Diary: David's Presence (Gale Walden, London Review of Books)

source

TL;DR

The fullest first-person memoir the archive holds from a woman who loved Wallace across two decades: Gale Walden, a poet who met him in 1985 at the University of Arizona MFA program, was twice engaged to him, and stayed a close friend until his death. Written for the LRB fifteen years after he died, the essay braids a Champaign-Urbana and Tucson biography (the cancelled wedding six weeks out; his 1980s suicide attempt and ECT; the sober Bloomington-Normal years; the ranch house whose bathroom walls were papered with Infinite Jest working pages) with grief for a man she can still feel walking beside her. It is also the primary home of two lines the archive had only secondhand — "I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed" and the carefully scoped "there was no way to be close to him and not be hurt by him, whether you were male or female." Walden gives named first-person conduct testimony that neither sanctifies nor prosecutes him: her own relationship held no physical violence, but he was not a good partner; she cannot question the accounts of the women who allege worse, and some of those accounts have made her wonder whether she minimised things; and she casts specific, first-hand doubt on the D.T. Max biography's story that Wallace tried to buy a gun to kill Mary Karr's husband ("the David I knew hated guns … Now I don't know").

Key claims

How they met (biography, cite-as-written). She "met David in 1985, at a party for new MFA students at the University of Arizona", where she was a second-year poet and he a first-year fiction writer four years her junior. He was kneeling by her ex-boyfriend's chair, looking up; "I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed." He courted her (a condolence card for her dead puppy won the first date), and they became inseparable talkers — the phone-ear-getting-hot intimacy that recurs across the essay.
The engagement(s) and the cancelled wedding. They got engaged in graduate school, told their parents, and let it fade. Years later, after he took a year's teaching at Amherst, they set a wedding date six weeks out, bought 18-carat rings ("We want them to disintegrate naturally," Wallace told the jeweller), got the license — and he disappeared; his father called to say he was too depressed to go through with it ("He convinced us too"). She ended it: if they couldn't make six weeks they wouldn't make a lifetime.
The illness, unromanticized. A year after the cancelled wedding "David made a serious suicide attempt that led him to try ECT"; he arrived at her Chicago apartment shaky and foggy from it. She distinguishes what she had known as ordinary depression from "what David had," which "was different." His fame-anxiety and self-doubt run throughout (below).
The name, and the early career (cite-as-written). He became "David Foster Wallace" by "having chosen to use his middle name when he started publishing" — a tribute to his mother (maiden name Foster) and to distinguish himself from another writer called David Wallace. At the time The Broom of the System was out to minor acclaim and Girl with Curious Hair was accepted; he was 26 and she 30.
Composition-history sightings (cite-as-written). In the rented house on Fell Street in Normal, where the "walls of the downstairs bathroom were plastered with working pages from Infinite Jest"; his dog there was Jeeves (the same dog Wallace elsewhere credits with getting him through the novel's last drafts). When the book came out in 1996 he sent her a copy in a large box, "the book wrapped in a black kitchen rug covered with wax drippings, as if someone had done a voodoo spell over it", inscribed "To Gale, With Much Love, David. W. 4/96". Before publication he anxiously asked her to buy a copy so at least one would sell at her local store.
Fame and fraudulence, in his own reported words. After the New York launch party he called late at night: "I need someone who isn’t impressed with me." At the last stop of the Infinite Jest tour he told her the tour was over and that a Rolling Stone reporter (later identified in the essay as David Lipsky) had shadowed him — and, of the book, "I threw everything I had into that book," he said. "I don’t think I could do that again." Years earlier, on her own fear of success, he had said "fear of success is just fear of failure wrapped in a tight phobic circle."
The break and the after-years. A counsellor told them he "just can't … give you what you want"; they parted for the last time around 1996. He took the Pomona job in California in 2002 (he had "been working on a book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and it had messed with him", turning him "cynical and almost cruel"). They had little contact after; the last word was a note saying he was married and happy. He died by suicide on 12 September 2008.
The D.T. Max biography (2010), read from inside. She spoke with Max at a Thai restaurant in Urbana. Reading the finished biography, only two things surprised her: that Wallace had voted for Reagan, and "a story about him trying to buy a gun to kill the husband of Mary Karr, a poet he was infatuated with." On the second she registers specific, first-hand doubt: she can imagine him inventing a tough-guy narrative for the halfway house, because "the David I knew hated guns and knew they were unsafe for him to have around, knew he was more likely to turn one against himself than anyone else." She had once been able to confirm with him something she'd thought invented; now she cannot, "So now I don’t know."
The misogyny question, first-person and carefully bounded. A former student called Wallace "a misogynist" after Walden taught "Everything Is Green"; "Girl with Curious Hair" once "caused me to say I wasn’t sure I wanted to date someone who could write that", and she remains "still afraid to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." Asked to respond to Mary Holland's essay on "the “Open Question” of Wallace’s Misogyny" (which weighs Karr's accusations, "which include stalking and physical violence"), she declines to adjudicate: "I cannot question another woman’s account. In fact, some repeated stories have caused me to question my own memories, to wonder if I minimised things." Her own scoping is the essay's most-quoted line: "My own relationship with him did not include physical violence, but there was no way to be close to him and not be hurt by him, whether you were male or female." Her verdict on the man both ways: "He was not a good boyfriend or partner. But he was one of the best friends I’ve ever had."
The posthumous-persona problem. At his memorial she was "just relieved" when a former student named a flaw, "because in the days and weeks after David's death, a posthumous persona was emerging, that of a wise saint, a genius of boundless kindness"; the student said "there were things he did that no teacher should ever do, leaving us to fill in the blanks." Walden frames her whole telling against both that sainthood and the later misogynist portrait, finding neither the whole of the David she knew.
The woman-adjacent-to-the-man theme. She describes the particular erasure of loving a famous man: "I became a secondary character, as women often are", and later, on his death, "I hadn’t been used to placing my invisibleness next to someone invisible."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: A named woman's first-person conduct testimony — hurtful but non-violent in her own experience, declining to adjudicate the accounts alleging worse

