Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Struggle with Depression

Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

By Maria Bustillos | April 5, 2011
Close Reads 181
http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/inside-david-foster-wallaces-private-self-help-library
"Humility
the acceptance that being human is good enoughis the embrace of ordinariness." underlined by David
Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz's The Spirituality of Imperfection.
"True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and
carewith no one there to see or cheer. This is the world." David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three
hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a
dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of
his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from
those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime
fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in
where they belong.
Wallace committed suicide in 2008. There has been a natural reluctance to broach questions surrounding the
tragedy with his family and friends, just as there was reluctance to ask him directly about his personal history
when he was alive. But there are indicationsparticularly in the markings of his booksof Wallace's own
ideas about the sources of his depression, some of which seem as though they ought to be the privileged
communications of a priest or a psychiatrist. But these things are in a public archive and are therefore going to
be discussed and so I will tell you about them.
One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which
he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to
be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw,
Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.
Much of Wallace's work has to do with cutting himself back down to size, and in a larger sense, with the idea
that cutting oneself back down to size is a good one, for anyone (q.v., the Kenyon College commencement
speech, later published as This is Water). I left the Ransom Center wondering whether one of the most valuable
parts of Wallace's legacy might not be in persuading us to put John Bradshaw on the same level with
Wittgenstein. And why not; both authors are human beings who set out to be of some use to their fellows. It can
be argued, in fact, that getting rid of the whole idea of special gifts, of the exceptional, and of genius, is the
most powerful current running through all of Wallace's work.
All his life, he'd been the smartest boy in class, the gifted athlete, the super brain,
the best writer. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, writing two
senior theses, one in philosophy and one in English, both praised to the skies; the
latter was published as a novel, The Broom of the System, when he was just 24.
When Infinite Jest appeared, in 1996, acclaim came in like a tidal wave from
nearly every critic of stature. "A work of genius." "The plaques and citations can
now be put in escrow." "Exhilarating." "Truly remarkable." "Taking the next
step in fiction." The New York Times was relatively restrained in its praise, but
still called Wallace "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do
anything."
But Wallace had already learned to mistrust such praise. There are many, many
places where he talks about that mistrust, but here's just one: David Lipsky spoke
with him in 1996 in an interview that later grew into Lipsky's book, Although of
Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Here, Wallace explained that he was
proud of Infinite Jest in a way that he was not proud of The Broom of the System:
"Which I think shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly,
rewritten sloppily, sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that
was really a not-very-interesting way... really a way for me to avoid doing hard work. [...] I was arrogant, and
missed a chance to make that book better."
A bit later, he expanded on what he'd since learned: "I gotta tell you, I just think
to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less
aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated,
and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that
means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to
have a conversation with a person. [...] It's true that I want very muchI
treasure my regular-guyness. I've started to think it's my biggest asset as a
writer. Is that I'm pretty much just like everybody else."
Wallace's self-image was fragile and complex, but he was consistent on these
points, from then onward. His later work enters into many, many kinds of
minds, many points of view, with unvarying respect and an uncanny degree of
understanding. Every kind of person was of interest to him.
The love his admirers bear this author has a peculiarly intimate and personal
character. This is because Wallace gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary
human beings in a manner so winning and so truthful and forgiving as to make him seem a friend.
Wallace seemed always to be trying to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand
them better, and trying visibly to make himself understoodalways asking questions, demanding to know more
details. He owned his own weaknesses willingly and in the gentlest, most inclusive manner. Also he talked a lot
about the role of good fiction, which, he opined more than once, is about making us feel less alone. He offered a
lot of himself to his readers, in all his writing; this generosity seemed like his whole project, in a way. This was
the outward, public Wallace.
But those who followed his career at all closely always knew that there was another, darker part to his nature. A
secret part. Wallace was fairly well known to have been very ill, to have been hospitalized more than once for
depression, to have attempted suicide, and to have been in recovery for addiction to alcohol and drugs. The
paradox of Wallace's humor and good-natured candor, the qualities so many of his readers enjoyed most, set
against the many secrets there have always been around his private life, is laid bare in the Ransom Center
documents.

From a postcard sent by Wallace to Maria Bustillos, in response to the question, "Were you as scared of The Blair Witch Project as I
was?"
* * *
When people asked Wallace personal questions about recovery or addiction, he used to slide out of answering
them quite neatly. Indeed I asked him myself, once, at a reading in January of '06 at the Hammer Museum,
about the AA-related aspect of the James Frey affair; basically I said, you wrote about AA and about recovery
in Infinite Jest, so how did the idea that someone would lie about the circumstances of his own recovery strike
you, given what you know and have written. And he replied:
Have any national twelve-step programs to your knowledge commented publicly on this?
[I felt quite scolded, there! Whatever, I shook my head a little hangdoggedly, but I still wanted to know.]
Why do you suppose that is?
[Eek! So scolded! My response is inaudible, who knows what the hell I stammered out.]
It seems as if hmmm [hums a little tune, frustratedly].... It seems as if, with some of these organizations, you've
got what is a weird kind of microcosm of the problem of "freedoms" in this country and a kind of Bill of Rights.
Um is that, um, when organizations are anonymous and, as far as I understand it, regulations are more or less
by suggestion, and there's no coercion, and you can't be kicked out, people get to do more or less whatever they
want to do. From my vaaaaague understanding!, therebesides the steps, there are also traditions, one of which
involves not talking about people's personal experiences with this stuff on a public level, I mean this is all right
there in books, it's printed, it's published; another of which involves not getting, you know, not getting involved
in outside issues or pretending to speak for the experience of everybody sort of in the fellowship. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that people who shit on those traditions do not come to happy ends. That is, in many cases
those people who play around with stuff, they don't have to be punished, they punish themselves.
I felt a little guilty for prying, but on the other hand I was like, look, you write a book that is basically a paean to
12-step programs, people are going to ask you.
For the depiction of addiction in Infinite Jest was, as many readers couldn't help but suspect, based not on
research but on experience. This was halfway confirmed in the cagey responses he gave regarding his personal
knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous in the wake of the success of Infinite Jest, and confirmed more clearly
when "An Ex-Resident's Story" first emerged on the wallace-l listserv in February of 2004.
This anonymous testimonial had been discovered on the website of Granada House, a long-term recovery
facility in Boston:
I was referred to Granada House in November 1989. "Referred" is a very polite way to put it. I was a patient in
a rehab attached to a well-known mental hospital in Boston, and a psychiatrist in this rehab had established
some credibility with me, and he opined that (1) unless I signed up for long-term treatment someplace, I wasn't
going to be able to stay off drugs and alcohol; and that (2) if I couldn't find a way to stay off drugs and alcohol,
I was going to be dead by 30. I was 27. This was not my first in-patient rehab, nor was it my first mental
hospital.
Because certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die hard, I'll give you a little bio. I was raised
in a solid, loving, two-parent family. None of my close relatives have substance problems. I have never been in
jail or arrestedI've never even had a speeding ticket. In 1989, I already had a BA and one graduate degree and
was in Boston to get another. And I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict. I had been in detoxes
and rehabs; I had been in locked wards in psych facilities; I had had at least one serious suicide attempt, a
course of ECT, and so on. The diagnosis of my family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented
but had "emotional problems." I alone knew how deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs,
which I'd been using heavily since age fifteen.
l had already learned some months before that Granada House appears as the model for Ennet House in an early
draft of Infinite Jest. Some nervous detective work followed the appearance of "An Ex-Resident's Story";
everything fit datewise, plus there was the unmistakable style of the writing, and the fact that of the various
testimonials for Granada House that appeared on the website at the time, only this one was unsigned. Few
(really zero, to my knowledge) who looked into the matter doubted that Wallace had written "An Ex-Resident's
Story."
Here, seemingly, was confirmation of all that had been suspected regarding the author's own history of
addiction and treatment and, maybe most significantly, an acknowledgement that he had felt himself required to
throw the whole concept of his own "genius" overboard in order to survive.
Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince at some of the hyperbole and melodrama
that are used in recovery-speak, but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada House helped me,
starting with the fact that the staff admitted me despite the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of
them, the House, and the l2-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable. They were patient, but they were
not pushovers. They enforced a structure and discipline about recovery that I was not capable of on my own:
mandatory counseling, mandatory AA or NA meetings, mandatory employment, curfew, chores, etc. Not to
mention required reading of AA/NA literature whether I found it literarily distinguished or not. [...]
People at Granada House listened to me for hours, and did so with neither the clinical disinterest of doctors nor
the hand-wringing credulity of relatives. They listened because, in the last analysis, they really understood me:
they had been on the fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing that was killing you, of
being able to imagine life neither with drugs and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and
manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truthsand on many days the
most helpful thing they did was to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now,
pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because tomorrow
might very well look different.
This message went pretty much intact into Infinite Jest, in which the wildly disparate group of inmates at a
halfway house struggle to arrive at exactly this condition of humility, endure exactly this kind of mockery for
their "meaningless intellectualizations," and sometimes gain exactly this kind of freedom from the prison of
substance abuse. Also, the genius of Hal Incandenza, the "lexical prodigy" (who has been dosed by his mother
with "esoteric mnemonic steroids") alienates him so profoundly that he is lost forever. A huge amount of Hal's
trouble is the burden of his genius, even though he has worked hard to be not just good but great, the best,
willinglyand yet unwillinglyflying close to the sun. A reluctant Icarus, full of contradictions.
To sum up: all his life Wallace was praised and admired for being exceptional, but in order to accept treatment
he had to first accept and then embrace the idea that he was a regular person who could be helped by "ordinary"
means. Then he went to rehab and learned a ton of valuable things from "ordinary" people whom he would
never have imagined would be in a position to teach him anything. Furthermore, these people obviously had
inner lives and problems and ideas that were every bit as complex and vital as those of the most "sophisticated"
and "exceptional."
Even so there was still a lot of the "prodigy" in Wallace, something he hated in himself, not just something he
mistrusted and had "gotten over." Like the guy in "Good Old Neon" he felt that he was performing a character
rather than being a person; he felt sundered from himself. But he could joke about that, too. His old friend JT
Jackson, whom I met at a Wallace event at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, told me about a joke they used to
have when they were in grad school together:
"Say, Dave, how'd y'get t'be so dang smart?"
"I did the reading."
Exceptional people often come to believe that the ordinary rules don't apply to them. But because Wallace
swam against that current all his adult life, he came to make use of some very standard-issue sources of
inspiration. He underlined the following paragraph in his copy of John Bradshaw's Bradshaw On: The Family,
in which Bradshaw describes his own reluctance to seek help:
In my previous go round I felt the 12-step program was too simple for me. I had degrees in theology and
philosophy and had taught both of these at the University level. I felt that my problems were more complex than
with most of the people I met at the meetings. My drinking was a symptom of a deep and profound sensitive
soul. I was one of William James' twice-born super-sensitive ones. This, of course, was all hogwash!
Intellectuals create the most grandiose denials!
That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great
surprise to me, as I mentioned earlier. But later I talked with my very old friend,
S., who went into recovery almost exactly when Wallace did. S. explained that
John Bradshaw was all the rage in AA circles at that time. (Bradshaw is the guy
who popularized the idea of the "inner child" in the '90s, and he had a TV show
on PBS that was hugely popular.)
"You're just alive, is the thing, as well as being in recovery, and these things are
moving through the culture," said S., adding that if you were to begin recovery
now, as opposed to twenty years ago, you would hear a lot about Eckhart Tolle
and "being in the moment" kinds of things, and not much at all about John
Bradshaw.
People often seemed a little flummoxed by Wallace's self-effacing discomfort with "genius." The issue came up
again and again with David Lipsky:
There's still something basically false about your approach here. To some degree. Which is this: that I think you
still feel you're smarter than other people. And you're acting like someoneyou're acting like someone who's
about thirty-one or thirty-two, who's playing in the kid's softball game, and is trying to hold back his power
hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less.
You mean in the book?
No, I mean in your social persona. And you're someone who's really trying
You're a tough room.
You make a point of holding backthere's a point, there's something obvious about you somehow in a gentle
way holding back what you're aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are somehow younger or...
Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn't it?
No it wouldn't: It would make you a reformed person...
The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.
I understand that.
And I think it's also like, I think one of the true ways that I've gotten smarter is, I've realized that I'm not that
much smarter than other people.
The Eleventh Tradition of AA requires members to refrain from speaking publicly about their affiliation with
that organization. You can tell your friends about your recovery, but you are encouraged to not seek public
attention for it, or for the organization. The condition of a recovering addict who happens also to be famous,
therefore, is a precarious one. It must have required a Herculean effort to maintain the anonymity of his
recovery in the face of questioning as probing and perceptive as David Lipsky's, but Wallace never failed in
this. He told Lipsky and many other reporters a lot of self-preserving fibs, and it is painful to think of what that
must have cost him. More contradictions: he was terribly fragile, but also had nerves of steel, an extraordinarily
strong will.
* * *
But Wallace wasn't only about his illness and recovery. At the same time that
there is a lot of pain and total horror and fear in Wallace's work, there is also a
giddy, life-affirming fizz, and that fizz came undiluted and complete from his
mother, Sally Foster Wallace. The writing of these two has a strangely
compelling, idiosyncratic beauty and charm: sparklingly sensitive and intelligent,
but never too good to stoop to an egregious pun; self-deprecating and friendly and
loopy as anything. They are hyperbolists who can evoke a terrible pathos and
then vertiginous humor in almost the same breath, one throwaway line after
another. In this way, Sally Foster Wallace and her son shared a sensibility so
exactly alike that it seems to vibrate between them like a tuning fork.
Mrs. Wallace has written just one book, an English grammar textbook called Practically Painless English. It is
the only book of English grammar I know of that can hold a candle to the works of the Fowler brothers. Like
them, Mrs. Wallace is delicate, fastidious, crystal-clear and tons of fun, but she has a lovely carefreedom and
wild imagination all her own (except for bequeathing 100% of it to her son). Her book is full of snakes and
gorillas, monsters, Superman, Cinderella, disasters of every description, ketchup on ice cream, kissing and
parachutes and romance. It reveals a dizzying, intoxicating and dangerous world.
The calamities that befall recurring character Fedonia Krump in Practically Painless English, for example, keep
the reader in a state of constant anxiety:
Fedonia completely drained the tea cup and then shakily climbed over the counter. She tried hard to sing "I
Love You Truly," but her voice was extremely gravelly. She was fading fast, but she felt too merry to go home.
At closing time, she fell asleep on the dirty floor, and Bernie, the waiter, slowly scooped her into his arms,
tenderly brushed the dirt from her cheek, and reluctantly threw her out into the snow.
Many David Wallace fans enjoy his frequent deployment of the phrase "the howling fantods" in Infinite Jest. It
is a delight to come across this phrase in his mom's book (2nd ed.), long before Infinite Jest was a gleam in its
author's eye. ("17. Snakes give me the howling fantods.")
I can't even hazard a guess as to which of the two of them wrote the dozens of "Selected Student Swifties" that
appear in the Ransom Center's collection of the teaching materials of Wallace fils:
"Remember that two plus two equals four," Tom added.
"This is a petrified tree," the guide said hollowly.
"Those are bees," Tom buzzed.
"There are bodies buried here," Tom said gravely.
"Some dog has destroyed my flower garden," Tom said lackadaisically.
There is such pleasure in reading the two Wallaces, so distinctively funny and gentle, scintillating with "the rich
glint of lunacy." Which is something he never talked about much, either humor per se (though there is one
really good YouTube excerpt from the interview he gave German public TV station ZDF) or the beautiful part
of himself, because nobody is ever aware of his own real beauty or worth. Nor did he talk about Mrs. Wallace
very much in public, though he must have identified with her quite a lot. His regard for her was clearly
enormous, though; he told Lipsky, "My mother's the best proofreader in the world, Amy's second and I'm third,
as far as I've seen." (Amy being Amy Wallace Havens, his sister.) You can see how much Wallace loved and
valued skill in English by reading his 2001 Harper's essay, "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars
over Usage."
David Wallace was a person who dwelt in darkness either by nature or compulsion, or maybe even by mere
habit, or maybe just because he'd been given the wrong medication. Depression is a very inward-turned and
self-loathing thing; he trapped himself in this sort of interior abattoir. But like all depressed persons, Wallace
loathed himself in error. He had a real value that others could see, but he could not.
And another bad thing: he identified so closely with his mom, it's as if she got caught in the crosshairs of his
self-loathing.
I have known intimately and looked after depressed people, and have no illusions about my ability to
understand the real nature of that illness. The sort of blues I occasionally suffer through compares to real
depression like a broken fingernail compares to being shot in the head and then set on fire and drowned. But it
seems to me that the victims of that terrible disorder are often trying all their lives in vain to figure out why this
must be so. Why them. And maybe there really is just no reason, or the reason is completely random, a cluster
of neurons misfiring one day by accident, a bad thing that happens and could not be helped.
A highlighted passage in Bradshaw On: The Family:
Thought Disorders:
You are always reading about your problems, learning why you are the way you are.
You are numb
You control your emotions and feel shame when you can't
You gauge your behavior by how it looksby the image you believe you're making.
Wallace's notes in Bradshaw On: The Family and especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child
reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and
revealed to himself by the latter book, one in which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering.
To say that Wallace took The Drama of the Gifted Child to heart is to put it very mildly indeed. He returned to it
over and over again; his notes were made at many different times, in wildly differing sizes and styles of
penmanship, states of mind. Here are the markers I could more or less identify:
Red sharpie, thin
Pink, thinner, like a faded red Rolling Writer?
Blue thinner Rolling Writer-type
Pencil
Dark blue felt-tip, thin
Black fine felt-tip
Furious blue Sharpie, a thick one
Black ball-point

