The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

David Lipsky's October 2008 Rolling Stone obituary-feature is the definitive contemporaneous long-form account of Wallace's life, written weeks after his suicide and built from Lipsky's own week of 1996 interviews plus fresh testimony from Wallace's parents, sister, Costello, Franzen, and his editors. It is overwhelmingly biography — the Illinois childhood, the two Amherst breakdowns, the Arizona MFA, the Somerville/Harvard collapse and McLean hospitalization, the two-decade dependence on the antidepressant Nardil, and the fatal 2007-08 decision to taper off it. For Infinite Jest specifically it carries two things of interpretive value: a compact record of the novel's genesis (the hundreds of hours of halfway-house research, the longhand Syracuse drafting, "Mount Manuscript," the one-finger typing, the ~1,700-page draft), and Wallace's own 1996 statement of the book's design — that its working title was A Failed Entertainment and that it is "structured as an entertainment that doesn't work". That design statement is the piece's one crux-bearing datum; the rest is biographical and compositional testimony.

Key claims

• The 1996 interviews are the spine. Much of Wallace's first-person voice here comes from "a series of interviews in 1996" Lipsky conducted at the end of the Infinite Jest book tour — the same recordings later published as the book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. The 2008 piece interleaves them with new family and friend testimony gathered after the death.
• Genesis / research. Before writing, Wallace spent "hundreds of hours at three halfway houses", finding "you could just sit in the living room" because "nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs" — the firsthand substrate of the Ennet House material, gathered while he was himself in recovery and living in the Boston area.
• Genesis / drafting. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest longhand in a tiny Syracuse apartment over 1992-93, using cheap Bic ballpoints he called "hot" pens (a hot one was "the orgasm pen"); moved to Illinois State at Normal in summer 1993 with the book "three-quarters done"; Nadell sold it to Little, Brown off the first stack of pages. He "finished and collected the three years of drafts" ("Mount Manuscript"), then typed the whole thing himself twice with one finger ("But a really fast finger"). The typed draft "came to almost 1,700 pages."
• The design statement (the crux datum). Asked what the book is "about," Wallace: "it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit. It's about me: Why am I doing it? The original title was A Failed Entertainment, and the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn't work" — the film Infinite Jest being what "entertainment ultimately leads to," "the star it's steering by." (A fuller, differently punctuated version of the same statement appears in the book-length transcript of these interviews, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.)
• The Entertainment described. Lipsky glosses the plot motor as "a movie called Infinite Jest, so soothing and perfect it's impossible to switch off: You watch until you sink into your chair, spill your bladder, starve, die" — a reception-side restatement of the lethal-Entertainment reading.
• Fiction's purpose. Franzen recalls that he and Wallace "had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something" and "decided it was to combat loneliness" — a much-cited formulation of the ethic behind Wallace's work.
• The illness, plainly documented. Two Amherst withdrawals; the 1988-89 Harvard-era collapse and eight days at McLean (suicide watch, then a clinical-depression diagnosis and Nardil); sobriety maintained for the rest of his life; the 2007 gastric episode that prompted doctors to taper him off Nardil; a year of failed substitute medications, 12 courses of electroconvulsive therapy, a 70-pound weight loss, a July 2008 suicide attempt, and the September 12, 2008 death. Wallace was "clinically depressed for decades," a fact "he limited to family and his closest friends."
• The reception facts. Walter Kirn's New York rave ("The competition has been obliterated"); the MacArthur "genius" grant in 1997, which Franzen thinks "did him" no favors; the fame Wallace described as a "greasy thrill." Colin Harrison: "a once-in-a-century talent … like a comet flying by at ground level."

Theories & evidence

The piece is overwhelmingly biographical/compositional. One passage bears directly on a disputed question — Wallace's own account of the book's design — and is carried below.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is by design "an entertainment that doesn't work" — its working title was A Failed Entertainment and the film is the endpoint the book steers by

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace, 1996 interview as printed: "The original title was A Failed Entertainment, and the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn't work … because what entertainment ultimately leads to is 'Infinite Jest,' that's the star it's steering by." [¶ genesis/design section]
  • [author] Wallace on the book's subject: "it's about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It's not about the shit. It's about me: Why am I doing it?" — the self-implicating, purpose-of-consumption frame. [same passage]
  • [secondary] Lipsky's plot gloss: the film is "so soothing and perfect it's impossible to switch off: You watch until you sink into your chair, spill your bladder, starve, die" — a reception restatement of the lethal endpoint.
• Notes: This is the same 1996-interview design statement already carried by entertainment-lethality via lipsky-becoming-yourself (the book transcript of these recordings); the RS piece carries a shorter, differently punctuated version of it. It is therefore corroboration / a second print venue for one author statement, NOT an independent theory-holder to double-count on the popularity axis. No in-source counter-position; Wallace's own hedge — that if the book reads as an indictment of entertainment it fails — appears in the fuller book version, not in this piece.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the halfway-house research and Wallace's own sobriety); entertainment and its lethal pull (the design statement); depression and mental illness (the black-hole-with-teeth, McLean, Nardil, the death); the labour and self-doubt of writing (the "babble in his head" that writing quiets, the five-year-cycle panic); loneliness and the ethic of fiction as its antidote (Franzen's "combat loneliness"); fame and the "greasy thrill" of success.

Cross-references

• lipsky-becoming-yourself — the book-length transcript of the same 1996 interviews Lipsky draws on here; the fuller source of the A Failed Entertainment design statement.
• dtmax-every-love-story — the full biography, which corroborates and expands nearly every life-fact here (McLean, Granada House, Nardil, the composition years).
• bdcwire-dfw-boston and silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the Boston halfway-house research and the 1996 press-cycle self-presentation this piece narrates from the inside.
• miller-1996-salon-interview — same 1996 book-tour cycle; the public-facing counterpart to Lipsky's private-facing week.
• The n+1, McSweeney's, Guardian-Saunders, Full Stop, and Guernica memorials — the 2008-14 remembrance cluster, of which the Lipsky piece is the longest and most reported.

Notable passages

• Wallace on information: "I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today" … "of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it."
• Wallace on his aim: he wanted to write "stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live."
• Wallace on the halfway-house research: "I spent hundreds of hours at three halfway houses. It turned out you could just sit in the living room -- nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs."
• On the manuscript: "he input the giant thing twice, with one finger" — "But a really fast finger." — "It came to almost 1,700 pages."
• Franzen on the ethic of the work: "We had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something" … "Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness."
• Franzen on Wallace: "But he wasn't Saint Dave" — "The closer you get, the darker the picture, but the more genuinely lovable he was."
• Colin Harrison: a "once-in-a-century talent"; "He was like a comet flying by at ground level."
• Wallace on the essays: "The Harper's pieces were me peeling back my skull".