Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

The full-length biography grown from Max's 2009 New Yorker piece (dtmax-2009-the-unfinished), written with the Ransom Center archive, Pietsch's editorial correspondence, and interviews with nearly everyone in the IJ orbit (Pietsch, Nadell, Howard, Moore, Costello, Karr, Franzen, "Big Craig" — the Gately model — and Wallace's Granada House and Bloomington recovery circles). For this archive it is the definitive month-by-month account of IJ's composition (1986 false starts → 1991–92 breakthrough → 1993 partial delivery → 1994–95 editing war) and the best documentation of the real people and places behind Ennet House, Gately, Avril, and Joelle. Chapters 5 ("Please Don't Give Up on Me") and 6 ("Unalone and Unstressed") are the core IJ chapters; chapter 7 covers reception/legacy.

Key claims

Genesis and false starts (chs. 3–5)

• Pieces of IJ date to 1986: Wallace's Sept 1986 Yaddo application already names a novel-in-progress titled Infinite Jest (to "try to determine just where and why the stories leave off and the novel begins") — so the Hamlet/ghost frame and presumably the Incandenzas predate Arizona's end (ch. 5).
• In fall 1986 Gale Walden found draft pages under Wallace's bed bearing her sister Joelle's name — Wallace described it as "fiction about a terrorist organization in Canada"; Max identifies it as the start of the Marathe/Steeply dialogues, set on mountains like the ones Wallace and Walden hiked outside Tucson (ch. 5). So Joelle's name comes from Walden's sister; the character's later substance comes from Karr (ch. 6).
• To Marshall Boswell (letter, May 2002): "I started IJ or somethin' like it several times. '86, '88, '89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in '91–'92 all of a sudden it did" (ch. 5, n.15).
• An early two-page draft titled "What Are You Exactly" survives: Hal — called "David" — visits the "professional conversationalist" who is his father in disguise (ch. 5, n.17). This scene (IJ 27–31) stood at the book's opening "for so long" until the Year of Glad scene replaced it (ch. 6) — directly confirming moore-first-draft-ij.
• The Wardine section began as a stand-alone Arizona character sketch Wallace called "Las Meninas" (ch. 5, n.16). The name "Incandenza" appears on a character list scrawled on the title page of Erotic Communications, used for his Somerville pornography research (ch. 5, n.18).
• Three styles = three strands: Amherst comic voice → Incandenza family; Arizona postmodernism → O.N.A.N./separatist dystopia; Boston "single-entendre" conversion → Gately/Ennet House (ch. 5).

The lived substrate: McLean, Granada House, recovery (ch. 5)

• Nov 1989: four weeks at McLean (Appleton House, the addicts' unit); staff told the 27-year-old he'd be dead by 30 if he kept using. Discharged against his Harvard plans to Granada House, on the Brighton Marine Hospital grounds — the "seven moons orbiting a dead planet" compound of Ennet House. Director Deb Larson (blonde, limping from a drunken fall) is fictionalized with affection as Pat Montesian (ch. 5 and n.2).
• Don Gately's model is "Big Craig", a Granada House supervisor/cook: North Shore burglar and Demerol addict, mid-twenties, "sober and just huge"; friends closed elevator doors on his head for fun as a teen (detail kept in IJ). He first met Wallace by throwing his bag off the bunk. Wallace drafted a scene around him within months of arriving. Big Craig also had his wisdom teeth out with only Novocaine — seed of the hospital-bed refusal of narcotics (ch. 5, nn.5, 13). On reading the novel: "Holy crap! The bastard was just looking for information" (ch. 6, n.10).
• Wallace's own April 1991 softball ankle injury — refusing painkillers took "every shred of will I've got" — is the autobiographical kernel of Gately's "Abiding" scene, though "[r]eal life was not so heroic" (ch. 5).
• Geoffrey Day's "Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off" is how the other residents saw Wallace himself; Kate Gompert's psych-ward scenes draw on his Newton-Wellesley hospitalization (Nov 1991, suicidal depression, Nardil dose increased). Kate Gompert is the real name of a junior-circuit tennis player who later sued Wallace unsuccessfully for libel (ch. 5).
• The "shunt" in Gately's burglary scenes came from a single hour-long interview with a retired burglary detective Costello found him; Wallace also canvassed Boston locksmiths claiming to be "a postmodern novelist doing research on how to disarm a burglar alarm system" (ch. 5 and n.23).
• After publication Wallace systematically dissembled about his recovery history ("I was never a member — I was a voyeur," Newsweek; "I hung out" at three of Boston's twelve halfway houses) because anonymity rules made the truth unusable (ch. 5, n.4; ch. 6).