This is another book that made a big splash when it appeared; Wallace's copy is an
eighteenth printing, from 1993. The thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child is that
particularly high-achieving children are damaged because their mothers did not
allow them to be themselves, but instead through their own insecurities gave their
children the impression that only achievement could win them love. That any
deviation from right behavior was unlovable, that they would be rejected unless
they performed well.
So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to
himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly. "Narcissistically
disturbed" is her phrase of choice for this condition. Because the child doesn't feel
free to own his feelings candidly, but instead must censor and control himself
ceaselessly and let only the good things about himself become manifest, all the
bad feelings like jealousy, rage, envy, are driven underground and fester there and
make the child secretly, existentially miserable, and in a special way, "divided" in
rather the way R.D. Laing describes in The Divided Self. Miller's gifted child splits into two: one is the
grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and "good" child, and the other a depressed child
who never was loved, never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to
perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably
lost to himself.
Pink highlighter indicates underlining or brackets in the text of his books; in
green are the notes written in his own hand.
Amherst 80-85 Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening
depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both
himself and those around him.
So Wallace, the A+ student whose profs at Amherst had written things like,
"un plaisir, mon vieux" at the end of his tests, during which part of his life he'd
been very ill from dependence on drugs and alcohol, wanted most of all to
escape from that genius. To be an ordinary person who could own his own
faults. Not just in a philosophical way, as I used to imagine, and not only because he'd found relief from his
troubles for a time through "ordinary" means, but in a manner connected very intimately to what he saw as the
genesis of his illness, as if he blamed his illness on the genius itself.
Grandiosity- The constant need to be, and be seen as, a superstar He has especially severe standards that apply
only to himself. In other people he accepts without question thoughts and actions that, in himself, he would
consider mean or bad when measured against his high ego ideal. Others are allowed to be [circled] "ordinary"
but that he can never be.
It will not come as news to any reader of Infinite Jest that Wallace had some complicated and deep-seated
issues with regard to the subject of motherhood generally. The relationship between Hal and Avril Incandenza
is to some degree a replay, one could not help but think, of the author's relationship to his own mother. Hal is so
obviously a projection of Wallace himself: a tennis player, a prodigy, a gifted writer, a brilliant intellect.
Thoughtful and kind, but fake, empty inside. Mute. Unable to feel. A secret drug addict, too, who before the end
(or at the beginning, if you like) will be destroyed (in my reading of the novel, at any rate). Avril Incandenza,
"militant grammarian," is a mysterious but also a monstrous figure, whose love is suffocating, all-
encompassing, intrusive, terrible.
Well, all of that emptiness, muteness and monstrosity is suggested in the markings that appear in his copy of
Miller's book. And Avril Incandenza's super-loving but emotionally barren characterthat, too, is indicated
here. And her ambition, the way she souped up Hal's brains by putting "esoteric mnemonic steroids" in his
cereal. The mother that appears in these notes is responsible. Created the son's inability to feel, to speak.
On the contrary, she loves the child, as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and
always on the condition that he presents his "false self."
Others are there to admire him, and he himself is constantly occupied, body and soul, with gaining that
admiration. This is how his torturing dependence shows itself. The childhood trauma is repeated: he is always
the child whom his mother admires, but at the same time he senses that so long as it is his qualities that are
being admired, he is not loved for the person he really is at any given time.
admiration is not the same thing as love
Basically he is envious of healthy people because they do not have to make a constant effort to earn admiration,
and because they do not have to do something in order to impress, one way or the other, but are free to be
"average".
The Lost World of Feelings
Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be performer
But how can you love something you do not know, something that has never been loved? So it is that many a
gifted person lives without any true notion of his or her true self. Such people are enamored of an idealized,
conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its
loss or psychosis confronts them harshly with that true self, whom they now have to face and to whom they are
delivered up, helplessly, as to a threatening stranger.
Several sorts of mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In
addition to simple denial there is reversal ("I am breaking down under the constant responsibility because the
others need me ceaselessly"), changing passive suffering into active behavior ("I must quit women as soon as I
feel that I am essential to them") projection onto other objects, and introjection of the threat of the loss of love
("I must always been good and measure up to the norm, then there is no risk; I constantly feel that the demands
are too great, but I cannot change that, I must always achieve more than others.") Intellectualization is very
commonly met, since it is a defense mechanism of great reliability.
It is worse if the parent is smartshe knows what it looks like to be a good, healthy parent. [Tiny, pink
writing.]
It is one of the turning points in analysis when the narcissistically disturbed patient comes to the emotional
insight that all the love he has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for him as he really
was, that the admiration for his beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements, and
not at the child himself. In analysis, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind his achievements wakes up
and asks: "What would have happened if I had appeared before you, bad, ugly, angry, jealous, lazy, dirty,
smelly? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was
not really me whom you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-behaved, reliable, empathic,
understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all? What became of my childhood? Have
I not been cheated out of it? I can never return to it. I can never make up for it. From the beginning I have been
a little adult. My abilitieswere they simply misused"?
These questions are accompanied by much grief and pain, but the result always is a new authority that is being
established in the analysand (like a heritage of the mother who never existed)a new empathy with his own
fate, born out of mourning.
distinguish from mere self-pity
At the center of these fantasies there is always a wish that the patient could never have accepted before. For
example: I am in the center, my parents are taking notice of me and are ignoring their own wishes (fantasy: I am
the princess attended by my servants)
Mom fostered this illusion
An adult can only be fully aware of his feelings if he has internalized an affectionate and empathic self-object.
People with narcissistic disturbances are missing out on this. Therefore they are never overtaken by unexpected
emotions, and will only admit those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, which is their
parents' heir. Depression and a sense of inner emptiness is the price they must pay for this control.
You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him again in the garden of your son.
ulp
Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his
mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her
and to be mirrored by her. This is beautifully illustrated in one of Winnicott's images; the mother gazes at the
baby in her arms, and baby gazes at the mothers face and finds himself therein provided that the mother is
really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own introjects onto the child, nor her
own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would not find himself in his mother's
face but rather the mother's own predicaments. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his
life would be seeking this mirror in vain.
She needed me to do 'bad' thingslie, be cruel to Amy, etc.that would anchor me, threaten her love. Why?
Dad was too steady, dependable
(re: the depressed and the grandiose, two sides of the same disturbed person) because the grandiose and the
depressive individuals are compelled to fulfill the introjected mother's expectations: whereas the grandiose
person is her successful child, the depressive sees himself as a failure.
These elements of his childhood, Wallace felt, were responsible for his troubles with women generally.
Writing Success
Fame
Sex
Spiritual Bankruptcy You live totally oriented to the outside believing that your worth and happiness lies
outside of you (BO:TF)
Wallace was scared of a lot of things. Not just the bugs and roller-coasters that he told us about being scared of,
but of losing his ability to write.
Paradox: You will not get back enthusiasm for X until it's not the most important thing. The key to '92 is that
MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were.) How to make G more important than X.
Will? No. Luck/Grace/Awareness(Spirituality of Imperfection)
Wallace is known to have had many lovers, and also to have wanted a family one day. He expressed regret to
David Lipsky at having reached the age of 34 without having married. But his relationships ended badly, it
seems, most of the time.
DW's inability to be with a girl permanently is a way to perpetuate fantasy bond w/Mom
DW internalized seduction, dishonesty, perfectionism
Intimacy problems: You find "nice" men/women boring. When you start getting too close, you leave a
relationship
Love Confused with Sex (BO:TF)
the individual suddenly discovers that he has acquired a mannerism, a gesture, a turn of speech, an inflection in
his voice that is not 'his' but belongs to someone else. Often it is a mannerism that he consciously particularly
dislikes.
Dave with girlfriend's accent (The Divided Self)
CAN'T BE WHOLE Telos
Gulp note next to the following list of bullet points in furious blue and all but three checked off with check
marks (question marks following the three as indicated)
A "false self" that has led to the loss of the potential "true self"
A fragility of self-esteem that is based on the possibility of realizing the "false self" because of lack of
confidence in one's own feelings and wishes
Perfectionism, a very high ego ideal
Denial of the rejected feelings (the missing of a shadow in the reflected image of Narcissus)
A preponderance of narcissistic cathexes of objects?
An enormous fear of the loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform?
Envy of the healthy
Strong aggression that is split off and therefore not neutralized?
Oversensitivity
A readiness to feel shame and guilt
Restlessness
There are other ways of seducing the child, apart from the sexual, for instance, with the aid of indoctrination,
which underlies both the "antiauthoritarian" [circled] and the "strict" upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes
account of the child's needs at his particular stage of development. As soon as the child is regarded as a
possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his vital growth will be
violently interrupted.
Later, about addicts, suggesting that addiction is a way to try to regain lost, repressed feelings, a license to feel
and experience.
Too simple? Or just that simple?
At the end: tiny and in a new pen
Freak: aware of his own pulse at all times
There's no way to date the marks made in this book, but Wallace was at least four years into his recovery when
it was published. When I was reading this I felt very bad. Like my hair was standing on end, thinking how this
literary sleuthing is also just prying. But I am also glad I read what I did, because I can argue with these views.
This man spent a lot of his life in terrible pain, desperate for an explanation and a way out. It's not surprising
that in the derangement of his mind he would reach out to those closest to him to blame.
However, I read Miller's book myself at some stage, years agoit made a terrific noise when the English
translation came outand I can tell you that it is a book that will make anyone detest his own mother for a
week at least because that is what it is designed to do: to blame mothers.
But the truth is that, while The Drama of the Gifted Child was highly regarded at that time, there is something
essential missing from it. Miller believes that it is so harmful for mothers to want their kids to "perform" and
whatnot, that they're stealing their childhoods from them, not letting them feel their feelings; okay, yes, at one
extreme there's the controlling mother, the Vinegar Mother, the Tiger Mother, who really literally won't let the
kid feel his feelings ever. But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-
worshipping monster who believes that her child's every Feeling is somehow Sacredto which you're all, hoy,
lady, your kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to
be happy or well-adjusted adults, either. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad.)
It's crazy hard, too, because when you're a parent every single minute of childrearing practically requires
compromise of some kind, in order to manage the requirements for a child's being socially adept and well-
mannered, but not repressed or bullied or overly controlled. If you indulge a child too much, "respect his
feelings" too much, then you become one of those doormats who lives in a nightmare where the child is a tyrant
over the house, and if you discipline him too much, he will feel sad, lonely and unloved.
Shame begets shame to compulsive/addictive behavior
DFW comes home broken in '82- not a 'perfect family.' Mom's lie here breaks down.
DFW the "troubled" one in family-angry, anxious, depressed-acting out, instantiating family's sickness (Why I
see myself as 'fucked up'?) (BO:TF)
The whole thing is a balancing act that nobody really understands the trickiness of until he has a kid himself.
When you can only really see yourself qua child, it is impossible to get a good sense of the other side, and
maybe especially not when you have spent enormous amounts of time in therapy and worrying about how
fucked up you are, and trying to "find answers" to questions for which answers may never be forthcoming, not
ever.
I'm not saying that I know how these things should be managed, because I do not. What I am saying is that
these books seem to present a lopsided view.
* * *
It must have been incredibly frustrating to be paralyzed with self-criticism and self-loathing, and have people
telling you that you're a genius all the livelong day and forking over Genius Grants and things. Even Wallace's
old college roommate Mark Costello told him so, just after he'd won the MacArthur grant.
Costello says, "He was talking about how hard the writing was. And I said, lightheartedly, 'Dave, you're a
genius.' Meaning, people aren't going to forget about you. You're not going to wind up in a Wendy's. He said,
'All that makes me think is that I've fooled you, too.'"
Wallace's harrowing depictions of self-loathing in "Good Old Neon" and "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In
Relation to The Bad Thing" remind me every time of the things I have wanted to say (but can never actually
say) to the depressed people I've known. Namely: fine, if you are such a worm, so false and worthless, unfit to
live, then why are you even listening to yourself? You are the very last person anybody ought to be listening to,
apparently? Just please back away from the mirror now, because it is all bullshit in there, nothing but illusions,
illusions all the way down. Sometimes I think that the principal difference between those who are in general
cheerfully-inclined and those who are not is that the former know better than to even countenance their own
bullshit for one instant.
Maybe someone should have kept telling him that he may have been a genius, but he was also a big idiot, the
way everyone seems to have done at Granada House. He knew it, too, is another crazymaking thing. By 2007 he
seemed to be thriving, married now and working on the new book, and everyone who loved his work figured
that the worst was behind him, and was just waiting for the new book and enjoying the various articles and
readings and different little things that he did.
[...] at certain moments in our lives in fact, it seems that the most fundamental choice each of us has is between
fighting ourselves and laughing at ourselves. Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection
* * *
Wallace had a penchant for extrapolating the troubles of American individuals into a broader indictment of U.S.
culture and politics, as Infinite Jest depicts a society enslaved to its own insatiable need for entertainment. His
own history provides a similar parallel. Wallace spent over twenty years fighting addiction and depression, and
though he privately seems to have credited AA and related therapies with saving his life, these methods were
not enough to prevent him from committing suicide at age 46. What the available details of Wallace's life and
ideas suggest is that we in the U.S. are maybe not doing a very good job of taking care of recovering addicts, or
of those suffering from depression.
The new Me Generation of the aughts is like a steroids version of the innocent '70s one, which really amounted
to little more than plain hedonism. There wasn't as much guilt and self-recrimination in those days. Today this
focus on "Me" is something more like an obsession with our faults, a sick perfectionism, coupled with an
insatiable need for attention; the idea of the 'star' as something we want to be.
A case can be made that U.S. society is very much obsessed with "self-help," which involves thinking a whole
lot (too much, even) about yourself and your own problems, seeing everything only as it relates to the self,
rather than seeing oneself as a valuable part of a larger valuable whole; this is one of the themes of The Pale
King.
We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old
sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious
responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiarieswe're actually
conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share
of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes
the pie?
The book Wallace was too stuck in himself to complete is one in which he was observing how we all ought to
become unstuck, sadly. The realization that you have something of value to contribute to the greater world
necessarily involves prying your mind off yourself for a minute.
I am making an informed guess that these things that we dwell on with our therapiststhey may or may not be
false, but almost necessarily, they're only the tiniest part of a picture that is so very much larger. To dwell on the
terrible things is to miss the point. To fail ourselves, in a sense. But when you are that sick that is just what is
happening, it's you missing the point, never being able to see the beauty or good in things because you are ill. It
is the illness talking, and talking, and talking.
And yet our culture is obsessed with finding the causes, with talking things through, and with getting to the
bottom of our problems by thinking and talking about them a lot. With solving the problem of depression. The
book The Drama of the Gifted Child, suffers very much from that "self-help", inward-turned weakness. It is a
good but flawed book that tells just a small part of the story of how to do family life. There is no blame to pin
anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve.
* * *
"... the deeper alchemy by which Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an
immense and reverent joy." David Foster Wallace, "A Series of Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which
Not Enough Has Been Removed"
I have a friend, C., who has suffered from depression for many years; she is
a fellow-admirer of Wallace. C. used to have a photograph of him on the
wall of her very pretty, comforting red-walled Midtown office, and she would
tell people that he was either her son or her boyfriend, depending on her mood.

