the notion that American artists should make their work subserve political movements became prominent and then virtually inescapable. At times, these causes tempted artists into a kind of grandstanding that was at odds with the valorization, in Fogle’s monologue, of acts undertaken for “no audience.” Still, it is possible that Wallace’s most meaningful influence on the writers and literary commentators who followed him came neither from his stylistic innovations nor his broadsides against postmodern self-consciousness but, rather, from his insistence that literature should aim at a moral purpose that was higher than itself.

Yet the difficulty that Wallace had in finding an object for this purpose proved predictive in a different sense. His inability to locate institutions not already corrupted in near-fatal ways, nor causes dignified enough to hold his skepticism at bay, hinted at the fickle, fugitive quality that would attend so many of the public passions of the ensuing decade. It also suggested why our artists and intellectuals cycle so reliably between utopian evangelism and ironic anti-politics . If Wallace believed that we should pursue the “moral equivalent of war” in the social realm, as James (the pragmatist philosopher, not the apostle) put it, he was also alive to the possibility that our moral wars would be about as decisive, and lead to just as much disillusionment and cynicism, as our military ones. We might read Fogle’s story today as an allegory for Wallace’s attempt to write passionately moral fiction for a society that had lost not only the will but also the capacity to make shared judgments about what’s useful and what isn’t. Wallace was like a man trying to build a new attic on a house whose foundation he knows has collapsed. It’s a kind of dark miracle that he stayed up there so long. ♦

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The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace

Mary k. holland on closing the “open question” of wallace’s misogyny.

Feature photo by Steve Rhodes .

David Foster Wallace’s work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is also thematically compelling, mounting brilliant critiques of liberal humanism’s masked oppressions, the soul-killing dangers of technology and American narcissism, and the increasing impotence of our culture of irony.

Wallace spoke and wrote movingly about our need to cultivate self-awareness in order to more fully see and respect others, and created formal methods that construct the reader-writer relationship with such piercing intimacy that his fans and critics feel they know and love him. A year after his death by suicide, as popular and critical attention to him and his work began to build into the industry of Wallace studies that exists today, he was first outed as a misogynist who stalked, manipulated, and physically attacked women.

In her 2009 memoir, Lit , Mary Karr spends less than four pages narrating the several years in which Wallace pursued her, leading to a brief romantic relationship that ended in vicious arguments and “his pitching my coffee table at me.” Unlike her accounts of the relationship nearly a decade later, Karr’s tone here notably remains clever and humorous throughout. She also follows each disclosure of Wallace’s ferocity with a confession of her own regrettable behavior: regarding his “temper fits” she admits to “sentences I had to apologize for” and assures us—twice—that “no doubt he was richly provoked.” After describing the coffee-table incident, she notes parenthetically that “years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle,” as if having a piece of furniture thrown at you makes you as guilty as having thrown it.

Three years later D.T. Max published his biography of Wallace, in which he divulged more shocking details about the relationship with Karr—that Wallace tried to buy a gun to kill her husband, that he tried to push her from a moving car—while also dropping enough details about Wallace’s sex life and professed attitudes toward women to make him sound like one of his own hideous men. Wallace called female fans at his readings “audience pussy”; wondered to Jonathan Franzen whether “his only purpose on earth was ‘to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible’”; picked up vulnerable women in his recovery groups; admitted to a “fetish for conquering young mothers,” like Orin in Infinite Jest ; and “affected not to care that some of the women were his students.”

In a 2016 anthology dedicated to the late author, one of those students, Suzanne Scanlon, published a short story about a student having a manipulative, emotionally abusive sexual affair with her professor (called “D-,” “Author,” and “a self-identified Misogynist”), using characteristic formal elements of “Octet” and “Brief Interviews” and dominated by the narrative voice popularized by David Foster Wallace.

None of these accounts had any visible impact on fans’ or readers’ love of Wallace’s writing or on critics’ readings and opinions of his work. Rather, one writer, Rebecca Rothfeld, confessed in 2013 that Max’s record of (some of) Wallace’s misogynistic acts and statements could not shake her “faith in [his] fundamental goodness, intelligence, and likeability” because his “work seemed more real to me than his behavior did.” Critic Amy Hungerford took the opposite stance in 2016, proclaiming her decision to stop reading and teaching Wallace’s work, but without mentioning his abusive treatment of women or the question of how that behavior presses us to re-read the same in his work.

