The Making of Infinite Jest — Bonnie Nadell & Michael Pietsch in conversation (McNally Editions)

source

TL;DR

A new (March 2026) agent-and-editor oral history of IJ's making: DFW's agent Bonnie Nadell and editor Michael Pietsch in conversation at McNally Jackson's "Infinite Jest Fest" book club, moderated by Sarah McNally — an edited transcript published by McNally Editions. The Nadell testimony is the rare half: how a "baby agent" at Fred Hill acquired the 24-year-old Wallace off a slush-mail "diachronic chapter" of Broom, the $75,000 health-insurance ask that set IJ's advance negotiation, Wallace's no-technology working habits (dial-up, no cell phone, long middle-of-the-night voicemails), and the discovery of the Pale King pages after his death. The Pietsch half delivers a load-bearing ij-cuts datum: Pietsch attributes the big-cut figure to Wallace himself — "He said at one point that I cut 500 pages. That’s a great exaggeration. I probably suggested cutting about 250 pages." — the editor-side corroboration of the archive's author-origin rider on the 300–500-pages myth. Plus: no editing until the entire manuscript was in hand; the as-small-as-it-could-be-and-still-be-itself compact; the refused cut of the "real math" proof; Nadell's 600,000-word final-manuscript figure (a new, unreconciled number for the cut-count family); and Pietsch's Pale King discovery narrative (five typed chapters on the desk, hundreds of files, "no outline").

Key claims

Acquisition (Nadell). As a new agent with Fred Hill in San Francisco — "a baby agent," no clients, reading the mail — she received "a letter and a chapter from David Foster Wallace, who was then a MFA student at the University of Arizona in Tucson." His query said "he was submitting a diachronic chapter"; she had to look the word up. The submission was a chapter from the middle of The Broom of the System, "his senior thesis at Amherst," continued at Arizona. "David was 24 and I was 25, which meant that we really started out together. The Broom of the System was the first book I sold as an agent." The only editor who shared her love of it was Gerry Howard at Viking Penguin.
Mid-'80s context. "The mid-’80s of publishing was very much about minimalist writing. David’s writing was the complete opposite. It was huge and sprawling and confusing."
Broom did well; Girl with Curious Hair did not. Broom was "reviewed on the front page of a bunch of papers"; on GWCH Nadell flatly corrects McNally's stage assumption that it was huge: "No, it was not huge" — "it sold very few copies around the time it was published." (GWCH went to Norton "because we followed Gerry Howard when he moved.")
The IJ deal (Nadell). She sent "the partial manuscript of Infinite Jest to a number of editors, some of whom loved it." Wallace's ask, verbatim as she recalls it: "This is gonna take me a long time. I have to pay for health insurance. Could you get me, like, $75,000?" (Broom had sold "for around $25,000.") Pietsch, already a friend, "said he wanted to do this book 'more than he wanted to breathe.' I still remember that, 30 years later."
Manuscript size (Nadell): "It ended up being a 600,000-word manuscript when David was done, but we didn’t sign a contract for 600,000 words. I think we signed a contract for a normal amount of pages."
Editing method (Pietsch). Against the questioner's premise that Wallace "famously submitted 150 pages at a time" so the editor lacked a full view: "I didn’t actually do any editing until I had the entire manuscript in my hands. I read it in pieces, as he sent it in pieces. Then once I had read it all the way through, I sent him a bunch of notes—in chunks—as I went."
The compact and the cut figure (Pietsch). "We agreed that I would work with him to make it as small as it could be and still be itself. He said at one point that I cut 500 pages. That’s a great exaggeration. I probably suggested cutting about 250 pages. An editor only suggests—if anything is not in the book, it’s because in the end he didn’t want it there."
A refused cut — the math proof. "there’s a really long math proof at one point in the book. I said, 'David, there are like four people in the world who will understand this,' and he said, 'Yeah, but this is real math, and I want the people reading this to understand that I know real math.'"
Editing IJ ate the calendar (Pietsch). "If you’re editing a book like Infinite Jest, it takes up massive, massive pieces of your time"; "An editor’s life is nights and weekends; you have a day job at the office" (with the envious To Kill a Mockingbird full-time-editor contrast).
First encounter with the text (Pietsch). "I felt I was in the presence of a master. I thought, 'This is a work of astounding genius.'" — the ideas, characters, comedy/drama mixture, "feeling miserable in the face of apparent plenty, and feeling bad about feeling miserable." On rereading recently: "I realized it is really hard. But it’s worth it."
Was it planned? (Nadell). "I’m sure there was a plan. It’s all about fractals." — immediately hedged: she's "terrible at math," deferred when told "Oh, it’s fractals!"; "I never saw an outline, but I think all the various characters were probably planned out very deliberately."
Working habits (Nadell). "David was someone who did not use technology. This is a person who had dial-up. No cell phone. He would leave really long messages in the middle of the night because he would not want to talk to someone but wanted to convey information." (Done with her and "a bunch of his magazine editors.")
Composition window (Nadell, as she tells it): "He worked on Infinite Jest for about four years. It was published in ’96 and he started writing it in ’92. He was teaching in between, because he still had to earn a living." (The archive's record has IJ named at Yaddo in 1986 with false starts '86/'88/'89.)
The cruise essay / magazine career (Nadell). The Harper's cruise essay came out in the December issue right around IJ's publication; "In the new year, all these magazines wanted him to write for them." Vanity Fair asked for the Oscars — "He said, 'Absolutely not.'" On Federer/Wimbledon: "he got to meet Roger Federer, whom he worshipped"; he'd call her fumbling among press professionals ("I’m on the bus with the political reporters").
After IJ. "But fiction was always much harder for him than nonfiction. Fiction was his first love. Figuring out what to do after Infinite Jest haunted him. I mean, that’s what haunted him for years."
The Pale King discovery (Pietsch). After the death, Bonnie called about pages left behind; he had been working "in secret" (Nadell knew of the advanced accounting class, the IRS/tax-law subject). "he left on his desk a stack of pages; it was five chapters from this book," "beautifully typed and printed out," "There was a light shining on the stack of pages." Karen Green "felt certain that David wanted this book to be somehow assembled and published." The office held "hundreds of files of chapters, multiple drafts of the same chapter, some in handwritten notebooks, some on old floppy disks"; "There were files with that title, but no outline." Pietsch spent "the next year reading them, rereading them, making an outline, making a spreadsheet to keep track of various drafts," seeking a satisfying sequence. "Sarah published one of those chapters on its own as a novella, titled Something to Do with Paying Attention."
The made-up IRS detail (Nadell). The TPK conceit that IRS agents' social security numbers "all start with a nine": "Turns out, it’s completely made up. But we Michael and I both thought, 'That seems accurate, sure.'" [sic — the garbled "we Michael and I" is the source's own text]
Grief timeline (Nadell). "He died in 2008, so time has passed and unfortunately I don’t hear his voice anymore."
Event color. Nearly 300 people tried to sign up for McNally's Long-Book Book Club, scaled into monthly "Infinite Jest Fest"; Sarah McNally's on-stage awe: "You could study it for the rest of your life and never find the structure behind it."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The cuts were editor-suggested, author-controlled, and far smaller than the circulating figures — and the big number came from Wallace himself