I chanced to be in New York some weeks after Wallace's death, a
catastrophe that had hit the both of us like a couple of bricks to the head.
We had a good late lunch and afterward on that cold, blowy, fast-
darkening late afternoon we sat on freezing stone steps on a quiet corner and
snuggled together and talked about Wallace for a while. I mentioned that I
could not understand how anyone would want to commit suicide, not right
then, not with this historic presidential election right around the corner; how could you not want to stick around
and find out what happens? And C. looked at me with pity and sadness, as if from a great distance, and said,
"Oh, honey. You don't care. You don't care; that's the whole point."
That's just the thing about recognizing our common humanity, our common burden. We're suspended for a
moment on this spinning blue pearl, here together and alive right now, conscious, though no one knows why. It
is a question of caring. When one of us considers the experiences of another, all the failings and the
achievements in someone else's life, we are seeing from this common place, knowing that it's all taking place in
doubt and the absolute solitude and terror of being human, and knowing that it's all temporary. All those who
are unsure of themselves and suspect themselves of the worst falseness and wrong, bad things are to be not only
pitied but loved, identified with and known. Wallace taught that, and suffered for it, and in a way he died of it,
too.
One last crown of laurels that is left from the war he waged in himself is the beautiful, McCarthyesque passage
that was first published as "Peoria (4)" in TriQuarterly in the fall of 2002, and later turned up as the first chapter
of The Pale King, the first part of which ends:
Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the
time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The
horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman.
Use of archived materials courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas
at Austin
Photo by Steve Rhodes. Used with permission.
Next: More archive discoveries.
Other Archive Discoveries
My favorite among all the hundreds of documents I mowed down might be the few issues of Sabrina, the
Amherst humor mag that Wallace edited in 1982-83 with Mark Costello, with whom Wallace later co-wrote
Signifying Rappers. In Sabrina they cultivated a kind of proto-Onion vibe that owed something to Lester Bangs
and the old Creem house style, and maybe a little something to Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. If you
go in for the fourteen-year-old-boy variety of impertinent, puerile comedy, as I do, it is irresistible stuff. As I
hovered over the brittle, oversized newsprint in that silent and stately libraryI had been coached to keep the
pages flat, and to handle them only by their edgesI shook like a leaf, eyes watering, in a mighty effort to keep
my whoops contained.
News Briefs: Professor Czap not just a Pair of Eyebrows
Prof. Czap yesterday denied reports that he received tenure principally because of his amazing furry eyebrows.
In a particularly unattractive part of the interview he was heard to agonize in a small voice, I am not an animal,
I am a history professor. Moments later the interview was abruptly ended as an enraged Czap rushed toward
the camera threatening to apply the Vulcan nerve grip.
(It turns out that Amherst history prof Peter Czap was indeed possessed of a powerful set of eyebrows.
Photographed in 2008, the eyebrows appear in resplendent health.)
Hadley Arkes Symposium Planned
by Dan Francheese
In the wake of sightings of Hadley Arkes in Belchertown, the Political Science department recently announced
plans to fund a "Hadley Arkes Symposium." Said Professor Austin Sarat, Chairman of the Department, "We
intend to sort myth from fact to determine once and for all whether Hadley Arkes exists or ever did exist."
Dismissing the claims of two student workers who reported seeing Professor Arkes lurking in the B level Men's
room of Frost Library as "unsubstantiated rumor," Sarat gives more credence to samples of what some faculty
members believe to be Hadley Arkes droppings found on the carpet of Merrill Dining Commons. Others
disagree. As Sarat says, "They could be the droppings of any faculty member really." The symposium is
planned for April.
Dan Francheese gives way to Dan Trapeze and Dan Francisco. Very few of the articles are signed.
There are the Letters to the Editor, as well.
Dear Sirs:
We would like to say that the material you will publish will be profoundly offensive to us as soon as we have
read it. In fact, we will never be so insulted in all our lives.
Society of Outraged Peoples (SOP)
* * *
Especially enjoyable were the three pages he wrote as an undergraduate on Pride and Prejudice. He freaking
hated Miss Bingley, calling her a mean-spirited, selfish little bitch who is so intent on grabbing Mr. Darcy for a
husband that she is willing a) to be extremely obsequious and agreeable to Mr. Darcy and, b) to tear to shreds
(subtly, if course) any woman in whom Darcy shows the slightest interest.
* * *
An exam book from History 48, Japan Since 1800: Spring 1981, Amherst College 100 A+. The questions are
along the lines of, "Why did the four-nation fleet attack Shimonoseki City in Chooshuu clan in 1864?" And he
had to fill out the names of a whole lot of cities on a map of nineteenth-century Japan. He didnt miss even one.
* * *
"Trying to come up with the theme of a story and then articulate it is HARD. Its also COOL and
WORTHWHILE. Kennedy, for once, states the case really well: Trying to sum up the point of a story in our
own words is merely one way to make ourselves better aware of whatever we may have understood vaguely and
tentatively.
* * *
He had a long, fun list of vocabulary words, forty-two pages long, that he seemed to add to every year. One
version is thirty-nine pages long, and is called "Vocab 3/97", and then there is the forty-two page version called
"vocab 1997."
Birl, cause to spin rapidly with feet
Musth, period of heightened sexual drive in elephants (Vulcans) when theyre more aggressive
Peculate, to embezzle
* * *
A wonderful correspondence between Wallace, age nine, and his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Taylor.
Sept, 13 1971
Dear Mrs. Taylor,
I saw a great movie called on any Sunday. It was a biography of motorcyclists.
Remember to capitalize names of movies. You know how to spell very well, especially the long words. That
movie sounds really interesting. Ill have to tell one of my friends about it. She has a Yamaha 175.
Dear Miss More 9/14
Yamaha 175s are all right but not as good as some (check consumer report) Honda 222 is best its speed recor is
138 m.pn. Next time she or he is shopping for a motorcycle tell him or her that. Dave W
p.s. My hobby is motorcycle research that is why I went to the movie.
Have you seen Evel Knievel on any of the talk shows? Hes quite a character!
Dear Mrs. Taylor,
I sure did see it and I liked the 20 car jump and the Ceaser Palace wipeout. Dave
Do you think he will make it over the canyon?
Dear Mrs. Taylor 9/16
We had fun last night, we went over to our neighbors and played football.
This is football season. Its in the air, on radio, television, on playgrounds, in parkseverywhere.
p.s. No hell get killed
Thats what Im afraid of, too!
* * *
And finally, as a bonus, here is a quiz that he gave his undergraduate students.
WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY
SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:
Foreign
Big
Diminutive
Incomprehensible
Untyped
Pulchritude
S-less
Unwritten
Indefinable
Misspelled
Vulgar
High-class
Invisible
Unvowelled
Obscene
My only stab at a guess is that these are words that can be used to describe writing itself, though I feel like
"pulchritude" is kind of wrong, that way. I would love to hear other ideas.
RELATED STORIES
You might like:
David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Books Removed From Archive (The Awl)

Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Follow-Ups
39
David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Books Removed From Archive
By Maria Bustillos | August 30, 2011
In the spring of this year I wrote a piece about David Foster Wallace's self-help
books that was published here in April. It appears that all the books referenced
in that piece have since been removed from the Ransom Center's collection of
Wallace's papers. The collection, which used to contain 320-odd books, now
contains 299. The remaining book list can be searched here.
It never occurred to me that Wallace's estate would be in a position to rescind
part of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center; I wrote what I did under
the assumption that these books would remain available to anyone who was
interested in seeing them. I was very sorryor rather, entirely freaked outto
learn that that will no longer be the case.

181 Comments / Post A Comment
Sort by:
Chronological
Reverse-Chronological
Popularity

David Roth (#4,429)
You know how sometimes you see a headline and a topic and an author all together up there atop a piece of
writing and you just kind of know that what comes after is going to be really, really good?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Reply 5

boyofdestiny (#1,243)
I saw a little "1" in the comment bubble, and thought "How the hell did someone read this so fast!"
Reply 0

brent_cox (#40)
I thought the same. But David is right. Week made.
Reply 0

David Roth (#4,429)
Sadly, I am going to have to save this one for a quieter moment. But man am I ever looking forward to it. Best +
Best = Best.
Reply 0

skybarn (#304)
Well, that is one fine piece of writing right there. Jesus.
Reply 0

Paige (#21)
Seriously. This was excellent.
Reply 0

Bittersweet (#765)
So good.
Reply 0

max bread (#5,970)
Oof. I think I might go have a cry somewhere.
Reply 0

KarenUhOh (#19)
Well. That requires a plusone run-through, and perhaps another.
I am looking at a picture of David's parents. It's from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, 12.19.10, and it
was taken at a luncheon in 2009 in CU. I am fascinated by his parents, and his upbringing, and I'm sure it's
because (yeah, I've said it oft before) I grew up in the same town five years in front of him.
I always wondered about what in that upbrigning, in that place, turned the tumblers. The obsession with math,
that translated to tennis. The rigid yet exquisitely playful, mazelike deployment of language: mathematical in
itself, a lob shot to set you up for the dink or tke kill.
Here's another picture, of Dave at age 12. He looks like a dork.
Anyway. What a beautiful piece, Maria. I will read it again, alone.
Reply 1

MichelleDean (#7,041)
Maria, I burst into tears in a coffee shop reading this, and I have a conflicted relationship with DFW's work,
particularly his fiction. So what I'm saying is that this is great. I have feelings about literary sleuthage, and about
literary sleuthage re DFW in particular, but I like writing that gets me out of my comfortable, skull-sized, tiny
kingdom, and this definitely qualifies as that. Thank you.
Reply 2

caw_caw (#5,641)
Exactly my feeling as well
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:48 am
Reply 0

Smitros (#5,315)
This provides additional poignancy to his portrait of a tennis prodigy collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll
Never Do Again.
Reply 0

Lockheed Ventura (#5,536)
Interesting that the current embodiment of American addictive narcissism, yes, Charlie Sheen, has come out so
strongly against AA and the concept that he is an normal human being. Instead he goes around calling himself a
"genius" Torpedo of Truth with Tiger Blood with absolutely no humility whatsoever. It is a sad state of affairs
that Mr. Two and Half Men is selling out arenas to declare his specialness, but DFW wrestled his entire adult
life with the concept of his specialness.
Incredible writing as always.
Reply 1

Harlon (#11,065)
Good points Lockheed. It seems likely that, although he may be the last person to realize it, Charlie Sheen is
going to end up a very powerful advertisement for the destructive powers of addiction, if he hasn't already.
Reviews of his shows in New York City noted that he's now publicly regretting all of the things that "have been
taken away from me" (meaning his show, his children, and his pets). As rich as he is, the downward spiral
seems pretty obvious.
DFW's suicide, meanwhile, is powerful testimony to the AA wisdom that you don't identify yourself publicly as
being in AA. The specific reason for that (I have 25 years in the program) is so that the program doesn't get hurt
because someone who's identified with it in the public's mind crashes and burns. Active addicts are all too
willing to write off AA because "so and so celebrity was in it and look how much good it did him." This is not
to cast any aspersions on DFW at all. It's well known in the program that (as the literature puts it) alcohol is "but
a symptom" -- of deeper emotional/psychological problems. Self medication, in other words. I have no idea why
DFW's demons got him in the end, but I can identify with the struggle. Wallace noted that some of the AA cant
is hard to swallow, and an example of that in my opinion is the promise that if you follow the steps you'll end
up "happy, joyous and free." It's an aspiration, but one that isn't easily achieved. But as they also say in the
program, some are sicker than others. In the program that's usually said with a smile (not always). What it really
means is recovery is more of a struggle for some than for others. It's not a judgment, just a fact.
Reply 0

boyofdestiny (#1,243)
"Next time she or he is shopping for a motorcycle tell him or her that."
A nine-year-old Dave W., deftly navigating the perilous terrain of gendered pronouns.
Reply 3

katherine (#10,025)
I feel sick.
This has nothing to do with the writing quality -- which is consistently excellent -- nor with the article's
existence -- it's in a museum, it was public to begin with.
It's the story itself. Which is why it's worth reading.
Reply 2