Mary Karr and Joelle/Madame Psychosis (chs. 5–6)

• Far darker than the 2009 piece: Wallace got a tattoo of Karr's name and a heart; in Feb 1992 he tried to buy a gun from an ex-con in his recovery program, planning to shoot Karr's husband ("one of the scariest days of my life"; to Larson: "I now know what obsession can make people capable of" — added in longhand — "at least of wanting to do"). He later tried to push Karr from a moving car and threw a coffee table at her (chs. 5–6).
• Margin note in one of his books: "The key to '92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were)" (ch. 5). E Unibus Pluram is dedicated to "M. M. Karr," "his other fount of sincerity."
• Karr's aesthetic pressure shaped the book: she panned Girl with Curious Hair ("His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things") and when he defended scenes in IJ as "cool" she snapped "that's what my fucking five year old says about Spiderman" (ch. 5 and n.11).
• May 1995: Karr telephoned Pietsch to warn that many Ennet House scenes were lifted from confidential Granada House/AA talk. Wallace changed names and details and added the "strongly worded but evasive denial" on the copyright page (ch. 6) — a late, externally forced layer of revision invisible to Moore's collation.
• Joelle Van Dyne in her recovery aspects is Karr brought into the book (ch. 6); Max also reads Joelle's "Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents" as a Karr-sourced view of Wallace (ch. 5, n.30).

Avril, the family, and Hal (chs. 1, 6)

• Avril is Sally Wallace as therapy revealed her to him: the Militant Grammarians campaign ("Ten items or less") is literally his mother's; in therapy he became convinced she had been abused by her father and that her denial taught him his own (she might just as well have taught him "how to bartend and de-seed dope"). The dedication "For F. P. Foster: R.I.P." encodes condemnation of his grandfather Fenton Foster — an earlier draft read "For Fenton Foster RIP, (P) [Rest in Peace (Please!)]" (ch. 6). He went ~5 years estranged from his mother during composition; he hired Amy as a test-drive copyeditor; his mother read the MS and was "deeply upset" despite his denials (ch. 6 and n.16).
• The Avril–Orin incest suggestion and the cheerleader-uniform scene were what he most feared his mother seeing (ch. 6). Orin's "fetish for conquering young mothers" was Wallace's own phrase for himself (ch. 7, n.2).
• Hal's Year-of-Glad breakdown transposes Wallace's own panic at his Oberlin admissions interview (he threw up) (ch. 1); Hal's pot secrecy ("as attached to the secrecy as he was to getting high") is Wallace's bathroom-exhaust-fan routine (ch. 1); the Battle of the Books and the Stendhal-for-lawn-mowing trade also migrated into Hal (ch. 1 and n.2).

