Memories of David Foster Wallace (McSweeney's Internet Tendency)

TL;DR

The McSweeney's "Memories of David Foster Wallace" page is a large crowd-sourced tribute collection — dozens of short first-person memories, mostly from readers and former students, gathered in the weeks after Wallace's September 2008 death. As a source it is reception evidence rather than argument: its recurring notes are Wallace's startling personal kindness (the thank-you cards and letters he sent strangers, the patient signings), the formative reading experiences his work produced, and the ache of losing him. For Infinite Jest specifically it carries reader-experience testimony (finishing the ending "with confusion and greed and satisfaction and wonder"; the footnotes as a life-rearranging device) and one compositional datum worth keeping: Wallace's remark that he "wrote a lot of it on the T", Boston's subway. It advances no reading of a novel crux.

Key claims

• A reception corpus, not an argument. The page collects some 65 short memories (Lilly de Lucia, K.B. Dixon, Shelly Cox, Todd Pruzan, Chad Willenborg, and many others) from readers, students, and fellow writers. The dominant, repeated content is biographical/reception: Wallace's kindness, his readings, the effect of his books.
• The kindness motif. Many contributors describe unsolicited generosity — handwritten thank-you cards (one on "Expressions from Hallmark"), replies to fan letters, patient inscriptions. This is the collection's through-line and a recurring theme across the whole 2008 memorial wave.
• IJ as reading experience. Contributors record the novel's characteristic effects: reading "the end of Infinite Jest with confusion and greed and satisfaction and wonder"; the footnotes as a cultural detour engine (one reader: "how IJ's footnotes sent me home from the video store with armloads of Tarkovsky films"). The book's ubiquity and heft recur as shared cultural memory.
• A genesis datum. When a reader told Wallace he'd read Infinite Jest commuting on Boston's subway, Wallace replied, "That's probably a perfect place to read it. I wrote a lot of it on the T." (Author-stated, secondhand — a composition/place detail.)
• The McSweeney's-era sincerity note. One contributor (Todd Pruzan) recalls the magazine's early Wallace-inflected house style — footnotes, digressions, "an unrelenting hypersincerity that was then so often mistaken for irony" — a reception gloss on the sincerity/irony reading of Wallace's project.

Themes

Reception and fandom (the breadth of reader devotion); Wallace's private kindness and the writer-reader bond; the formative power of his work on young readers and writers; sincerity mistaken for irony; grief and communal mourning. (No IJ interpretive crux is argued; the connections are reception-level.)

Cross-references

• memorial-guernica-postcard-from-dfw — the same kindness-to-strangers motif (Wallace's postcard/card replies), there in a single sustained essay.
• memorial-mcsweeneys-tributes-2008 — the companion McSweeney's page (writer tributes); this batch's other half.
• memorial-rollingstone-lipsky-lost-years-last-days-2008 — Lipsky's account of the halfway-house research and the Boston/Somerville years that the "wrote a lot of it on the T" datum sits inside.

Notable passages

• On finishing the novel: reading "the end of Infinite Jest with confusion and greed and satisfaction and wonder".
• On the footnotes: "how IJ's footnotes sent me home from the video store with armloads of Tarkovsky films".
• Wallace, on where he wrote it: "That's probably a perfect place to read it. I wrote a lot of it on the T."
• On the sincerity/irony reception: "an unrelenting hypersincerity that was then so often mistaken for irony."