CleverUserName (#1,910)
Superb.
Reply 0

Parleyview (#7,337)
"...giddy, life-affirming fizz, and that fizz came undiluted and complete from his mother, Sally Foster Wallace."
Thankful for this delicious writing to be savored to this evening.
Reply 0

MichelleDean (#7,041)
MMK is Mary (Marlene) Karr, I think.
Reply 1

Mork el Pork (#8,293)
Yup. And '92 was the year that the bulk of IJ- Infinite Jest- was written.
PS, I met MMK just tonight!
Also, as a bipolar-er and under-read DFW-er, this is going to make my reading of his work quite a bit richer, so
thank you MB.
Reply 0

KeithTalent (#2,014)
I was super gung ho to make this comment but you beat me to it.
Reply 0

HiredGoons (#603)
This was exactly what I needed today Maria, well done.
I wish I had taken you up on your invitation to come poke around in Austin, but I may have proved a distraction
and then we wouldn't have gotten this little gem - everybody wins.
Reply 0

katalist (#973)
Un plaisir, ma vieille.
Reply 3

Marco Carbone@twitter (#10,916)
Re: the list of words at the end. They are all words that precisely do not describe themselves.
Reply 3

katalist (#973)
What about "pulchritude"?
Reply 0

Tulletilsynet (#333)
It ain't a beauty, but hey, it's all right.
Reply 5

propertius (#361)
Every word in Latin is ugly.
Except - maybe - "carmen".
The grammar is unsightly as well.
The miracle is that they pulled Italian and Spanish out of it. Let's not go into French.
Reply 1

Just how many different people are you trying to pick fights with?
Reply 2

DoctorDisaster (#1,970)
Marco's right. I was so proud of myself for figuring this out, too -- but I guess that's what I get for waiting a day.
And honestly? "Pulchritude" is probably a noun specifically so that the answer won't be "they're all adjectives."
Reply 2

Marco Carbone@twitter (#10,916)
It's an ugly word.
Reply 0

katalist (#973)
Well--duh. I was just wondering if you have any thoughts as to why it's "pulchritude" rather than the no-less-
ugly "pulchritudinous." All the others are adjectives!
Reply 0

radeblunner@twitter (#10,976)
My tribute to DFW is to be a bit of a nerd here and point out that I think this is close but not quite on the mark.
These words do not describe themselves but neither do words like inflamed, vertiginous, smelly, gaseous,
blinding, or any word for any color (unless, I guess, you write the word in ink that matches the word itself;
green written in green ink, for example). I think the list is more about words whose meaning is in direct
opposition to some aspect of the word's DNA (be it length, sound, or spelling). Foreign is an English word. Not
foreign at all. The word obscene is fairly proper as is vulgar. Et cetera. DFW talks about this quality of certain
words in one of his works -- maybe it's in the Lipsky book. It's a great reminder of how much he loved
language.
Reply 0

roboloki (#1,724)
this was great. thank you.
Reply 0

vespavirgin (#1,422)
Dear god, and on the 17 anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I'm filled with grateful sadness. Thank you, Ms.
B.
Reply 0

Philo Hagen (#3,619)
Kurt Cobain's suicide anniversary isn't today. It's not until the 8th. Just sayin'.
Reply 0

Bettytron (#575)
That's actually not true, but the "Just sayin'" flagged you as kind of a dick anyway, so it cancels out!
Reply 2

Fantastic work & writing. This should be a foreword to something. Someone tell Little, Brown.
Reply 0

stefan michael@twitter (#10,917)
A trenchant piece that almost gets to the heart of the paradox - one that is not unique to those of us who have
been diagnosed as "clinically depressed" or accused of being "smart" - inherent in our consciousness ("alive
right now, conscious, though no one knows why"), one that is expressed in this quote that has always nagged
me:
The mountains, rivers, forest and the elements that gird them round about would be only blank conditions of
matter if the mind did not fling its own divinity around them.
from an article entitled Imagination and Fact (writer unknown) in Grahams Magazine (not dated, but
referenced by Walt Whitman in his Notes and Fragments and ascribed to approximately the fifties - that
would be the eighteen fifties)
Your essay is a wonderfully written and researched piece about someone who has touched so many of his
fellow humans simply because he wrote about being human in ways that were funny, painful, perspicacious,
frightening, occasionally very wrong, and always challenging.
At times reading this, thinking of you alone with these materials researching, I could not help thinking of
Nietzsche's quote: "...when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." Thanks for taking the
risk.
Reply 1

Debussy Fields (#9,962)
Too many of us strive to impress rather than to touch. But what's scary is that the cleverness of this distinction
is impressive, so it's like you're smarting your way out of being too damn smart. And it seems like you have to
drink a lot of beer before you can realize that it won't fix things. But a mind as developed and refined as Dave
Wallace's knows exactly how to keep goading anything worth believing into the ether. You glean wisdom from
Bradshaw or Alice Miller, and then you figure out how to outwit it, so the real, life-saving wisdom is ever
Sisyphian.
Incidentally, I saw David Wallace read on my 29th birthday. He signed my copy of Infinite Jest "To XXXX,
who is one year from having to think about mortality."
Reply 4

hockeymom (#143)
I'm pretty sure that Mrs. Taylor knew 4th grade David was something special.
Thank you, Maria.
Reply 0

bestestuary (#8,955)
Great, great piece.
Reply 0

bluesuedeshoes (#8,610)
This is a very well-written piece. Thanks for writing and sharing it. But, am I really the only one who refuses to
romanticize people who commit suicide? To me, much more ingeneous is figuring out how to live (and keep
living) well.
Reply 0

erikonymous (#3,231)
I can't speak for anyone else here, but I was kinda romanticizing the man well before he killed himself, purely
on the basis of his incredible writing and career. Tragedy, though, always feels capital-r Romantic, doesn't it?
And tragedy certainly befell the guy.
I've known enough people with serious clinical depression to know that just deciding to live well and be happy
is not always a possibility, and being smart not only doesn't protect anyone from serious depression, but often
exacerbates it.
Reply 3

Apel Mjausson@twitter (#10,928)
One of the goals of many in AA (and the plethora of other 12-step fellowships) is to live life on life's terms.
It's so easy to romanticize people who aren't actually present. Those of us who are still around may be a little
too solicitous to any cute young thing, get into weird spiritualities or have that permanent quizzical expression
that is the result of a not-expensive-enough face lift. Like bluesuedeshoes, I'd much rather be criticized for
normal human follies than dead.
Reply 0

Cesare Caligari@twitter (#11,059)
"much more ingeneous is figuring out how to live (and keep living) well."
Thank you for that condescending and misspelled admonition. If you had any experience with chronic
depression, you'd know that all the ingenuity in the world can't teach a depressed person how to live well.
It's not romanticizing him or his suicide to examine Wallace's life and work in light of his problems. Nothing in
this article suggests that his depression or his suicide were romantic. Unless you think addiction, rehab, failed
relationships, poring over self-help books and unjustly blaming your mom for problems caused by scrambled
brain chemistry are "romantic."
Reply 1

HiredGoons (#603)
can we talk about that haircut?
Reply 2

Keith Kisser (#9,714)
Am I the only one who saw the picture and thought to himself, "That's the guy from Leverage!" No? Just me
then. OK. It opens up his back story on the show though. World famous novelist turned hitter and retrieval
specialist, steeling from the rich and speaking in a gravelly voice, occasionally singing country songs.
Reply 0

Lauri (#10,588)
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Reply 0

Talix (#10,922)
Thank you for this. Especially "...like all depressed persons, Wallace loathed himself in error."
Reply 1

The Dependent Clause (#925)
This was difficult but lovely. Thank you so much, Maria.
Reply 1

davidwatts (#72)
What's most touching to me about all this is DFW's belief, which he shared with a lot of people, that there is
something like an "answer." Some thing you can do or think or be that will fix everything, and that you can
figure it out with enough work. I just don't know that that exists. But I try not to be depressed about it.
Reply 1

Philo Hagen (#3,619)
Brilliant piece Maria. Having worked in addiction, Bradshaw was in fact a pretty significant signpost on the
road back from hell twenty years ago. Miller, however, was not required reading at all. Your highlighting of
DFW's notes regarding it is incredibly revealing, so much so that I fear calling it lopsided in this case is to
dismiss what your flashlight has unearthed as a pretty significant self diagnostic in eight different kinds of ink.
DFW was 46 when he took his life. He never had kids. Perhaps this is testament to just how crippling this truly
was for him.
Reply 2

o0o (#10,923)
The quiz is easy gaiz, they are all words that do not describe themselves. They are analogues of Russell's
paradox, one of DFW's hobbyhorses. Each word describes a set of words that does not include the word itself.
Reply 2

Mork el Pork (#8,293)
That may be, but I dont know who High-class thinks she is with that hyphen around her waist, the bitch
Reply 0

DorothyMantooth (#69)
This was remarkable, Maria. And thank you. (Am I the only one who's perplexed by -- and insanely jealous of!
-- the number of people that seem to already possess The Pale King?)
Re: the words, I wish I knew what o0o was on about (I really do!), but my guess was that they were all things
that were the object of derision to some.
Reply 1

Uaxuctum (#10,973)
For whatever reason Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a few other retailers started shipping online orders last
week. I just got my copy on Monday.
Reply 0

RickVigorous (#214)
Beautiful Maria, thank you. This is going to need another pass or two.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Fantastic piece! Whenever I see a discussion of DFW's depression and suicide, I always want to point out this
Rolling Stone piece on his last days by David Lipsky (that link is to a pdf, but there's also an html version on
someone's blog here) which makes the case that his suicide wasn't a matter of finally succumbing to something
he'd been struggling with all his life, that in fact he had his depression pretty much under control with
antidepressants for most of his adult life, but then shortly before his suicide he was convinced to switch
antidepressants, and found that the new meds didn't work, and his old meds had also stopped working when he
tried to go back to them. If this account is true I think it sort of suggests the danger of interpreting his entire
life's work through the filter of his depression and suicide (not that Maria's piece does this, just that it's a
tendency that I think we all have whenever we consider the work of an artist who eventually killed themselves).
Also, on the subject of "they fuck you up, your mom and dad", I've always found interesting the work of
psychologist Judith Rich Harris (Malcolm Gladwell article on her here, and a Scientific American interview
here), who looked at large collections of studies of adopted children and twins raised in different families to
come to the conclusion that psychological similarities between children and parents are due almost entirely to
genetics, that in fact how your parents raise you has no measurable effect on your adult personality whatsoever.
Her research seemed to show that adopted children are no more similar to their adoptive parents than they are to
any other random adult from the same community, and they're just as similar to their genetic parents as are
children who are actually raised by their genetic parents. Something to think about to counter the common pop-
psychology idea that parenting style is all-important in determining how kids come out (and maybe take some
of the pressure off new parents!)
Reply 2

margarets (#11,021)
Re: the idea that genetics rather than child-rearing account for personality differences, did this research account
for abuse? Was it based solely on more-or-less functional emotionally healthy families? With adequate
economic resources? What aspects of personality were studied, exactly?
People who grew up in poor or abusive or dysfunctional families will rarely say that it made no difference to
how they turned out as adults.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Harris does briefly discuss abuse in her first book The Nurture Assumption (the section of the book can be seen
on google books, see pages 296-298 here), she says that "severe abuse can produce physical injury--including
brain damage--with long-lasting or permanent effects. Another possible long-term consequence is post-
traumatic stress disorder." But as for abuse not severe enough to cause long-term physical injuries or PTSD, she
says that at present there isn't enough evidence to say either way whether, for example, the increased
aggressiveness of abuse victims is due to the abuse itself or due to the fact that abusive parents are more likely
to have passed on genes for aggressiveness. She also mentions that abused children may be more likely to have
been moved around more in childhood which could mess with peer relations, which she thinks do shape
personality more than parenting. And as for your question about economic resources, I think her answer would
basically be that economics influences development insofar as kids from different socioeconomic groups are
likely to have different peer cultures. She discusses this in a section on p. 303 of The Nurture Assumption where
she talks about why children of single-parent families tend to be worse off:
"The loss of income impacts the kids in several ways. For one thing, it can affect their status in the peer group.
Being deprived of luxuries such as expensive clothing and sporting equipment, dermatologists and orthodontics,
can lower kids' standing among their peers. Money is also going to play a role in whether the kids can think
about going to college. If it's out of the question, then they may be less motivated to graduate from high school
and to avoid getting pregnant.
"But by far the most important thing that money can do for kids is to determine the neighborhood they grow up
in and the school they attend ... Poverty forces many single mothers to rear their children in neighborhoods
where there are many other single mothers and where there are high rates of unemployment, school dropout,
teen pregnancy, and crime.
"Why do so many kids in these neighborhoods drop out, get pregnant, and commit crimes? Is it because they
don't have fathers? That is a popular explanation, but I considered the question in Chapter 9 and came to other
conclusions. Neighborhoods have different cultures and the cultures tend to be self-perpetuating; they are
passed down from the parents' peer group to the children's peer group. The medium through which the cultures
are passed down cannot be the family, because if you pluck the family out of the neighborhood and plunk it
down somewhere else, the children's behavior will change to conform with that of their peers in their new
neighborhood.
"It's the neighborhood, not the family. If you look at kids within a given neighborhood, the presence or absence
of a father doesn't make much difference ... Within an economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhood, the
kids who live with both parents are no better off than those who live with only one."
Reply 0

margarets (#11,021)
Hoo boy. Harris thinks neighbourhood cultures and peer relations influence kids but family cultures don't? Like
there are no dysfunctional or abusive families in nice affluent neighbourhoods; no one who grew up with a mom
and a dad and enough money was ever negatively influenced by mom and dad's dysfunction. Ask any rich kid:
life at home was grand every minute. Jeez.
It sounds like Harris is trying desperately to find a way to let parents off the hook when their kids have
problems. She'll accept ANY other explanation except lousy parenting. And of course bad parents will lap it up.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
"Hoo boy. Harris thinks neighbourhood cultures and peer relations influence kids but family cultures don't?"
Yes, but she "thinks" that not based on a random personal hunch, but based on what she finds in studies like the
adoption studies showing no influence from families, or from a study she discusses in the above section (which
I left out to keep the quote short) showing that within a given inner-city neighborhood, children from single-
parent families were no different from children from two-parent families in terms of "alcohol and substance use,
delinquency, school dropout, or psychological distress".
The thing about science is, it often proves that our "common sense" intuitions are complete nonsense, including
a lot of the "folk psychology" we use to explain human behavior. Of course a lot of people think they were
influenced by their parents, but the human mind isn't good at separating correlation from causation...just for the
sake of argument try to imagine a hypothetical world where Harris' thesis is entirely correct, do you doubt that
in this world, when people noticed how various personality traits of theirs resembled their parents (due only to
the influence of genes), they would concoct false causal explanations about how their parents had influenced
them growing up? This is why if you care about the truth of this matter you have to ignore folk psychology and
anecdotal evidence, and just look at statistical studies which try to control for different factors like the influence
of genes (controlled for in studies of adopted children) or the influence of neighborhoods (controlled for by
looking exclusively at a single neighborhood as in the study above).
Reply 0