Crux: ij-cuts
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [editor] Pietsch, 2026: "He said at one point that I cut 500 pages. That’s a great exaggeration. I probably suggested cutting about 250 pages." — the 500-page claim attributed to Wallace, the editor's own figure ~250 suggested
- [editor] "An editor only suggests—if anything is not in the book, it’s because in the end he didn’t want it there." — author-control doctrine, same as his Infinite Summer and IW-2016 tellings
- [editor] the compact: "make it as small as it could be and still be itself"
- [editor] method: "I didn’t actually do any editing until I had the entire manuscript in my hands" — read in pieces as sent, then notes "in chunks"; the questioner's submitted-150-pages-at-a-time premise absorbed, not disputed
- [editor] the refused math-proof cut ("this is real math") — a concrete what-was-NOT-cut exhibit, the author winning a cut negotiation on verisimilitude-of-competence grounds
- [agent] Nadell: "It ended up being a 600,000-word manuscript when David was done" — a new word-count figure, unreconciled with the archive's ~750k full-delivery figure
Notes: Direct 2026 editor-mouth corroboration of the theory record's favored verdict (scope-preserving cuts; the 300–500 folklore author-voiced). The speak-1996 author-origin rider (Wallace's own tour talk of "cut by 400 pages or so" / 400–500) gains its editor-side counterpart: Pietsch names Wallace as the source of the 500 figure and calls it "a great exaggeration." Watch the suggest/accept slippage across Pietsch's own tellings: here ~250 pages suggested; infinite-summer has Wallace accepting cuts of "around 250 manuscript pages"; IW-2016 has "around 150 pages were cut" (~75k words). Reconcilable as suggested-vs-accepted, but no source does the arithmetic — cite each as written.