Composition and editing timeline (chs. 5–6) — the documentary spine

• Spring 1992: 250 pages + proposal to Nadell; cover letter: "structurally it's not much like any other novels I've seen… this thing proceeds according to something more like a broad arc than a Freytagian triangle," footnotes "just brutal." Howard (Norton) could offer only $35k; Pietsch bought it for Little, Brown in June 1992 for $80k ("more than I want to breathe").
• May 1993: Wallace mails ~750 pages / first 400,000 words, with narrow margins and tiny font to disguise length; Pietsch "pulled out a calculator", projected 1,200+ pages. Pietsch's first letter: the "novel made up out of shards" reading, plus the surfacing "'I' who may be the one trying to put everything together" (an early outside witness for the Hal-as-narrator question). He pushed to cut and doubted the "ornately bizarre-to-goofy superstructure" of the Quebecois plot: "the dog is awfully shaggy already."
• Wallace's response over 1994 was to expand the "interAmerican huggermugger," believing the book needed it for his "seat at the table with Pynchon" — and to write the Year of Glad opening only in early 1994, replacing the professional-conversationalist opening. The new frame deliberately multiplied the explanations for Hal's state (DMZ, marijuana detox, having seen the Entertainment): "Hints for all three of these plot twists are in the text," and Wallace "was never going to let the reader settle on one" (ch. 6).
• Jan 1994 letter to Pietsch proposes "an almost Artaud-ish blackout-type ending… not so much anticlimactic as aclimactic?", citing "themes of stasis, annulation, paralysis, undecidability, clarification of questions > solutions to questions" (ch. 6).
• Spring 1994: the endnotes pitched as a length solution he'd "fight w/all 20 claws to preserve" (full five-point rationale quoted; same letter as in the 2009 piece). Pietsch initially counter-offered footnotes, came around by Dec 1994 (less "academic and daunting"), and floated packaging the book with a bookmark.
• Late June 1994: full MS delivered, ~750,000 words, brought to New York "handcuffed to a wrist." Oct 1994 Pietsch letter objects to the ending: "Hundreds of pages of killer cartridges and stalking Canadians… all those dingleberries in the air — and we don't get to find out who or how or why?" On second read (Dec 1994) he capitulates: "Hal's breakdown… is approaching clearly enough that I finished the book guessing how he got from here to there…. The revelation that Hal's known all along of his mom's many affairs seems like a key to it all… I'm assuming now that this part of the story isn't resolved more clearly… because Hal's still avoiding it."
• Feb 1995: Wallace's sixteen-page reply to hundreds of cut suggestions — "maybe I have an arrogance problem — I think I'd presumed… it was OK to make a reader read the book twice" — including the canonical ending defense: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin." His markup code: circle = "total acquiescence to demand", dash = "bared teeth", "dickering", or a cut to be discussed by phone. Favored evasions: condense instead of cut, or move material into the endnotes, "where some of his favorite passages went to make their last stand" (ch. 6).
• May–June 1995: Pietsch's "editorial ecstasy… the veil lifted," then ten days later: "I hadn't actually edited the manuscript yet… This is my best editing, David," and a third round on the first 500 pages. To DeLillo, Wallace worried cutting for commercial reasons "seems slutty"; DeLillo's advice (as Wallace relayed it): when "you feel incipient bladder tumors at the thought of cutting something don't cut it." He planned to cut "40% of what they ask and mak[e] the font slightly smaller and hop[e] to fool them" (ch. 6).
• The Orin ending was a requested insertion: Pietsch "asked for one clarification… some indication of the fate of Orin". Wallace faxed the tumbler-and-roaches scene on June 11, 1995 ("Potential insertion into page 1229 about which I'm not exactly qualmless") — mirroring the fate Orin inflicted on the roaches in his bathroom (ch. 6).
• "A Failed Entertainment" died at Pietsch's hand: he refused to put it on a book "people were supposed to buy" because "it's not," and it "quietly disappeared from the manuscript" (ch. 6).
• The Sierpinski-gasket structure claim (recursive, nested, self-similar) is Max's gloss of Wallace's own statements; cf. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach "'braid' or 'fugue'" shape Costello remembers him invoking (ch. 2, n.6). Eschaton's debt to DeLillo's End Zone worried Wallace enough that his first contact with DeLillo was to ask about it; DeLillo absolved him (ch. 5, n.32).
• To Markson, post-publication: "the fucker's cut by 600 pages from the first version, and though many of the cuts (editor-inspired) made the thing better, it fucked up a certain watertightness that the mastodon-size first version had, I think" (ch. 6) — Wallace's own (likely inflated) cut count, vs. Pietsch's ~250 pages and Moore's ~40 (see Cross-references).

Publication, reception, legacy (chs. 6–7)

• Little, Brown's dare-marketing: teaser postcards to 4,000 recipients revealing the title in stages, "Just imagine what they'll say about his masterpiece"; Wallace begged them to stop ("I'm 33 years old; I don't have a 'masterpiece'… What if nobody buys it?"). Six reprints/45,000 copies during the tour; 150,000 sold by 2006. Gus Van Sant wanted to option it; a friend reassured Wallace "no one could ever make a movie from that novel" (chs. 6–7).
• Readers phoned Little, Brown with ending theories; Pietsch compared it to finishing Gravity's Rainbow and needing "to knock brains with" someone (ch. 6).
• Two more authorial ending statements beyond the Pietsch letter (ch. 6, n.19): Wallace praised Stanford undergrad Christopher Hager's thesis reading (the resolution "sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper," the novel as a satellite dish focusing voices on a resolution it never touches), and told a WORD e-zine chat (May 1996): "there is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you."
• Max on YDAU: "most Wallace researchers agree" it's 2009, with "one bit of data that points to 2011, possibly an error, possibly a deliberately misleading clue" (ch. 6, n.1) — cf. ij-chronology-subsidized-time.
• The book is sourced from the Ransom Center papers, Pietsch's files, and the Howling Fantods community's shared letters (Acknowledgments) — the letter-quotes have archival backing the 2009 piece could only sample.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the documentary substrate of Ennet House, AA voice, "the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers"); irony vs. sincerity (the Granada House → E Unibus Pluram → IJ conversion arc, the Leyner confrontation at Syracuse); entertainment and spectation (the samizdat as "entertainment neutron bomb"; his horror at IJ itself becoming hype, "the Most Photographed Barn"); family/Avril; the ending (three distinct authorial defenses); composition/form (endnotes, Sierpinski gasket, "broad arc not Freytagian triangle").