margarets (#11,021)
But Harris had no way of knowing what any of those families (not to mention the neighbourhoods) were really
like. Statistics wouldn't tell even a fraction of the story. They certainly wouldn't get at the extent of various
forms of family dysfunction and abuse, or identify which families were happy ones, for that matter.
And how can Harris possibly know what influenced the personality development of an individual she never
met, when that person - according to her theory - can't be trusted to know themselves? And what about the
wider culture, or historical developments? Does that make no difference?
It's preposterous. And it's bad, bad science. We don't even understand completely how genes influence physical
health, yet Harris figured (in 1998!) that she had human personality all worked out? Based on a combo of genes
+ neighbourhood - family dynamics?
And of course, personality is in the eye of the beholder. What one person sees as career dedication another may
see as workaholism. How does Harris's theory account for that?
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
"But Harris had no way of knowing what any of those families (not to mention the neighbourhoods) were really
like."
What does it matter? The only result being claimed there was that single parent vs. two parent families have no
effect on the mentioned outcomes when you control for the neighborhood. I don't know why you bring up
"family dysfunction and abuse" since this example was in the section where I was responding to your question
about whether she considered socioeconomic status, as I mentioned earlier she thought there hadn't been enough
of the right type of studies to draw any real conclusions about abuse.
"It's preposterous. And it's bad, bad science. We don't even understand completely how genes influence physical
health, yet Harris figured (in 1998!) that she had human personality all worked out? Based on a combo of genes
+ neighbourhood - family dynamics?"
She doesn't claim any definite knowledge of what actually shapes personality, she's just saying the current
evidence suggests family dynamics is not a significant factor (analogous to showing a particular gene or set of
genes does not seem to have any significant influence on a health condition, which has been done with a great
number of genes and conditions in the course of trying to find genes that do influence the condition). This is just
a universal method of drawing conclusions about causality using statistical methods--if there is a statistical
correlation between X and Y, but the correlation disappears when you control for variable Z, that implies X has
no measurable causal influence on Y (correlation is not causation). To say this general type of reasoning is
"bad, bad science" puts you at odds with pretty much the whole of the scientific community, it seems to me--
basically any time you hear about scientists doing a "controlled experiment" to try to test the effects of one thing
on another thing, this is the sort of thing they're talking about.
Reply 0

paula (#10,975)
I'm a huge fan of Harris.
Reply 0

laurel (#4,035)
Wow. I feel like this is a thing that so needed to be written.
I've always wondered about his relationship with his mother, whom he treats so affectionately ("the SNOOT")
in "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage" v. Avril Incandenza, (the "militant
grammarian") in IJ, with her obsession with her "green babies", the substantial hints at her, um, inappropriate
relationship with Orin, and her borderline neglect of Mario.
I mean, it's a pretty damning portrait of a mother, especially when Hal is so clearly, as you say, a projection of
DFW. What was Thanksgiving 1996 like at the Wallace residence?
Reply 0

GoGoGojira (#2,871)
I don't think it's so strange, but I grew up under strange circumstances in which I can write both tenderly and
affectionately about my father, as well as "pretty damning portrait"-type stuff.
Reply 0

laurel (#4,035)
I don't think it's strange, either--probably quite common, to have conflicting feelings about a parent? And one's
writing is probably richer for the tension, I think.
Just, interesting. Avril isn't simply a poor parent. She's a monster.
Reply 0

maddieD (#9,798)
I absolutely adore my mother in my waking life but every single time I dream about her, she is doing something
that enrages me.
Reply 0

kpants (#719)
This was lovely, Maria, wonderfully written. After just finishing reading it, I'm already wanting to reread it.
Thank you.
Reply 0

philomene (#355)
This was really great to read. Are there any other parents out there who fear even just a little bit that they might
have an effect on/be blamed by their children after reading this? On the one hand, his mother seems lovely and
sympatico intellectually; on the other, she gets the lion's share of the blame for a vast mountain of unhappiness.
I'm sorry if this is a little bit "My baby is special/I'm scared of my baby" for the childless. It's just that the older
children get, the less control you have over the choices they make and yet the blame is still there. Fortunately, I
realized when I was a child that being called 'gifted' was a shitty thing (and I was never really that gifted to
begin with).
Reply 0

C_Webb (#855)
Won't send this to my students because I want them so badly to read it that if they didn't, I'll quit. So smart and
wise and kind and good. Thank you.
Reply 3

GoGoGojira (#2,871)
Thank you, I really appreciate this.
Reply 0

Hillary Rettig (#5,883)
As author of a self-help book for progressive activists (The Lifelong Activist), I was really happy to read this
article, and particularly your suggestion that people like Bradford, etc., be added to the canon. There is
definitely a bias against self-help among self-described intellectuals. (Although now under the rubrics of
"positive psychology" and "behavioral technology" it's more accepted.) It never made sense to me - life is
complex and difficult, so why not learn from others? Additionally, people on the left tend to think the whole
field of self-help ignores issues of societal and institutional oppression, and some of it does, but not all of it. (In
my work, I really try to help people identify the oppressive forces in their lives.)
The right, of course, has a different objection to self-help. In books like One Nature Under Therapy, they talk
about how there's too much self-help, therapy, etc. - because we're all supposed to just shut up and effortlessly
cope, I suppose.
Reply 0

Hillary Rettig (#5,883)
should be "One Nation Under Therapy" - sorry
Reply 0

Joshua Pierson@facebook (#10,929)
Thank you for this.
Reply 0

Bettytron (#575)
This piece will be tumbling around in my head for the next few weeks, I can tell. I spent the last year reading all
of his fiction and non-fiction, working myself up to IJ (I didn't want to get frustrated partway through and give
up, so I wanted to make sure I was up to the task) and just yesterday ordered a copy. Wonderfully written; thank
you.
Reply 0

thawking (#10,931)
I registered just to say how much I loved this. Wonderful, wonderful article.
Reply 0

Deleted by user

Abe Sauer (#148)
Bravo.
Reply 1

Elmo Keep (#3,840)
Ten minutes of staring at this comment box and still only, wow. Just, fuck.
Reply 1

Craig Brownson (#4,257)
Thank you for writing this.
Reply 0

Ms. (#10,933)
On Monday April 4th I posted DYING AND LIVING LIFE-DAVID FOSTER WALLACE on my blog
http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/. it was a complicated construction of elements from disparate , but related
sources that I hesitated to actually post because a family member has just become a follower (I wondered how
they would take the conversation I was having with myself). But after two days, and hours of tweaking, I just
went right ahead. After all, I only have 13 followers, no comments, and I am doing the blog because I care
about what I care about. Since posting it, I have added a few extra items that seemed to belong. Now that I've
read your searching, brave piece here, I am going to edit a reference to it into the post. What a touching
exploration of a man who, though recently discovered, has moved me deeply. So thanks for this. Thanks very
much!
Reply 0

Daniel Gumbiner@facebook (#10,936)
holy shit, tremendous job.
Reply 0

Nathan Huffstutter (#10,937)
Re: the class quiz. What's the first word that pops into your head when I say 'language'?
Reply 0

barnhouse (#1,326)
Schmanguage?
Reply 1

One of the principles of free association is that there are no wrong answers. But schmanguage is the wrong
answer. In the question, I was speculating that the words in the quiz were derived from an exercise where DFW
had asked a separate group to spit out the first word they thought of when he said 'language'. The individual's
jumping off point will say something about the speaker, all the words in combination say something about the
subject.
Reply 0

Bittersweet (#765)
My first thought was "arts" but I like Maria's "schmanguage" much, much better.
Reply 1

It's not my quiz and I'm grossly unqualified to grade the results. But I doubt language shmanguage wins a free
lunch.
Reply 0

Slapdash (#174)
"There is no blame to pin anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve."
Faved and saved. Also, bravo.
Reply 0

James M (#10,947)
Top shelf.
Reply 0

BakhtinHungerForce (#6,839)
Oh man. Dan "Francheese": an Illinois boy's reference to that most terrifying of Chicago delicacies, the
francheezie?
Wonderful piece.
Reply 0

Brian Abelson@facebook (#10,956)
Okay... this was really enjoyable coming from someone who has always admired DFW's writing, but I have a
single and, I think, important issue:
Don't you think this sort of fetishistic approach to DFW's archives only serves to ironically champion him as
some great auteur of our time for rejecting auteurism and refusing to consider himself a genius? Don't you think
these sort of obsessive speculations about his psyche based on what he read, or his relationship with his mother,
or even the types of questions he asked his students only serve to effectively gloss-over the central point of
much of his work which, as you so eloquently put it,was "to erase the distance between himself and others in
order to understand them better" ?
Reply 1

theharpoon (#10,705)
I think you have a good point, but I thought it might also be worth mentioning that a "fetishistic" approach to
authors' archives is hardly limited to DFW's collection, even among modern writers. The Ransom Center
particularly specializes in modern American and British authors, but of course we've been picking writers apart
pretty much as long as they've been writing.
Reply 0

hapax (#6,251)
I kept thinking I knew what this article was about as I was reading it, but with every paragraph you made a
flawless hairpin turn into a new, amazing set of observations. Your insights about DFW are trenchant and
powerful and utterly heartbreaking, but piggybacking on them are even deeper observations about depression,
writing, 'genius', addiction, parenting, and the disturbing prurience of our own fascination with our idols.
I am normally the type of person who logs into a website just to tell someone that they are Wrong On The
Internet, but Ms. Bustillos, this might be the best thing I've read this year. Thank you. I hope you get a fucking
Pulitzer for it.
Reply 2

outwardbound (#10,958)
Had to create an account so I could post. Thank you for very inspiring writing and thanks to all who posted in
appreciation, also inspiring. Off to work I go....
Reply 0

Sam duPont@twitter (#10,957)
wonderful piece, thank you. searching for the Amherst Review archives to read "planet trillaphon" now. and my
stab at the quiz:
These are words to be avoided for their failure to illustrate their own meaning. Particularly "pulchritude" (has an
uglier word ever been uttered?) and "S-less" (which violates itself three times). Untyped, Unwritten,
Indefinable, Misspelled, Invisible, Incomprehensible likewise defy their own definitions. Big is a little word;
Diminutive is big. High-class is a tacky phrase, while Obscene and Vulgar are rather dainty. And Foreign is
such a common, ordinary word, so divorced from its possibility as to almost carry no meaning at all.
Reply 3

Yes. This. DFW actually refers to this quality of certain words and has a term for them. I can't remember it off-
hand. But it wasn't necessarily negative. It was just an interesting quality that these words share -- their
meanings are in seeming contrast to their architecture (be it spelling or pronunciation).
Reply 1

Sam duPont@twitter (#10,957)
i think 'heterological' is the term...
Reply 0

Mike Doughty (#6,314)
I'm frustrated. There's a few things I don't think you quite have a grasp on--but I wonder if I don't have a firm
grasp on the things I believe you don't have a firm grasp on. So, struggling. Blogged a response:
http://mkdo.co/post/4393084913
Reply 0

Chris Stucky@twitter (#10,966)
Amazing. I was in an undergraduate class where he gave us that quiz, and I've wanted to find a copy ever since.
Happened to do a search and found you'd posted it yesterday. This was great reading. Thanks!
Reply 0

Mike Doughty (#6,314)
Dude, dude, dude. I misconstrued stuff bigtime. Big errors in my blog. Ugh. Apologies.
Reply 0

Geoff1 (#10,969)
Doesn't anyone have reservations about this piece? Picking apart his depression and history, psychoanalyzing
the notes he wrote in his private books and his anonymous posting - doesn't that seem wrong, like literary
rubbernecking? His work stands on its own and it's what he wanted to and did express to the world.
Reply 1

dntsqzthchrmn (#2,893)
(hugs)
Reply 0

Uaxuctum (#10,973)
I think the piece is well-written and carefully approaches what is definitely a delicate subject. Still, I can't help
but be reminded of DFW's NY Times review of Borges: A Life, in which he expresses doubts about exercises in
which biographers attempt to draw conclusions about an author's interior life from pieces of fiction they've
written. And so, perhaps this should be approached with a caveat:
"A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable. In order to ensure this, the bio
has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't
correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances
surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another
is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others." (The whole review can be read here:
http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Borges_on_the%20Couch.pdf)
Reply 2

Mister Chu (#11,001)
Yes this is very much so. I am hoping that Mister Borges and Mister Wallace are sharing their own thoughts on
some more elevated (or otherwise) social intercourse site available to those no longer available (to us).
Best wishes to you,
Mister Chu
http://misterchu.tumblr.com/
Reply 0

Deleted by user

paula (#10,975)
Regarding Geoff1- I understand your point. DFW kills himself and, understandably a University Library
inherits his papers. I found his whole obsession with recovery and Alice Miller in particular, sad. The reading
and rereading- the different markers! What a collossal waste of emotion. Regardless, what really matters, is his
work. And it will endure. Biographies of writers- or biographical articles or what have you- I love to read them.
But they often color my view of the work in a bad way and sometimes I regret my desire to know all about a
writer. Two writers come to mind right off the bat- Philip Roth (I read his ex wife's book on him, In a Doll's
House) and Jean Rhys.
That said, the author of this piece herself states her reservations on all his mother hating and need to
"understand" himself in that "pychological" way which really is, let's face it, usually detrimental and eschews
personal responsibility. And I also must say I found this piece sort of riveting. Such a bright, successful, loved
man- and he sits around underlining crap about his inner child. Just- wow.
Reply 0

theharpoon (#10,705)
More accurately, they probably bought his papers; it's what usually happens these days.
Reply 0

DoctorDisaster (#1,970)
I didn't have time to give this the reading it deserved when it was posted, so I got to it a day late. Now I feel like
a fool for not putting off yesterday's responsibilities. The article deals with so many important topics that it's
hard to pick a single highlight, but I'll just say that the examination of a depressed person's coping mechanisms
was revelatory for me. Thanks.
Reply 1

Deleted by user

Mark802 (#10,983)
Maria Bustillos has written a fascinating and brilliant commentary on David Wallace's inner life and suffering.
However, I think she tends to misrepresent somewhat Alice Miller's views. Miller's concern to "respect the
feelings" of children had nothing to do with so-called permissive parenting. As Miller argued in her many
books, permissive parenting is often just the flip side of authoritarian parenting. In other words, both parenting
styles are often more about the parent's emotional agenda (or unmet needs) than what healthy parenting should
be: To meet the real needs of the child to feel respected, understood, cared for and protected within the family.
This hardly means no rules or anything goes. Nor do I agree that the intention of Alice Miller's work was to
foster "mother hating" or to assign blame. That's a superficial reading of what was rather a commitment to help
individuals better understand the dynamics of their upbringing for the purpose of moving through their troubled
feelings to a healthier emotional life. Obviously, staying stuck in feelings of hatred for parents would be
counterproductive to that goal. Then again, so is denial of such feelings. The fact that David Wallace studied
Miller as he did is a testament not only to his pain, but to a searching, relentless, and obviously difficult effort
on his part to understand himself better.
Reply 1

barnhouse (#1,326)
Hi Mark (Maria here.) Thanks for this insightful comment. I should have been clearer with respect to Miller's
position regarding "permissiveness", you're right; her larger theme is that the narcissistically-disturbed parent
sees the child not as an individual, his own person, but as a sort of vessel for her own imperatives. This can take
the form of excessive "permissiveness" or what she calls "anti-authoritarian" parenting. What I was getting at is
something outside the area of Miller's work; it's just something I've observed myself among fellow-parents, and
it's not a question of reflecting one's own needs onto the child. There are parents who straight-up believe it's the
right thing to do, objectively, to make the child the absolute and only center of their world. That is a distinction
worth making, for sure.
As for Miller's intentions, it's very clear that she wanted to help those whom she felt had been harmed, as she
had been herself, by a certain kind of parenting. And I think there is an enormous value in this book. But that
value might well be undercut by focusing solely on the predicament of the injured child. There seems to be very
little sympathy for the narcissistically-deprived mother in The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Reply 0