Another writer, Deirdre Coyle, explained her discomfort at reading Wallace not in terms of the author’s own behavior—which she gives no sign of being aware of—but because of sexual and misogynistic violence perpetrated on her by men she sees as very much like Wallace (“Small liberal arts colleges are breeding grounds for these guys”) and in terms of patriarchy in general (“It’s hard to distinguish my reaction to Wallace from my reaction to patriarchy.” Any woman who has been violated, talked over, and condescended to by this kind of man, the kind who thinks his pseudo-feminism allows him to enlighten her about her own experiences of male oppression and sexual violation, cannot help but sympathize with Coyle.

But in rejecting Wallace because of other men’s sexual violence and misogyny in general, she shifts the argument away from questions about how these function in the fiction and how Wallace’s biography might force us to re-read that fiction, and allows for the kind of circular rebuttal that a (male) Wallace critic offered a year later: not all male readers of Wallace are misogynists; therefore, women should listen to the good ones and read more Wallace; let me tell you why.

These pre-#MeToo reactions to Karr’s and Max’s reports of Wallace’s abuse of women clarify what is at stake as readers, critics, and teachers consider this biographical information in the context of Wallace’s work. For, while Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument against the intentional fallacy is compelling and important, its goal is to protect the sanctity of the text against the undue influence of our assumptions about the person who wrote it. Arguments defending the importance of Wallace’s beautiful empathizing fiction in spite of his abuse of women threaten to do the opposite.

Like Rothfeld, whose admiration for Wallace’s fiction renders his own misogynistic acts less “real,” David Hering argues that “the biographical revelation of unsavoury details about Wallace’s own relationships” leads to an equation between Wallace and misogyny that “does a fundamental disservice to the kind of urgent questions Wallace asks in his work about communication, empathy, and power”—as if Wallace’s real abuse of real women is not worth contemplating in comparison with his writing about how fictional men treat fictional women. Hering’s use of the euphemism “unsavoury” to describe behavior ranging from exploitation to physical attacks, like his description of Wallace’s work regarding gender as “troublesome,” illustrates another widespread problem with nearly all critical treatments of this topic so far: an unwillingness to say, or perhaps even see, that what we are talking about in the fiction and in the author’s life is gender-motivated violence, stalking, physical abuse, even, in the case of Karr’s husband, plotting to murder.

In the wake of the October 2017 resurgence of Burke’s #MeToo movement, we see a curious split between Wallace-studies critics and others in their reactions to these allegations. Not only does Hering’s response downplay the severity of Wallace’s behavior and its relevance to his work; it also asserts Hering’s “belief” that Wallace’s work “dramatize[s]” misogyny, rather than expressing it—without offering a text-based argument or pointing to the critical work that had already done this analysis and found exactly the opposite to be true.

He also relies on a technique used by memoirists, bloggers, and critics alike in their attempts to save Wallace from his own biography: he converts an example of male domination of women into a universal human dilemma, erasing the elements of gender and power entirely, by reading Wallace’s silencing of his female interviewer’s voice in Brief Interviews as “embody[ing] the richness of Wallace’s work—its focus on the difficulty and importance of communication and empathy, and its illustration of the poisonous things that happen when dialogue breaks down.” Such a reading ignores the fact that when dialogue breaks down between an entitled man and a pressured woman , the things that can happen go beyond metaphorically poisonous to physically sickening and injurious—as so many of the stories in that collection illustrate.

Given the same platform and the same task—celebrating Wallace around what would have been his 56th birthday—critic Clare Hayes-Brady offered “Reading David Foster Wallace in 2018,” mere months after the social media flood of women’s testimonies about sexual violence had begun. It does not mention #MeToo or the public allegations that had been made about Wallace, raising the question of what “in 2018” refers to. When asked several months later “what’s changed?” in Wallace studies, after the public (but not critical) backlash had begun, Hayes-Brady falls back on the same generalizing technique used by Hering. She reframes accusations of misogyny as an entirely academic development, beneficial to Wallace studies and unrelated to #MeToo outcry against perpetrators of sexual violence (“a coincidence of timing”). She equates “flaws in his writing both technical and also moral and ethical,” as if women had been up in arms across Twitter over Wallace’s exhausting sentence structures.

When directly asked if Wallace was a misogynist, she replies “yes, but in the way everyone is, including me,” as if we neither have nor need a separate word for men who do not just live unavoidably in our misogynistic culture but also willfully perpetrate selfish, cruel, and violent acts of misogyny against women. That is, rather than responding humanely to indisputable evidence that our beloved writer was not the saint he would have liked us to think he was (and that we would have liked to believe him to be), Wallace critics—including me, in my silence at that time—refused to allow #MeToo to force the reckoning that was so clearly required. We did so by denying the relevance of his personal behavior to his fiction and to our work, or—worse—by participating in that age-old rape culture enabler: refusing to believe women’s testimony.