Cross-references

• Confirms Moore (moore-first-draft-ij) on the big points: the professional-conversationalist scene was the original opening and the Year-of-Glad frame is a post-1993 addition (Max dates it early 1994); the Quebec/AFR "huggermugger" was substantially expanded after Pietsch's 1993 objections — matching Moore's finding that the Marathe/Steeply Tucson dialogues and most AFR material are absent from the 1993 draft (though Max shows the Marathe/Steeply germ goes back to 1986); the aclimactic ending was argued for, not stumbled into; endnotes were a 1994 length-management invention and a refuge for material Pietsch wanted cut (Moore: "maybe half of the endnotes" added after 1993). Max also confirms Moore's role: Wallace sent Moore the MS in fall 1993 and preferred his cut list ("80% different from Little Brown's, meaning I get to go with my gut more").
• Tension on how much was cut: Moore counts only ~40 pages cut from the Dec 1993 draft (and 200+ added); Pietsch (infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij) says ~250 MS pages; Wallace told Markson 600 pages. Max's narrative reconciles more than it contradicts: the heavy cutting happened in the 1994–95 rounds after Moore's snapshot, against a ~750,000-word full draft, and much of it was condensation or relocation into endnotes rather than deletion — while Wallace simultaneously kept "adding back in more than he had cut". Wallace's "600" is best read as self-dramatization; Moore's "publisher cut 300-400 pages" legend-busting stands for the 1993 draft but understates the later rounds.
• Minor discrepancy with Pietsch's account: Pietsch's Infinite Summer essay says ~150 opening pages came in on submission in April 1992; Max (from the same archive) says 250 pages went to Nadell/Howard that April. Max also shows the famous "5000 words of theoretico-structural argument" line comes from the Feb 1995 sixteen-page cut-negotiation letter — Pietsch's essay quotes it as a page-785ff margin note; same artifact, different framing.
• Extends dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — see final-message summary; the article's claims all reappear with fuller quotation and dates, none retracted.
• Ending debate: the WORD chat "parallel lines" quote and Pietsch's Dec 1994 "Hal's known all along of his mom's many affairs" reading belong in the-ending; cf. swartz-ij-ending, neocities-ending-explained, infinite-tasks-endings-ii. Note Max's three-explanations framing of Hal (DMZ / detox / the Entertainment) matches the answer Wallace gave a 2004 Philadelphia reading-Q&A questioner — that a well-set-up book leaves somewhere between three and five plausible explanations (video-reading-soul-smithy-philadelphia).
• Hal-as-narrator: Pietsch's 1993 "'I' who may be the one trying to put everything together" complements Moore's MS first-person evidence.
• Biographical-source notes: mccaffery-1993-interview (Max dates the interview April 1991 and reads it as mid-blockage); miller-1996-salon-interview ("recovering smart aleck"); lipsky-becoming-yourself (Max retells the Rolling Stone visit, including the "Rolling Stone was essentially TV anyway" rationale); e-unibus-pluram (the essay's composition history — Harper's commission, Karr dedication, Leyner attack — is ch. 5); silverblatt-bookworm-1996 (Silverblatt called Pietsch asking to read the outtakes).
• Characters/scenes: Gately (Big Craig, the Abiding scene, the toothbrush B&E read at Swarthmore); Pat Montesian (Deb Larson); Joelle (Walden's sister's name + Karr); Avril (Sally Wallace, Militant Grammarians, F.P. Foster dedication); Kate Gompert (real name, libel suit); Erdedy ("Three Protrusions," Grand Street 1992 — the first published IJ excerpt); Eschaton (End Zone anxiety; the Mean Value Theorem endnote he refused to lose); Lyle (Max applies the Lyle description to Wallace's own listening); crime jazz (the Arlington roommate's Tito Puente records); the cover (the ETA waiting-room "fluffy cumuli" wallpaper; Wallace: "identical to the passenger safety card on American Airlines flights").

Notable passages

"The key to '92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were)." — Wallace, margin note (ch. 5)

"It's a novel made up out of shards, almost as if the story were something broken that someone is picking up the pieces of…. [O]ccasionally there surfaces through the stories an 'I' who may be the one trying to put everything together." — Pietsch's first response to the partial MS, 1993 (ch. 6)

"Hundreds of pages of killer cartridges and stalking Canadians… and moving furniture and Avril's affairs and James's suicide — all those dingleberries in the air — and we don't get to find out who or how or why?" — Pietsch on the ending, Oct 1994 (ch. 6)

"[T]here is an ending as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an 'end' can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book's failed for you." — Wallace, WORD e-zine chat, May 1996 (ch. 6, n.19)

"[T]he fucker's cut by 600 pages from the first version, and though many of the cuts (editor-inspired) made the thing better, it fucked up a certain watertightness that the mastodon-size first version had, I think." — Wallace to David Markson (ch. 6)

"I guess maybe I have an arrogance problem — I think I'd presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice." — Wallace to Pietsch, Feb 1995 (ch. 6)

"Holy crap! The bastard was just looking for information." — "Big Craig", the Gately model, on reading the novel (ch. 6, n.10)