Mark802 (#10,983)
Maria, I'm not sure it's lack of sympathy for the mother on Miller's part as much that the focus of her polemical
book was on the dynamics of the parent-child relationship as it affects the child. But, of course, the
narcissistically deprived mother was herself once the victim of parents who mistreated her. Miller did recognize
this and wrote often about the cycle of abuse carried from one generation to the next. But I can see your point.
The tone of her writing doesn't always suggest much sympathy for the situation of the parent. Thanks again for
your important, thoughtful essay.
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
The only person who could have saved David was ALICE MILLER, and he knew it. But even so, it proved too
difficult and painful.If only we could have more sympathy for the one who took his own life, we would
understand - alas too late - that suicide is ALWAYS the ultimate mean of communication (ie when all else has
failed). Bradshaw (to name just one) may have been a stepping stone, a step up on the staircase of "recovery";
but when you get to the top of the stairs, you are warned and admonished by a loud voice, which clamours that
"This is NOT a witch-hunt, this is NOT about blaming the parents". This is how Bradshaw introduced his latest,
sum-total work(PRSD-2000) and took the wind out of your sails before you could even open your mouth in
protestation. Whereas Alice Miller stayed uncompromisingly on your side, right till the end.So why are fans and
experts not dwelling more on the contradictions that David's life was?"I was raised in a solid, loving, two-parent
family. "But by the age of 15, he is in the grip of depression, addictions and treatment centres. Does that sound
NORMAL? Some people say that he loved his mother. "His regard for her was clearly enormous, though, he
told Lipsky, "My mother's the best proofreader in the world, Amy's second and I'm third, as far as I've seen."
(Amy being Amy Wallace Havens, his sister.) Others see clearly how "Wallace had some complicated and
deep-seated issues with regard to the subject of motherhood generally....and Avril Incandenza, "militant
grammarian," is a mysterious but also a monstrous figure, whose love is suffocating, all-encompassing,
intrusive, terrible.....and how David's writings ARE about himself and his mother who he despises.So why
would he choose his mother to be is No1 Proof-reader, if not because he wanted to SHOW her, and her to
READ in his own words, what he was TOO AFRAID TO TELL HER? Or was it about seeking approval, or
love, or maybe just a whisp of attention...Of course she never acknowledged it and the true message was
repeatedly dismissed. And No2 Proof-reader, his sister who was a first class witness. Just as Alice Miller shows
about Nietzsche, the audience is more than happy (as here with DFW's audience) to lap up the performance, but
ignore the message, rather than hearing the author's pain, and rising against the crime and injustice.Wallace's
notes.....especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be
messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and revealed to himself by the latter book, one in
which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering.
This article speaks volume for present-day dysfunctions, addictions, suicides and their respective stats and rates
(of INCREASE) and how NONE of the cures on offer work. Meds have now overtaken Arms manufacturing,
and the business of "RECOVERY" figures right there at the top. Except nobody is getting any better. Just as
there's no need for Asthma. Or Diabetes!
All a bit simplistic? Perhaps we should all revisit Alice Miller's books and her website. Therein lie all the
answers. Free and available. Now let's make sure New Mexico does away with spanking this week.
Goodbye David. I hear you.....
Reply 1

Connie Michener@twitter (#11,123)
@Raymondo The idea that one cannot even privately characterize one's parent's style, as one truly sees it,
makes this article a bit noxious to me. I came to Alice Miller by way of Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery.
To Ms. B. I say, despite your self-reporting here, there is still a chance that your child took your mothering "the
wrong way," and you'll look, to them, like a "bad parent." At least your children will know not to bother to
discuss it with you, or let you see their private libraries. DFW's work is not that of one merely seeking, but one
running from disintegration; he's constantly trying out helpful scenarios, and looking to see if he's fooled
anyone. But consesnsus doesn't matter, and comparisons don't matter, either. I nearly wept earlier this week,
reading about his attempt to establish a third way in a binary logic system. But I too dream that dream every
night. In private, of course he was seeking. A non-believer has to try every source, and test every footfall, is
plagued by uncertainty, is looking for single toeholds of axioms of truth. Sure we can know everything there is
about the classification and beauty of rock, but what way in to the social world for someone so hung up on
getting everything right he was trying to resolve models clearly independent of each other. It is very hard to
reverse-engineer constructions of self. Alice Miller's short bio on Nietzsche was inspirational to me; the work I
did following that was a mutiny against syntax itself -- and finally to a new prioritization.
Reply 0

DavidHarp (#10,987)
What a disturbing but fascinating -- in the sense that one may be mesmerized by an object of horror or danger --
article. On the one hand, it's disturbing to look so closely into DFW's mind via his personal notations in self
help books. On the other, it certainly lends depth to one's understanding of the man, although for me not
particularly of the work of the man which I've read.
To me, if I recall correctly (and I think I do, although not near verbatim level) a particular sequence in the
middle of Infinite Jest sums up most of what Ms. Bustillos came up with here. To the effect that Hal
(paraphrased) realizes "...that he needs their love, but it's not about love, it's about their need to have someone
come up from underdog and win, and to do it again, and again, and again, it's never enough..."
I.E. that "they" love you for what you do, not for who you are. Whereas in AA, they love you, see your
humanity, just for being in the room...
Again, for me, this is the point of "The Entertainment," it's the point of all these painful, sad, musings of DFW
in the Miller book, and one of the things that most people, especially those designated as "talented" early on,
must deal with to be happy or fulfilled.
That all said, Ms. Bustillos, thank you for your work, I think. DFW, wherever you may be, rest in peace.
Reply 0

Marioninnyc (#2,702)
This was a harrowing trip, and I'm sure not easy to write. It doesn't surprise me that Wallace owned, read and
desperately sought answers in those books. Our way of thinking gets set, some of it may be simply be because
we are born with certain tendencies. The truth is for someone like Wallace, probably the only thing that could
have kept him alive longer would have been the right combination of a trusted competent psycho-
pharmacologist, a good therapist -- possibly of the cognitive school -- and supportive friends and family. Even
then there would have been dark and desperate times.
Reply 0

paula (#10,975)
Agreed.
Reply 0

Carole Mandryk@facebook (#10,991)
Wow. It's been years since I've read anything this well-written. And not just the writing - the thought behind it,
the detective work, the analysis. Though perhaps analysis is the wrong word - too logical and sciency, when the
article was an elaborate dance with dips and twirls that made me smile, made me gasp, made me cry. And hits
so so close to home. Thank-you.
Reply 0

Donald Dunbar@twitter (#15,366)
@Carole Mandryk@facebook
I too really think this is fantastic. I think a lot of things in Harper's Magazine are also fantastic, and if it's been
years for you, spend the twenty dollars to subscribe for a year:)
Cheers!
Posted on July 7, 2011 at 5:25 am
Reply 0

Susan of Texas (#11,006)
Ms. Bustillos has written a lovely piece that completely misunderstands depression and therefore is fated to
completely misunderstand her subject matter. What she sees as navel-gazing is an attempt to discover the source
of great inner pain, and what she sees as mother-blaming (something no mother wants to read) is the need to
separate reality from the confused fictions that unhappy parents inflict on their children to ease their own pain.
Wallace needed to acknowledge that he was loved for his genius (if that was indeed the case) and not for
himself, with all his normal human flaws, and accept that he would never have the unconditional love that
children need, and that adults need to have had.
Most revealingly, Ms. Bustillos expresses her own worries about parenting in this article, further confusing her
assessment of Wallace. She believes introspection is self-indulgent and paying attention to the feelings, wants
and needs of one's child is indulging them. Her own insecurities as a parent come pouring out of this article. She
has no idea of Miller's theories, which state that we all all individuals and need to be treated as such, not as
extensions of our parents, here to provide them with unconditional love and self-esteem.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Your paraphrases of what Maria said seem to bear little or no resemblance to what I read in her article. Can you
give a specific quote where you think she says anything like "introspection is self-indulgent and paying
attention to the feelings, wants and needs of one's child is indulging them", for example?
Reply 0

If you indulge a child too much, "respect his feelings" too much, then you become one of those doormats who
lives in a nightmare where the child is a tyrant over the house, and if you discipline him too much, he will feel
sad, lonely and unloved.
and
Just please back away from the mirror now, because it is all bullshit in there, nothing but illusions, illusions all
the way down. Sometimes I think that the principal difference between those who are in general cheerfully-
inclined and those who are not is that the former know better than to even countenance their own bullshit for
one instant.
Plus the general tone of the remainder of the article.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
The first quote doesn't say that all respect for a child's feelings is indulgence, it says "respect his feelings" too
much, the "too much" is important, as is the fact that she put "respect his feelings" in quotes, which suggests to
me she was talking more about a posture of respecting feelings by never saying "no" to any behavior, as
opposed to actual respect for feelings which includes the possibility of saying "no". That sort of posture of
"respect for feelings" can involve not really seeing what the child's feelings actually are (including the fact that
letting the child do whatever they want at all times may not actually be making them very happy), it can be an
excuse for a kind of lack of engagement with the child. This is also suggested by Maria's comment slightly
earlier, "But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-worshipping
monster who believes that her child's every Feeling is somehow Sacredto which you're all, hoy, lady, your
kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to be happy or
well-adjusted adults, either."
The second quote seems to just be arguing for a little humility in considering one's own psychological
explanations for why one is the way one is, which I think is reasonable and doesn't mean "introspection is bad".
But certainly the introspection of a depressed person can become neurotic, and being too confident about one's
own explanations can make one feel trapped in personality patterns that make the person unhappy...if one
"explains" a pattern in terms of something set by childhood experience, that may not inspire great hope for
changing it as an adult. I also think that there's a lot of evidence from modern science that suggests we are very
good at manufacturing false explanations for our own behavior, see for example the evidence discussed in this
paper that the left brain (where language is centered) has a marked tendency to come up with false
rationalizations for behaviors that actually originated from the right brain (and as mentioned in this paper, even
tends to rationalize away paralysis on the side of the body controlled by the right brain), or the evidence from
Judith Rich Harris that I mentioned in an earlier comment (scroll up a bit and look for my avatar), which
suggests that parenting actually has little to no influence on adult personality and that personality similarities
between children and parents are due almost entirely to genetics.
Reply 0

We are speaking of behavior, the choices we make and the way we interact in the world. Our behaviors are
affected by our interactions with other people, most especially those who raise us, when we are most young,
vulnerable and impressionable. Miller tells us that children whose parents withhold love grow up to crave
unconditional love, that people who were belittled grow up angry, and children who were abused grow up to
abuse others. If people do not care to acknowledge those rather simple facts there's not much one can do, but
they could have the grace to refrain from slap-happy moralizing.
Miller is speaking of letting a child have his own opinions, not too much sugar. Letting him have his own
preference, his own goals and dreams. Not letting him run around a restaurant. Respect his feeling by not using
insults, digs, put-downs or arbitrary commands. It has nothing to do with "never saying no to a behavior" and
the example is ludicrous.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Maria said over-indulging a child and letting him run around a restaurant is bad, but she didn't accuse Miller of
advocating this type of over-indulgence as you seem to suggest, she was just making the point that Miller
focused entirely on one extreme of bad-parenting (over-controlling) and didn't discuss the fact that the other
extreme (no control) could be a problem too. Her main criticism of Miller was just that she thought there was
too much blaming-the-mother in her book.
Reply 0

Repetition is not a response.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Repetition of what? I had never previously addressed your claim that Maria accused *Miller* of advocating
over-indulgence, I hadn't realized that was what you were arguing and there was nothing in Maria's piece that
actually suggested that, if you think she did I suggest the problem is with your reading comprehension.
By the way, I notice that towards the end of this comments thread we suddenly have a bunch of people coming
in specifically to defend Alice Miller from a perceived attack by Maria's piece--Mark802, Raymondo, you,
Brian Roessler (all of you first-time commenters at the Awl)...just curious, are you a regular Awl reader, or has
the piece been publicized at some site/blog that's frequented by a lot of Alice Miller fans?
Reply 0

You have no idea what you're talking about. Bustillos has no idea what she's talking about. Miller didn't write
self-help books about parenting styles. She did not "blame the mother." She wrote how people mistreat their
children because of unresolved issues that stem from childhood. She wrote how people have to stop making
excuses for the abusive actions of their parents because they still want their parents' unconditional love. She
wrote that one must accept the truth for what it is and stop seeking love from a toxic parent. When one does
that, there are no longer any excuses for blaming anyone else for one's actions. That matter has been settled and
must be left in the past where it belongs. From then on you must let go of your feelings of self-hatred and anger
and resentment for what has happened to you. You stop blaming your parents because you realize that they
couldn't help themselves, they are damaged people who were incapable of moving beyond their own pain, so
they took it out on you. When you forgive yourself for being a victim you forgive those who victimized you as
well. They were children once too.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
I have no idea where others found this article; I came across it by chance.
Reply 1

hypnosifl (#9,470)
You have no idea what you're talking about. Bustillos has no idea what she's talking about. Miller didn't write
self-help books about parenting styles.
I never said she wrote "self-help books about parenting styles" (neither did Maria as far as I can see), and I'm
not even sure what you mean by that phrase. Certainly a type of parenting style was a major focus of her book,
no? Are you denying that the book should be considered any form of "self-help", or are you making the point
that the book wasn't addressed to parents, or something else?
She did not "blame the mother."
There are different senses of the word "blame". One sense is about assigning moral responsibility to someone
and getting self-righteously angry at them for having done something wrong; personally, since I think people
are just another type of animal doing what comes naturally to them, I can never really get too worked up about
that sort of "blame", I like this quote from Einstein: I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man
can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and
reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free
will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from
losing my temper. (I'm also sort of drawn to Buddhism which I think takes a similar view towards self-righteous
"blame" of this sort). But then there's another sort of "blame" which is simply assigning something a primary
role in having caused something--for example, I can "blame" a virus for having caused a cold I'm experiencing.
In this sense I think Alice Miller does "blame" parenting for causing psychological problems in adults, no? (if
you read my comments to margarets above about the work of Judith Rich Harris, I think there's actually a strong
scientific case that Miller is actually wrong that psychological problems of adults have much of anything to do
with parenting, even though this is the common folk wisdom among psychologists and most modern
Westerners)
That said, I do think Maria was talking about the former, more emotional type of blame when she wrote "I can
tell you that it is a book that will make anyone detest his own mother for a week at least because that is what it
is designed to do: to blame mothers." But I took this more as a statement about the effect she thinks the book
has on typical readers (including Wallace, attested to by his notes) rather than some sort of definitive claim
about Miller's original intent in writing her book.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Yes, you already said that. There's no need to be so emphatic about defending Miller from perceived
"attackers", you seem to have a lot invested in the rightness of her theories but she certainly wasn't even a minor
focus of the article and Maria's offhand comments about her seem to be almost entirely focused on the effect her
ideas had on Wallace, not about her book itself. Similarly I have not claimed any special knowledge of Miller,
I'm just defending the article from what seem to me to be your complete misrepresentations of what it actually
says.
Reply 0