Those outside literary studies reacted quite differently to the renewed attention #MeToo brought to these accusations. After Junot Díaz was publicly accused on May 4, 2018, of sexually abusing women, causing immediate public protest, Mary Karr responded by reminding us on Twitter of the abuse she had reported nearly a decade earlier, prompting a series of blog articles and interviews that supported Karr by recounting the allegations made by Karr and Max. They also began to reveal the misogyny that had shaped and stifled public reception of those allegations.

Whitney Kimball pointed out that Max described Wallace’s violent treatment of Karr as beneficial to his creative output and part of what made him “fascinating”; that in praising the “quite remarkable” “craftsmanship” of one of Wallace’s letters, Max notes only in passing that the letter is Wallace’s apology for planning to buy a gun to kill Karr’s husband. Megan Garber noted the misogyny of an interviewer asking Max why “his feelings for [Karr] created such trouble for Wallace”—an example of what Kate Manne calls “himpathy,” or empathizing with a male perpetrator of sexual violence rather than the victim.

#MeToo also began to make the misogyny of Wallace’s work more visible to his readers. Devon Price describes how reading about Wallace’s abuses against women caused them to revisit Wallace’s work and see its gender violence for the first time. Tellingly, Price also realizes that one of the reasons they were depressed when they fell in love with Wallace’s work is that they were then in a physically, emotionally, and sexually abusive relationship. Price’s realization points to another common reason why readers are blind to or defensive about the misogyny in Wallace’s work and behavior, and to a key way in which the #MeToo movement can allow reading and literary studies to illuminate misogyny in synergistic ways: we are often blind to misogyny and sexual abuse, in fiction and in others’ behavior, because we are living in it unaware. And the awareness of the spectrum of sexual abuse brought by #MeToo testimonies reveals misogyny not just in the fiction that we read, but in our own lives—one revelation causing the other.

To date, no new criticism has emerged that directly considers the implications to his work of Wallace’s now widely reported misogyny and violence toward women. But the recent publication of Adrienne Miller’s memoir In the Land of Men (2020), which describes her years-long relationship with Wallace while she was literary editor at Esquire , makes a compelling, if unwitting, argument for the necessity of such biographically informed criticism. Miller documents the connection between Wallace’s life and work in excruciating detail, recounting extended scenes between them in which Wallace speaks and acts nearly identically to the misogynists of Brief Interviews , an identification he encourages by telling her that “some of the interviews were ‘actual conversations I had when I had to break up with people.’”

But though Miller lays out the “sexism” of Wallace’s fiction, especially Jest and Brief Interviews , more baldly than any of us Wallace scholars has so far, she remains, even from the vantage point of twenty years later and post-#MeToo, unable or unwilling to identify Wallace’s treatment of her as abusive or misogynistic. In fact, most shocking about the memoir is not its record of Wallace’s behavior but its methodical and steadfast refusal to acknowledge the gender violence of that behavior, and Miller’s disturbing pattern of normalizing, apologizing for, and denying it.

Ultimately, she attempts to redirect us from the question of whether her relationship with Wallace qualifies as abuse or sexual harassment by asking, “Who looks to the artist’s life for moral guidance anyway?” and “What are we to do with the art of profoundly compromised men?” But rather than neatly pivoting from Wallace’s culpability, these questions reveal important reasons why we must consider the lives of such men in conversation with their art. For these men are not merely passively “compromised” but aggressively compromis ing , in ways that our misogynistic culture obscures, and which savvy investigation of their art and lives can illuminate. And “moral” investigation is particularly indicated by the work of Wallace, who declared himself a maverick writer willing to return literature to earnestness and “love” (“Interview with David Foster Wallace” 1993), who wrote fiction that quizzes us on ethics and human value (“Octet” 1999), and who delivered a beloved commencement speech arguing the importance of recognizing one’s inherent narcissism in order to extend care to others.

What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)? What does it mean that a man and a body of work that claimed feminism in theory primarily produced a stream of abusive relationships between men and women in life and art? What can we learn about the blindness of both men and women to their participation in misogyny and rape culture, despite their professions of awareness of both? How might reading Wallace’s fiction in the contexts of biographical information about him and women’s narratives about their experiences of sexual violence enable us to better understand—and interrupt—the powerful hold misogyny and rape culture have on our society, our art, and our critical practices?

_____________________________________________________________________

Excerpted from #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture , edited by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Academic.  © 2021 by Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett. 

