Amy Wallace Havens on her brother — unedited radio interview (2009): the goofball brother, the first depression, and proofreading Infinite Jest by mail

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TL;DR

A rare, unguarded sister's-eye interview: roughly forty minutes of raw session tape in which Amy Wallace Havens describes the brother behind the dark-genius image — the family comedian, the tormenting-and-beloved older sibling, the tennis instructor, the volatile and secretive teenager whose first depressive collapse sent him home from college — and, most valuably for readers of Infinite Jest, recalls being paid by her brother to proofread the novel's manuscript as he mailed it to her in enormous envelopes, and lobbying him unsuccessfully to drop the endnotes. The interview advances no theories about the novel; its value is firsthand biographical testimony from the person the book's first-novel predecessor was dedicated to.

Key claims

Music: he loved Pearl Jam, Madness, and the Flaming Lips, and one summer played a Fun Boy Three cover of a Go-Go's song over and over; the U2 t-shirt he famously wore to meet his editor was a gift Amy brought back from Australia, worn until it fell apart. [00:00–00:02]
Portrait: talking to him felt like meeting someone just out of a space capsule — everything registered as slightly foreign; he took a book to parties, never used ATMs, wore only 100% cotton, refused to be uncomfortable, and was the best listener she has ever met, collecting scraps of other people's stories from anywhere. [00:02–00:04]
The top knot: a hair phase roughly a decade before the interview that family and friends had to gently talk him out of; he washed his hair with bar soap and was suspicious of what he saw as the shampoo game, despite living at the time with a cosmetologist. [00:04–00:05]
Big brother: benevolently sadistic — he knew every button; he would ruin her beloved Partridge Family episodes with a killer David Cassidy impression, and on boring winter days would become two invented characters at once — Captain Phlegm, whose sidekick answered to Goat Bile — roles she begged in vain to share. [00:05–00:08]
Family: at the dinner table he talked with the academic parents as a peer while Amy pushed peas around her plate; the family had a private idiolect from their mother (a comforter was a puff; you stirred your stumps in the morning) that the children only slowly realized was not standard English; the father's humor was dry and rare and therefore devastating. Amy reads David as the distillation of both parents: the mother's delight in language, the father's capacity for abstract thought. [00:08, 00:12–00:14]
Tennis and the Midwest: before tennis he played on a dairy-sponsored Little League team that held a local record for shutouts against it; tennis lessons at the Urbana Park District revealed real talent, and by sixteen his summer job was teaching tennis while fourteen-year-old Amy detasseled corn from 5 a.m. — a contrast he breezily rubbed in. [00:09–00:10]
High school: he moved easily between the jocks and what she calls the scruffy flannel pot-smoking crowd — he was, she says plainly, a quite serious pothead across junior high and high school, and more at ease with that group. The period word for an unkempt kid was grit, not the dirt bomb of his later self-description; she suspects he softened the word so old classmates reading it wouldn't feel bad. [00:10–00:12]
First depression: he left for college seemingly strong, then came home unexpectedly in the middle of his sophomore year, stunning a family that had no idea what he was struggling with; as a teenager he had been very volatile, very moody, and very secretive, with small signs from his senior year of high school. She attributes the collapse to homesickness compounded by perfectionism and self-imposed expectations. It was, she says, when the two of them first really began talking: he would pick her up from school and describe the loneliness, asking how people manage ordinary functioning — how she could serve an ice-cream customer without the urge to flee out the back. Therapy and medication brought marked improvement. [00:14–00:19]
Writing timeline (her account): fame arrived early and did not help — he was startled by it and felt more pressure; he regarded Girl with Curious Hair as a pretty good college thesis rather than a great book and feared it would be the only one he'd publish. [00:19–00:21]
Infinite Jest, from inside the family: she believes he was very proud of the novel though he always deflected; writing it was harrowing and took a very long time and a great deal out of him. He wrote it longhand and typed it himself. He paid Amy to proofread the manuscript, mailing it in enormous envelopes in irregular bursts of production — the only time she had that clear a view of a project in progress, since he otherwise never announced projects (everything was a thing I'm trying to do) or publications. She suspects the errors she found were bones he threw her on purpose. [00:21–00:24]
The endnotes argument: she took him to task over the footnotes — telling him it was nuts, that nobody wants to read that tiny type — and, as she notes wryly, did not prevail; she suspects her objection made him do it all the more. [00:24]
Marriage: Karen understood him on every level and loved how he dressed; most of his life he had felt less than grown-up, and marrying her soothed that; a friend reported monthly breakfasts at which David asked for husband pointers. Her emblematic image: Karen playing shark in the swimming pool — hands as a fin — attacking a girlishly squealing David, whose shark phobia dated to Jaws-era childhood torments he had himself inflicted on Amy at Lake Champlain. [00:25–00:28]
The end: she affirms the reported picture of a brave person who endured what felt unendurable; she was never for a minute angry at him, because she knew how hard he tried. The condolence letters that poured in — starting pardon the intrusion — were a comfort, not an intrusion. [00:28–00:31]
The Volkswagen Rabbit story: a mid-1980s cross-country drive from Illinois to Tucson, his computer in a trailer he feared the Texas heat would damage, strict departure rules, a strictly observed 55 mph; when the boom box batteries died he spent two hundred miles trying to teach his tone-deaf sister to sing harmony rather than stop the car, then apologized with a Hostess cupcake. She offers it as David in a nutshell: fussy conviction in the teeth of all evidence. He had a lovely singing voice and had sung in the Amherst glee club — she adds, as a tidbit, alongside Prince Albert of Monaco. [00:32–00:36]
His voice: soft and distinctive; his phone greeting to her — a pet shortening of her name — still surfaces in her head, and she counts the memories as things she will never regret. [00:36–00:37]

Themes

Family and sibling communication (the private idiolect, the talking-that-began-with-the-first-collapse); depression rendered from the outside — what a family sees and doesn't see; tennis and the Midwest as formation; humor as the household currency; the labor and secrecy of composition.

Cross-references

ttbook-dfw-remembrance-2009 — the aired program this session tape was recorded for: the broadcast uses a cut of this interview, and its credits resolve this tape's unnamed interviewer as Anne Strainchamps.
dtmax-every-love-story — the biography independently records the proofreading arrangement (Amy as a hired test-drive copyeditor for IJ); this interview is the firsthand version, with the mailed-envelopes texture and the endnotes argument the biography doesn't carry.
bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 — Amy again, two years later, guiding the BBC around Champaign: the geometry-of-the-flatlands and tornado material there complements the domestic portrait here.
asft-derivative-sport — the Midwest, tennis, and wind in Wallace's own voice; her detasseling-vs-teaching contrast is the sibling's-eye view of the same courts.
silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — his own account of IJ's composition and revision, against her harrowing-process testimony.
girl-with-curious-hair — the collection he privately rated a pretty good college thesis.