Brian Abelson@facebook (#10,956)
uh. so does this mean that we should think of Infinite Jest as a 1000 page suicide note now?
Reply 0

marty (#11,011)
Very sad account of a person who couldn't go on, who "wanted to just stop being conscious"...just wanted to
stop the hurt. And with the imminent arrival of The Pale King, articles that focus on DFW's nuanced mental and
emotional states will hopefully not be the last things considered about him. For, his work is not his life, though
refractions of it might appear to be hidden in the text of his writings. Furthermore, his annotations should not be
overly scrutinized, as if they were cryptic paths to an inner/divided/multiplied version of a self in the quest of
validation and clarification. As for the undergraduate quiz: All the words listed have implied opposites.
Reply 0

dinah101 (#11,016)
After reading this, I couldn't help but wonder whether Mr. Wallace ever had a sponsor or worked the steps. It
seems as though this was a man who was extremely isolated, despite everything. Very sad.
Reply 0

Brian Roessler@facebook (#11,026)
While there is very much to admire in this piece, and I especially appreciate the insight it shares with us via
DFW's notes and thoughts about these books, ultimately I'm left with the same sense as Susan of Texas. Ms.
Bustillos fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between family, depression, emotional honesty, and
one's ability to have a meaningful connection with others. This is nothing to do with blaming anyone. DFW
identifies the central issue on page 85 of The Pale King:
To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful
impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful;
maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it.
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough
stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient
low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from
feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty
confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly... but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or
tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates,
SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence
with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is
just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
Comfortably Numb ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkJNyQfAprY
Reply 0

Deleted by user

Katherine Tanney@facebook (#11,032)
What an amazing job, Maria. Thank you for sharing this material and for your beautiful writing about this
extraordinary writer and human being. I have to agree with Brian (just above), though, that you might be
misguided in your take on "The Drama of the Gifted Child" and how it affected DFW.
Reply 0

Michael J. Curtiss@facebook (#11,037)
David Foster Wallace, the James Dean of literature.
His small ouevre has been ludicrously blown out of proportion to its significance by the postmortem
exhortations of those who mistakenly assume that by pretending to like or understand his on-the-whole prosaic
efforts at being clever somehow gives them more credibility.
Mental illness, coupled with being a pretentious, bloviating writer with barely two books under one's belt does
not automatically apotheosize one as the Messiah to the literati.
Reply 0

Alsy (#11,052)
I can only assume you're trolling but want to respond nonetheless. He didn't have "barely two books" under his
belt. He had two published novels, along with three short-story collections and half a dozen non-fiction books.
Whatever you think of DFW's fiction, if you've actually read even a fraction of his essay writing, I suspect
"bloviating" would be the last word you'd use to describe it. Get back under your bridge.
Harrumph.
PS "does not automatically apotheosize one as the Messiah to the literati". Pretentious? *Moi?*
Reply 1

What you said, Alsy. Very much. Award-winning short stories, award-winning essays, articles on topics as
varied as gourmet eating to Roger Federer (which I believe also won an award), books ranging from fiction to
explorations on math, hip-hop, etc. He didn't win a MacArthur Award for nothing (and certainly not
posthumously).
But -- for some reason -- DFW brings reactions similar to Michael's out in some people. If you don't like him:
fine, of course. DFW isn't for everyone. But I'd recommend his Federer article, his cruise ship essay or his "This
Is Water" commencement speech before completely turning your back on him. He will go down as a very
potent voice for a certain segment of the late 20th/early 21st century global population.
Reply 0

Josh Brown@facebook (#11,051)
Of course, his was a tragic life. Need it now become a spectacle?
What's most tragic is this: in death, DFW has been given the same obsessive workover that he gave to his own
characters.
Reply 1

Raymondo (#10,980)
Why are we not talking about the tragedy that Dave took his life? Here is a man - genius and inspiration to
many - and he's dead. Is that not the only show in town? We know that " This man spent a lot of his life in
terrible pain, desperate for an explanation and a way out." Why are we not talking about THAT, especially as it
seems clear to everyone that this is precisely what he was writing about? It would be interesting to hear more
about the details of his childhood. All we're told is that the parents were very fussy about English (plenty of
"language", but zero meaningful COMMUNICATION?) and that MAMMY WROTE A BOOK... What a
benchmark! But no, it's easier to talk about David's WORK, admired or unfinished, and ignore the tragedy
which the WORDS THEMSELVES WANT TO COMMUNICATE. Just as with the paintings of Francis
Bacon: we see the most valuable ART but choose to ignore that the images are all born OUT OF
UNIMAGINABLE VIOLENCE AND ABUSE INFLICTED IN CHILDHOOD. Or with James Joyce: we
celebrate Ulysses as a masterpiece, and even re-enact the whole show every year. But not a word about that the
poor bastard wasn't welcome in his own country TO DIE, or that his childhood was steeped in family
dysfunction thanks to his drunken father. When we choose to NOT talk about these things, we CONDONE
them. So why don't we explore, and PROTEST the things that drove a bright young David to drugs and being
depressed - BEFORE HE WAS 15?
Reply 1

paula (#10,975)
People can talk about his work because his work is- important to the world of literature. If one is more
interested in his family life, then one should talk about that. As far as the things that "drove" him to depression.
Hm. That just flies in the face of everything I know about depression and suicide. I happen to think that
depression of his kind is a clinical, genetic variety. Certain life choices may exasperate it, but it's no one's
"fault". And the whole "mammy wrote a book"- that is a seriously hateful thing, with hints of racism and just- I
mean- what is wrong with her writing a book? Should she not write, because of her son? So confusing and
wrongminded.
He wrote about many things, not just his depression and family. I love his essays in particular and his essays on
tennis for instance. To compartmentalize his entire body of work- and to read his fiction as HIM, instead of his
work, related to him, but not him- is to not understand what it means to write.
I don't condone abuse- again, so wrong to get this conclusion-but unless I were to spend large amounts of time
with his family and very loving seeming wife- I can't say what the relationship really was. I think Maria treads
this matter lightly- she talks about how close he was to his mother, how he even quoted her, took words from
her. Simplifying him- he was abused and unloved and that is why he was depressed- goes against everything,
everything, I know about the human condition.
Reply 0

bigpeep (#11,060)
Nice piece - I just had to take issue with your inclusion of Alice Miller in "best-sellingest, Oprah-level
cheesiness and la-la reputation." Miller is a well-regarded serious author whose writing is both academically
sound and accessible. Hardly cheesy. And your summary of the Drama Gifted Child is inaccurate. The "Gifted"
in the title does not refer to the term as understood in the US (Alice Miller is Polish). As she explains in the
book the "gift" is the overly sensitive child who can perceive and intuit his/her parent's emotional needs,
limitations, etc. It is not "gifted" as in "high achieving." You might want to read the book before you make
assumptions about how it relates to the David Foster Wallace.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
bigpeep, where did you come across this article? You're now the fifth person to post in the comments with the
specific purpose of defending Alice Miller, who was a minor part of the article at best; I'm curious if this article
has been publicized on some sites or blogs where a lot of Alice Miller fans are likely to congregate.
Reply 0

bigpeep (#11,060)
I just read it here. I think it got so much response b/c Miller was such an influential thinker and this article got it
so wrong.
Reply 0

hypnosifl (#9,470)
Obviously you read it here, but did you find a link to it somewhere, or have you been a regular reader of "the
Awl" since before this article?
Reply 0

Karin-helen Jensen@facebook (#11,063)
Thats a lot of insight...thank you to all! Life is... for the most part...a lot of days and hours...months and
years........ yes...for many... long and sometimes messy.... ...in observing people for 11 years......in my own self-
help theme bookstore in California and now on the other side of the world...Oslo....observing people at the end
of life....end stage care home work.....I see the struggle humans beings experience... just to get up the
morning...lets not forget that many self-help and human studies books.... where written from a lot of pain..often
a breach birth project...said many of the authors....when asked ....Just some simple thoughts from Oslo...and like
the saying goes...Life is messy!
Reply 0

Tony Wuersch@facebook (#11,069)
Thank you for opening up those parts of DFWs life to us. To me, you've well established DFW believed he
cycled between performing and depressive selves and that he preferred seeing each of them from the
perspective of the other self -- a masochistic and profoundly undetached introspection. You've also well-
established that DFW saw a release from that cycling in trying to vicariously think like selves other than his,
i.e., "typical" selves in trouble as described by the self-help books. Unfortunately that also led to DFW's
reliance on mirroring external views about him uncritically, perhaps as a buffer so he could mediate the efforts
of well-meaning helpmeets. DFW also seems someone especially burdened by his self-perception of what
Harold Bloom called anxiety of influence. It seems like he had problems distinguishing a systemic
decomposition of influences from drowning in influences. But (speculatively) I think the overarching issue was
that his internal critic was masochistic. If you don't aim to win, you're not going to fully work out or execute a
best strategy. You'll set yourself up to lose. I wonder if DFW ever wrote about management consultants,
because often they get paid extra to "do the hard decisions" and "take the blame."
Where I guess I part the ways is in your speculating about his mother. You report lots of evidence of DFW's
manipulating and delighting his teachers. I doubt that was to please his mother. She and he both seem to have
had monstrous charismatic talents. And he clearly had great guilt about it. What that has to do with Alice Miller
eludes me, but her books have a way of taking credit away from kids and reassigning it to parents, and that
sleight of hand displacement of blame seems a very American meme. Don't blame Eichmann, blame his mom.
Then we'll understand.
I'm glad you brought this to us. DFW was an exceptional person. Thanks.
Reply 0

paula (#10,975)
well said.
Reply 0

Pete Smillie@twitter (#11,081)
As one who started on a path to self knowledge with the very same books of David's you cite; "The Drama of
the Gifted Child", "The Divided Self", and John Bradshaw's on "The Family", - I can say that you grossly
misstate the thrust of Millers work, and only the last might be perfunctorily lumped in a "self help" genre.
Bradshaw walked the walk. He's not an ego invested Deepak or Wayne Dyer who's interest is to cover every
new development in psychology and contemplative practice with their own image. Years earlier than you state,
before others made it cliche, Bradshaw's "inner child" and "mobile" which dynamically modeled the family -
this was a work of art - served as meaningful catalysts for many willing and able to do "the work". That task for
David was greater than for most, (compounded by alcoholism) but it was clear that he made a heroic effort - and
an experiential understanding of his reading material would be useful to all, not just those who write about it.
Reply 0

barnhouse (#1,326)
Hello Pete (Maria here.) Apologies if I have given the impression that I don't think these are serious books. I do.
I had read and made personal use of all three of the books you cite many (many! erf) years before I learned that
Wallace owned them; that's why, in part, I was so interested in looking at his copies. I don't think "self-help"
should be a slur; it isn't one to me. It is marketing-speak, though. And a lot of U.S. intellectuals do not think
much of "self-help" as a literary genre, which fact I was making fun of, kind of clumsily maybe. Anyway, I
agree completely that the "mobile" family concept is a work of art, one that helped probably millions of people,
myself included. All that said, though, it seems we have a long way to go (with respect to medicines, therapy,
psychology, philosophy etc.) before we really know how to deal with these issues in a way that can restore
people to health completely, as Wallace's death sadly shows.
Reply 0

Pete Smillie@twitter (#11,081)
Ah! Marketing Speak. "Self help" is a (colloquial) slur, yet we can differentiate. One non self help book comes
to mind. "A General Theory of Love". The way "to go" is always right in front of us. Through. No issues, no
deal.
Not easy! Enjoyed your piece, engagement.
Reply 0

JD Vargas@facebook (#11,085)
Wait, this is The Awl, right? No, can't be. Jesus.
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
Hypnosifl: the only person I am defending here is the VICTIM, DAVID. I don't hear too much sympathy for
him on the site, only the terrible loss and how much he will be missed. His audience and the World, have been
robbed of a Genius, but only HE lost his life. Earlier in the text, Infinite Jest is likened to a "Paean to the 12-
Steps." It may be useful to point out here, that AA ideology and Alice Miller just don't mix. Never did and
never will. With regards to your concern about my visit to the site, relax: like a watchful eagle, my attention
was caught by the reference in Maria's article to Alice Miller. And to say that "...she was a minor part of the
article at best..." is slightly disingenuous. Both in the article, and in David's life. Here is a fresh link you may
not know about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIjS4K2mQKY
Reply 1

Dylan Bryan-Dolman@facebook (#11,116)
Not at all sure I buy DFW's "jes plain folks" routine -- it seems kind of hairshirt-y to me.
To me he looks more like a self-lopping tall poppy.
Reply 0

barnhouse (#1,326)
@Dylan Bryan-Dolman@facebook Hello, Maria here. Whoa that is a fine phrase you cooked up there. Makes
me want to say it over and over. And yes, he suspected himself of that a lot, for sure. Both the good and bad are
true, I think.
Reply 0

DavidHarp (#10,987)
To Maria -- Thanks for commenting a few days ago. Should you have time and energy and inclination, as a fan
of Alice Miller's work (and, of course, of some of DFW's), I'd be very interested in your response to those
commenters who feel that your own thoughts about motherhood, and blame thereon, affects your feelings about
Drama of the Gifted Child type hypotheses. Then again, asking a writer [you, let's call you #1] -- who wrote
about a writer's [DFW, #2] relationship to his parents in the context of his [#2's] self-help marginalia -- to talk
about her [#1's] relationship to another writer [Miller, #3] who writes about one's relationship to one's parents is
perhaps a bit recursive...IMHO, though, you did come off as a bit defensive regarding Miller's "blaming" of
parents. I'd also be very curious, in an admittedly ghoulish way, to know what other self-help books DFW had.
Is a list of these available at Ransom?
Reply 0

barnhouse (#1,326)
@DavidHarp Hi there! Thank you for your note. I guess I have been down a very common road personally, of
having "blamed" my parents quite a lot and then coming to "forgive", to see them as peers, necessarily-flawed
human beings like all of us, rather than gods. Definitely though Miller's first book was VERY helpful to me as a
kid. Then I had kids myself and (another common reaction) was stunned to learn how difficult it is to do right
by them, and thereby gained another dimension of understanding of my own parents--? So it's a matter of
judging Miller's first book in retrospect, through different prisms of age and experience. I have a lot of respect
for her though I do think in the astonishment of her discoveries and the pain of her personal history, this first
book was bound to be pretty ragey, as it is. Also yes, the full list of Wallace's books at the Ransom Center is
here: http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search/X?SEARCH=david+foster+wallace&searchscope=29 .
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
(also, noting your earlier response on April 11 at 1h41pm)
Hello Maria, and of course THANK YOU for your article and the generous debate it has engendered. Why only
refer to Alice Miller's first book of over 30 years ago, when she has written so much more, right till her death
(today! April 14 2010) as well as the priceless contributions on her website by Readers and herself? Every
single idea she put forward has been proved right. Out of YOUR finest universities have come the SCIENTIFIC
proof / the pictures and scans, that the early-years abuse, violence or even silent neglect are causing structural
changes in the developing brain, with a legacy of scars and lesions. The neuro-scientists and professors
CONFIRM these findings, but unfortunately are not able to make the connection and condemn the
BEHAVIOURS from adults which cause this damage in children. Of course there will be "chemical
imbalances" detectable, but why should we surprised about that? In the light of these very recent discoveries, it
could be argued that Alice Miller's books are not so much about Self-Help anymore, but JUST PLAIN
COMMON SENSE - (supported by irrefutable evidence).
Reply 0