Mary K. Holland

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30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

in e-books , Literature | February 22nd, 2012 10 Comments

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We start­ed the week expect­ing to pub­lish one David Fos­ter Wal­lace post . Then, because of the 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion, it turned into two . And now three. We spent some time track­ing down free DFW sto­ries and essays avail­able on the web, and they’re all now list­ed in our col­lec­tion,  800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices . But we did­n’t want them to escape your atten­tion. So here they are — 23 pieces pub­lished by David Fos­ter Wal­lace between 1989 and 2011, most­ly in major U.S. pub­li­ca­tions like The New York­er , Harper’s , The Atlantic , and The Paris Review . Enjoy, and don’t miss our oth­er col­lec­tions of free writ­ings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman .

• “9/11: The View From the Mid­west” (Rolling Stone, Octo­ber 25, 2001)
• “All That” (New York­er, Decem­ber 14, 2009)
• “An Inter­val” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Asset” (New York­er, Jan­u­ary 30, 1995)
• “Back­bone” An Excerpt from The Pale King (New York­er, March 7, 2011)
• “Big Red Son” from Con­sid­er the Lob­ster & Oth­er Essays
• “Brief Inter­views with Hideous Men” (The Paris Review, Fall 1997)
• “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster” (Gourmet, August 2004)
• “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (Pre­miere, 1996)
• “Every­thing is Green” (Harpers, Sep­tem­ber 1989)
• “E Unibus Plu­ram: Tele­vi­sion and U.S. Fic­tion” (The Review of Con­tem­po­rary Fic­tion, June 22, 1993)
• “Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence” (New York Times, August 20, 2006)
• “Good Peo­ple” (New York­er, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2007)
• “Host” (The Atlantic, April 2005)
• “Incar­na­tions of Burned Chil­dren” (Esquire, April 21, 2009)
• “Laugh­ing with Kaf­ka” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” (The Paris Review, Spring 1988)
• “On Life and Work” (Keny­on Col­lege Com­mence­ment address, 2005)
• “Order and Flux in Northamp­ton”   (Con­junc­tions, 1991)
• “Rab­bit Res­ur­rect­ed” (Harper’s, August 1992)
• “ Sev­er­al Birds” (New York­er, June 17, 1994)
• “Ship­ping Out: On the (near­ly lethal) com­forts of a lux­u­ry cruise” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1996)
• “Ten­nis, trigonom­e­try, tor­na­does A Mid­west­ern boy­hood”   (Harper’s, Decem­ber 1991)
• “Tense Present: Democ­ra­cy, Eng­lish, and the wars over usage” (Harper’s, April 2001)
• “The Awak­en­ing of My Inter­est in Annu­lar Sys­tems” (Harper’s, Sep­tem­ber 1993)
• “The Com­pli­ance Branch” (Harper’s, Feb­ru­ary 2008)
• “The Depressed Per­son” (Harper’s, Jan­u­ary 1998)
• “The String The­o­ry” (Esquire, July 1996)
• “The Weasel, Twelve Mon­keys And The Shrub” (Rolling Stone, April 2000)
• “Tick­et to the Fair” (Harper’s, July 1994)
• “Wig­gle Room” (New York­er, March 9, 2009)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Philip K. Dick: Down­load 13 Great Sci­ence Fic­tion Sto­ries

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Sto­ries

Read 17 Short Sto­ries From Nobel Prize-Win­ning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

10 Free Sto­ries by George Saun­ders, Author of Tenth of Decem­ber , “The Best Book You’ll Read This Year”

by OC | Permalink | Comments (10) |

Related posts:

Comments (10), 10 comments so far.

I got anoth­er free DFW essay for you: Big Red Son http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316156110_ChapterExcerpt(1) .htm

Thanks very much. I added it to the list.

Appre­ci­ate it, Dan

Thanks very much for this infor­ma­tion regard­ing essays and sto­ries

Hi Dan. It’s a bit late for this, but I just remem­bered anoth­er link you might want to add. You can hear DFW giv­ing the full unabridged Keny­on com­mence­ment speech (which you link to in your list) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8 (it’s in 2 parts). Or down­load the full audio from http://www.mediafire.com/?file41t3kfml6q6 Thanks for all your hard work!

This is excel­lent, thanks so much. Will these links be up per­ma­nent­ly? I want to avoid the trou­ble of down­load­ing the stuff I don’t have time to get to now.

Just thought I’d men­tion that ‘Lit­tle Expres­sion­less Ani­mals” cuts off about 2/3rds of the way through, requir­ing you to pur­chase the issue ($40) for the chance to read the rest.

Kind of a bum­mer.