THEORY: The Pale King was left with drafts and files but no outline; the published sequence is Pietsch's construction

Crux: pale-king-incompletion
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [editor] the desk stack: "it was five chapters from this book," not continuous, "beautifully typed and printed out"; "There was a light shining on the stack of pages."
- [editor] "hundreds of files of chapters, multiple drafts of the same chapter, some in handwritten notebooks, some on old floppy disks"; "There were files with that title, but no outline. Nothing to tell you what he intended it to be"
- [editor] the assembly year: "reading them, rereading them, making an outline, making a spreadsheet to keep track of various drafts," then "trying to find a sequence that seemed like it delivered the pleasures and ideas of this book in a way that would be satisfying to readers"
- [secondary] Karen Green's certainty (as relayed by Pietsch) that David wanted the book "somehow assembled and published"
- [agent] Nadell's secrecy texture: the advanced accounting class, the IRS/tax-law subject, and the made-up SSN-starts-with-nine detail both she and Pietsch believed ("Turns out, it’s completely made up.")
Notes: Oeuvre-scoped crux; the no-outline datum is the load-bearing bit and matches the assembled-not-authored consensus (Treisman's pieces-sewn-together characterization in the NYer Festival panel note — ASR paraphrase there, so no quotation). The five-chapters-on-the-desk specific is this source's contribution — record as testimony; other Pietsch accounts describe the desk stack differently (do not harmonize without checking his TPK Editor's Note). McNally Editions' own novella printing of "Something to Do with Paying Attention" is confirmed here from the publisher's stage.

THEORY: IJ was deliberately planned/fractal — agent's belief, secondhand

Crux: annular-structure
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [agent] Nadell: "I’m sure there was a plan. It’s all about fractals." — immediately self-undercut: she is "terrible at math" and assented when someone said "Oh, it’s fractals!"; "I never saw an outline, but I think all the various characters were probably planned out very deliberately."
Notes: Zero independent structural weight — deferential, secondhand, and she never saw an outline. Consistent with the fractal-recursion baseline (adjudicated favored at baseline description only); do NOT cite as planning evidence. Sarah McNally's you-could-never-find-the-structure awe is reception color on the same point.

Themes

Composition and editing history above all (acquisition → advance → delivery → cuts → publication); agenting and the economics of literary careers ($25k Broom, the $75k health-insurance ask, magazines-mattered-a-lot); biography/working habits (no technology, night voicemails, politeness, the bandana); posthumous stewardship (the Pale King discovery and assembly); the fiction-vs-nonfiction split (fiction harder, first love, post-IJ haunting); reception (Infinite Jest Fest's ~300 sign-ups as 2026 anniversary-wave evidence).

Cross-references

infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij — Pietsch's 2009 written account; carries the "around 250 manuscript pages" accepted-cuts figure this conversation's "probably suggested cutting about 250 pages" must be read against.
iw-pietsch-interview-2016-excerpt — same witness, 2016: "around 150 pages were cut" (~75k words), Max's 250k "wildly overstated," no cut sections at the Ransom Center (digested this same batch).
The archive's cut-count table (in the manuscript-differences record) — this source adds the Wallace-said-500 attribution and Nadell's 600k-word figure to that question.
nyer-festival-rereading-dfw — the editing-testimony family: Treisman's Grand Street house-of-cards account of mid-90s Wallace-being-edited; also the Pale King assembled-posthumously-by-Pietsch consensus this source narrates from inside.
broom-of-the-system and girl-with-curious-hair — the two pre-IJ books whose sale/reception Nadell testifies to here (Broom front-page reviews; GWCH "sold very few copies").
asft-cruise-essay — the cruise essay whose December-issue Harper's landing Nadell describes as the magazine-career detonator.
kelley-whats-so-funny-about-ij — the Paris Review essay this transcript's preamble quotes (litbro-baggage line); Kelley attended the January Fest session (digested this same batch).

Accuracy notes

The transcript is explicitly "an edited transcript": its quotes are edited-for-print speech, not verbatim audio, and the transcript's own text misspells its subject's surname ("Piestch") six times against four correct spellings — quotes in this note use the correct spelling. A visible editing garble ("But we Michael and I both thought") and "hold up though time" (for "through time") survive in the source text.

Notable passages

"He said at one point that I cut 500 pages. That’s a great exaggeration. I probably suggested cutting about 250 pages." (Pietsch)
"An editor only suggests—if anything is not in the book, it’s because in the end he didn’t want it there." (Pietsch)
"Yeah, but this is real math, and I want the people reading this to understand that I know real math." (Wallace, as recalled by Pietsch)
"more than he wanted to breathe" (Pietsch's acquisition-era vow, as recalled by Nadell)
"It ended up being a 600,000-word manuscript when David was done, but we didn’t sign a contract for 600,000 words." (Nadell)
"I felt I was in the presence of a master." (Pietsch)
"This is a person who had dial-up. No cell phone." (Nadell)
"There were files with that title, but no outline." (Pietsch, on The Pale King)
"Figuring out what to do after Infinite Jest haunted him. I mean, that’s what haunted him for years." (Nadell)