DavidHarp (#10,987)
@DavidHarp Thank you Maria for your response, and the link to DFW's self-help collection. Perhaps we need
to perform a litero-psych-mathematical function and AVERAGE the "blame elements" of Alice Miller's early
work with the incredibly anti-blame tirade in DFW's AA Meeting (the one where the Crocodiles" are miffed
because, IIRC, a speaker at the meeting -- a young woman who as a foster child was forced to see horrific
behavior between her disabled foster sister and the foster parents -- has had the temerity to imply that her
addiction might have been CAUSED by her trauma [which, of course, said Crocodiles dismiss as "...a day at Six
Flags Amusement Park compared to their own childhoods..."]). Thus Millerian Anger Plus Crocodilian
Rejection of Causality might equal some sort of nuanced outlook in which we can factor in "what happened" as
an partially causal element without using blame to deflect our sense of personal responsibility to act in the
present...
Thanks again, david
Reply 1

barnhouse (#1,326)
@DavidHarp That is SUCH A GOOD POINT wow. That scene is such an iconic one, such a perfect example of
the comedy/tragedy both going to 11. I am going to be thinking on these insightful comments for a long while.
Thanks too to @Raymondo, so true about how Miller's instincts, clearly moving in the right direction and later
confirmed by "science", fine, but where does this leave people like David Foster Wallace?
Thanks so much, everyone for these illuminating remarks.
Reply 0

Ryan P (#7,939)
My only quibble with this otherwise pretty great article would be with the suggestion that depressed people
should not listen to the very self that they discredit so often. It's a suggestion that could help in many cases, I'm
sure, but depression is more than constant toxic introspection, and in some cases can exist independent of it. I'm
a lifelong depressive, and the sheer pain and misery certainly remains even when I have not fallen into any
indulgently introspective habits for quite awhile. (Of course I have times where I do my brooding, as all do.)
But if we can distinguish between thought and mood, I think depression per se is more properly associated with
mood, whereas depressive self-perpetuating introspection is a kind of thinking that can accompany it. The
depressive mood, in my experience, is more like a kind of mental weather, and one's thought is akin to what one
does in that weather. A sleet storm may affect how you drive, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you slide off
the rode and crash and die.
Actually, I'm not so sure that analogy held up. Basically I'm trying to say that I've have in the past been brutally
depressed w/o being particularly wrapped up in myself. There have been days where I felt generally confident
about my place in the world and my ability to contribute positively toward something (society, nature, world,
whatever) greater than myself, where I felt that I loved and was loved, where I spent most the day engaged in
decidedly non-introspective activities (generally trying to learn as much about the world and the people in it as I
possibly could) - and yet, the ambient level of plain old sadness and pain would be so great that I was never
*not* a suicide risk. I think the instinctive response to extreme pain is to find some way to end it, and when
addled with the peculiar pain of the depressive one craves non-existence in the way that someone with a nasty
sunburn craves a squirt of aloe vera. And it's in this way that depression can exist below/above/beside conscious
depressive introspection. (And in my personal and intensely non-professional opinion, it's this sort of fucked-
upedness that makes the gestures toward depression-as-heritable-disease or depression-as-result-of-screwy-
neural-wiring much more persuasive. Not that I actually understand anything about the causes of depression.
Just speaking anecdotally.)
Oh my god that was a lot to write about a tiny quibble. If I had the energy I would just as much about what I
found so wonderful about the article.
"And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.'"
-ryan
Reply 1

artemis (#11,147)
@Ryan P
Thank you so much for putting into words how I often feel when people describe depression in terms of
negative thinking. That bleak state's even more cruel in the presence of the knowledge that I'm loved and
worthy and useful possessed of a good life.
Reply 0

elizabennett (#11,160)
Since Wallace's death, and in the wake of articles citing factual information about Wallace's childhood and
distressing emotional dynamics in his family that to me dovetailed to a "T" with the perceptive and hard-won,
not to say extremely un-cheesy, insights of psychoanalyst Alice Miller, I had toyed off and on with pitching and
writing a think piece on Wallace, his problems and his death, headed "The Tragedy of the Gifted Child." The
reading material and notes reviewed and described by the writer of this article only confirms my intuitive (and
inductive) sense of Wallace's terrible dilemma, along with an accompanying sense of monumental bone-headed
obtuseness by this article writer.
Folks, notwithstanding the current vogue for seeing mental illness as a purely chemical or biological issue,
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, all mental illness has a psycho-emotional component, usually rooted in experienced
pain or trauma, usually (not always) experienced during the period from gestation to about age 5. Without
exception. That's not to say the biochemical and/or inherited predisposition to biochemical problems are not
factors. But it IS to say that the emotional pain/trauma component is ALWAYS there in all mental disorders
including severe substance/addiction/compulsion issues and ranging through clinical mental illness. Wallace
was no exception.
The writer of this article has performed a useful service in bringing to light the evidence as to Wallace's own
thoughts and feelings along these lines. Aside from that, the article is mind-bogglingly stupid and seemingly
penned by an individual who cares little for facts or evidence, beyond a reflexive, knee-jerk outrage at and
defensiveness towards the psychoemotional components in mental illness and addiction.
Was the writer too stupid and lazy to seek the known evidence out there about issues in the Wallace family
dynamics during Wallace's early childhood, or did the writer have this information and knowingly ignore it in
this piece? I hesitate to get into it because I am reluctant to brand the Wallace parents as monsters or some such.
The very nuanced writing of Alice Miller makes clear that the "gifted child" syndrome is not always created by
wicked or cruel parents, and is sometimes inflicted by well-meaning "loving" parents. The writer of this article
seems to have chosen to conclude that Wallace's anguished dynamic with his very disturbed and, yes,
"narcissistically damaged" mother has to have been a fantasy or hallucination because, the writer shrieks, the
woman wrote a delightful primer on grammar.
Go check out what I am saying. It is a known fact that from earliest childhood, David Foster Wallace was held
responsible for protecting the feelings of a clinically depressed mother, was induced to "protect" his mother
from his normal childish needs and emotions, and was taught (I am sure with no conscious ill intent on the part
of his parents---that's the problem) that his mother was so fragile and neurasthenic that he had to literally write
requests on a piece of paper and slide them under her bedroom door. He was conditioned (again--I believe with
zero ill intent on the part of his parents) to gain approval and love by performing---being precociously acute and
precociously grown-up. As Miller detailed so brilliantly, this conditioning is often accomplished not explicitly,
but implicitly. Perceptive children---and Wallace was nothing if not hyper-perceptive--pick this up and "earn"
their love accordingly, and Wallace lived this scenario to a "T," including the Miller-described circumstance in
which it is often the OLDEST child in a family unit who is "appropriated" to perform for the damaged parent.
Wallace's mother herself, after his death, is quoted recounting a story of him at age four or five replying to a
question about what he wanted to be when he grew up by saying, a football (or some sport) player, and also a
neurosurgeon, "to help my mommy's nerves" or something like that. The woman offered this quote as evidence
of Wallace's precocious empathy, but it is evidence of far, far more than that.
Were these dynamics co-existent with biochemical predispositions and vulnerabilities in Wallace, inherited or
otherwise? Most probably....but the dynamics were there. They are in the factual evidence to be discerned by
any careful investigator. Every breakdown he had, from the "mini" breakdown in adolescence when he dropped
competitive tennis, concerned PERFORMANCE---feeling "not good enough" and unworthy. Every last one.
His addiction problems were meaningless in and of themselves---their real meaning was as a cover for these
deeper issues, which destroyed him. In a letter (I think to Franzen) documented in his final months, he made
some allusion to NOT EVER having been psychoanalyzed or having psychotherapy. And there's the rub---
reading books and going to 12-step meetings, helpful those these measures may be, are not actual psychiatric
talking-cure treatment. And if ever a sick person desperately needed such treatment, say, twice a day for five or
ten YEARS, it was David Foster Wallace. Granted---along with, anti-psychotic medication, and along with
being confined in a secure place on suicide watch long enough for a safe dosage to be found. We have not been
given the complete story on why these things didn't happen. God knows, he had checked himself into facilities
before---did he resist it this time? If so, why? Why, why, why did he resist participating in intense, long-term
psychotherapy along with biochemical treatment? We will never know. Unlike the writer of this article, he was
perceptive enough to know where the problems lay, but seemed unable to truly grapple with the problem.
Therein is the Tragedy of the Gifted Child.
Reply 0

Ryan P (#7,939)
@elizabennett can you provide proof for these claims about his family?
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
Wow Eliza! where do I begin? Firstly we shouldn't be shooting the messenger: Maria provided a very useful
platform with her article, both from the points of view of DFW and Alice Miller. With regards to "the current
vogue for seeing mental illness as a purely chemical or biological issue", this is only so because they have
FINALLY LET GO the notion of mental illnesses having their roots in genes. You are right to point out that
they ALL have their origins (95 per cent) in the environment. I would be very glad to see your writings, your
"think piece on Wallace, his problems and his death", especially details and anecdotes of his early experiences
in childhood. The article is void of any such information and details seem hard to come by. Perhaps you would
paste some links to that effect? And as for cures and treatments, unfortunately there are none coming from the
Alice Miller position. With or without medication or supervision. It was doubly-difficult for him as his insights
were always seeking support and validation IN A VACUUM, our present-day society, complete with therapists
and professionals. He did what he could: expressed himself through his books. But same vacuum, as is evident
from his readers and fans, same dead-end.
Reply 0

scrooge (#2,697)
@elizabennett Gosh, it must be nice to be so certain of everything.
Reply 0

enchantclovissangrail (#11,199)
This is so beautifully written and true. Such a worthy tribute. Thank you, Maria.
Reply 0

Caren Finnerman Rich@facebook (#11,310)
Maria-thank you for this brilliant analysis to be read and reread. Time to reread some of Alice Miller and R.D.
Laing as well.
Reply 0

Connie Michener@twitter (#11,123)
Assumptions in this article that I disagree with:
""
Self-help books are cheesy.
Anyone who tries to frame out family problems, thinking they can edify others is to be derided.
People who seek answers for their hurt through any and all channels are just losers.
If drugs don't fix their "chemical" problems, they should turn to puerile humor and moping.
Families are not the cause of anyone's problems; 'family' is such an important ideal that the examination of any
one family is unimportant.
If one once characterized one's family as happy, one cannot say otherwise.
Abused children are irreparably damaged.
Mothers are above reproach or examination.
Narcissistic disturbance is not a family pathology.
Coinages like "screaming fantod" are near the top of the list of best things about DFW.
All depressed people are the same, and channel DFW.
""
So, pretty much, I am glad to know the facts of the archive, but the analysis doesn't sit right with me.
Reply 0

Sadder Susan@twitter (#12,157)
Perhaps in writing "The Pale King", DFW realized that the larger picture of humanity and civilization was as
doomed as his own inner world. Hoping to live for something greater than yourself only to find that "It" is not
there. This can bring a person already prone to depression to the deadly conclusion that there is no point
slogging through another pointless day.
Posted on May 10, 2011 at 10:48 am
Reply 0

Tisoh (#12,956)
Event Planning
Posted on May 24, 2011 at 10:50 am
Reply 0

Ali Shass@facebook (#63,526)
Found your weblog by accident for the second time these days so I considered I would have a nearer appear.
I've just started producing my own blog site and modeling it right after what you have done. I hope mine is
going to be as profitable as yours.
Free Beats
Posted on September 8, 2011 at 9:36 am
Reply 0

I honestly believe there is a skill to writing articles that only very few posses and honestly you got it. The
combining of demonstrative and upper-class content is by all odds super rare with the astronomic amount of
blogs on the cyberspace.
Dance shoes Toronto
Reply 0

I will note your feed to keep up to date with your approaching updates.Just striking and do uphold up the good
work.
yrityshakemisto
Reply 0

the site in such a way that with very little effort one would never notice what it is making the site tick all
without limiting content and effectiveness.
glo minerals pressed base
Reply 0

Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with incoming post. Thanks a
million and please keep up the delightful work. laser comb review
Reply 0

I really like the fresh perpective you did on the issue. Really was not expecting that when I started off studying.
Your concepts were easy to understand that
pure fiji products
Reply 0

Raymondo (#10,980)
Puzzles, Cross(ed)Words and Joining-The-Dots for a rainy weekend >>> see the following link for the latest:
http://www.statesman.com/life/books/ransom-center-restricts-part-of-wallace-archive-1830220.html
Reply 0
Post a Comment

78392 0

You must be logged-in to post a comment.
Login To Your Account
About| Contact| Advertise

Follow @awl on Twitter
Get the RSS feed
Most Viewed
Most Commented
o "Ruin Porn" And Detroit
o Why Yoga Can Be So Irritating
o Das Racist: "We're Not Racist"
o Everything I Ate At The Minnesota State Fair
o Cookbooks As Literature
o
Gawker Media Is A Tech Company 54
o
Everything I Ate At The Minnesota State Fair 45
o
When 9/11 Is Your Birthday 45
o
Loser Brit Gays Allowed to Donate Blood 43
o
Douglas Rushkoff: Why Do We Want "Jobs" Anyway? 42
Contributors
John Ore Everything I Ate At The Minnesota State Fair

Abe Sauer The Police Are Now Paul Ryan's Private Security Force

Laura Griffin An Incomplete Digest Of Programs That Will Be On TV This Weekend, In Alphabetical
Order

Dave Bry Lana Del Rey, "Blue Jeans"

Emerson Beyer Cheap, Cheerful Flowers For Your Next Party

See all contributors

Staff
Editors Alex Balk and Choire Sicha Managing Editor Carrie Frye Publisher John Shankman
About| Contact| Advertise| Legal| RSS

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Struggle with Depression

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Descrição original:

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Struggle with Depression

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library

Você também pode gostar