Don’t for­get “Tra­cy Austin Serves Up a Bub­bly Life Sto­ry” (review of Tra­cy Austin’s Beyond Cen­ter Court: My Sto­ry): http://www.mendeley.com/research/tracy-austin-serves-up-bubbly-life-story-review-tracy-austins-beyond-center-court-story

Also, just to let you know, the link to “Big Red Son” is bro­ken.

There’s also a ton of oth­er here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace_bibliography

You can add “Good Old Neon” to your list if you like:

http://kalamazoo.coop/sites/default/files/Good%20Old%20Neon.pdf

There’s a bunch of arti­cles with bro­ken links, notably those from Harper’s Mag­a­zine. Has any­body saved them and would be so kind to share them?

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Archives & Special Collections David Foster Wallace at Amherst College

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D avid Foster Wallace’s time at Amherst College is the story of a brilliant young mind searching for identity and voice while struggling with debilitating depression. Wallace arrived at Amherst in the fall of 1980 when he roomed in a suite in Stearns. He made a strong impression on many of his professors, such as Willem DeVries who recalled, “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had.”

Wallace focused on his studies and received excellent grades throughout his time at Amherst. He won the Borden Freshman Prize in his first year, followed by the Armstrong Prize in English and the Hamilton Prize in Economics. He also found a group of friends, among them Mark Costello with whom he shared a room in Moore during his sophomore year. Wallace returned home for winter break at the end of the fall semester 1981, and took the spring 1982 semester off because of his depression.

Wallace returned to Amherst in fall 1982, again rooming with Costello, this time in Stone, one of the Social Dorms that were demolished to make room for the new Science Center. That fall, Wallace, Costello, and other friends revived an old Amherst student publication and launched Sabrina as an outlet for their humorous observations on college life. (The original Sabrina ran from 1950-1962.) One of Wallace’s contributions to the first issue in November 1982 was a parody of a Hardy Boys mystery titled “The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hanged Hamster.” It is a short piece with dark humor around suicide and sexual assault; in spite of the “To be continued...” at the end, it never was. Sabrina appeared regularly throughout the 1980s, then sporadically into the early 1990s.

During his summer at home in 1983, Wallace was first prescribed the antidepressant Tofranil. Shortly after returning to campus for the fall 1983 semester – what would have been his senior year – he once again withdrew from school and returned home. He continued to read voraciously while away from Amherst, immersing himself in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. It was also during this time that he produced his first short story published in a more serious college magazine: “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” in the 1984 issue of The Amherst Review . The story opens:

“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, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.” (26)

Wallace took a creative writing course during the spring 1984 semester from visiting professor and novelist Alan Lelchuk. He received an A-, the lowest grade he had earned since his freshman year. Undeterred, Wallace returned to school in fall 1984 more enthusiastic about fiction than ever. His friend Mark Costello graduated in spring 1984 having completed two theses: one a study of the New Deal, the other a novel. Wallace was determined to match Costello’s accomplishments and began work on two theses of his own. He worked with advisor Willem de Vries on a philosophy thesis, Richard Taylor’s “Fatalism” and the Semantics of Physical Modality , and with English professor Dale Petersen on a novel, The Broom of the System .

After graduation, Wallace moved to Tucson to pursue an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. The Broom of the System was published by Viking Penguin, Inc. in 1987, appearing simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. That year, he also served as a visiting instructor at Amherst. In 1999, the college awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree.

Remembering David Foster Wallace

Wallace died Sept. 12, 2008, when, after a decades-long struggle with depression, he hanged himself at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 44.

In the essays below, four people who knew Wallace at Amherst—his English thesis adviser, two friends and one former student—remember a young man who wrote his papers late at night when he couldn’t sleep, who played Bruce Springsteen’s “I'm Goin' Down” until the tape broke and who, even in college, possessed a “Dickensian genius for spawning new characters and newly devised connections among them.”

• Like a Set of Old Clothes
• Talking with Dave
• The Start of Everything that Followed
• The Teacher

Members of the Amherst community may post their own remembrances here .

David Foster Wallace Collections

In March 2010, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced that they had purchased Wallace’s personal papers – including his personal library -- and would make them available to researchers:

• David Foster Wallace: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
• David Foster Wallace: Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections

In December 2012, Columbia University Press published Wallace’s second Amherst thesis, Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will .

The Archives & Special Collections at Amherst holds a small number of letters Wallace wrote to Professor William Kennick ; the copies of his senior theses he submitted as a student in 1985; and a complete set of his published works, including several pre-publication proofs and variant editions.

Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man

In 1999, Amherst  magazine ran a feature-length Q&A interview with David Foster Wallace.