Crux: wallace-misogyny (primary reception/biography attestation; ij-boys-book is the reception-fight anchor alongside)
Stance: advances (as attestation; the essay itself refuses both the saint and the villain frame)
Evidence:
- [text] The scoping sentence: "My own relationship with him did not include physical violence, but there was no way to be close to him and not be hurt by him, whether you were male or female." — first-hand, and the archive's primary home for the second half (held secondhand via Krug).
- [text] The both-ways verdict: "He was not a good boyfriend or partner. But he was one of the best friends I’ve ever had."
- [text] Her refusal to adjudicate others' accounts, with self-doubt: "I cannot question another woman’s account. In fact, some repeated stories have caused me to question my own memories, to wonder if I minimised things." — responding to Mary Holland's essay on "the “Open Question” of Wallace’s Misogyny", which cites Karr's accusations "which include stalking and physical violence."
- [text] First-hand doubt cast on the biography's Karr-gun story: "the David I knew hated guns and knew they were unsafe for him to have around, knew he was more likely to turn one against himself than anyone else", landing on "So now I don’t know" — she neither confirms nor denies.
- [text] The reader-recognition datum: a student called "Everything Is Green" the work of "a misogynist"; "Girl with Curious Hair" made her say "I wasn’t sure I wanted to date someone who could write that"; she is "still afraid to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men."
Notes: ATTESTS-discipline, per the Krug precedent (krug-wapo-dfw-fateful-correspondent): record what the witness attests AND what she explicitly does not allege; neither inflate nor discount. What this source adds is a named, decades-long intimate who reports no physical violence in her own relationship yet insists proximity to him was itself injuring ("whether you were male or female" scopes the hurt as non-gendered), who declines to speak for other women while affirming their accounts are not surprising and have made her question her own minimising, and who supplies a rare piece of skeptical first-hand context on one specific biography allegation (the Karr gun story) without dismissing it. Do not read the gun-story doubt as exculpation: she ends on uncertainty, not denial. The two flagship quotes ("little bird"; "no way to be close … not be hurt") have their primary home HERE; the Krug note's versions are secondhand and lightly reworded (Krug: "there was no way to be close to him and not be hurt by him"; Walden's full sentence carries the physical-violence and male-or-female scoping the recap drops).

THEORY: The fame-discomfort and fraudulence themes as lived, unperformed biography — the substrate of the autobiographical reading

Crux: ij-autobiographical (biography-side documentary support, not IJ-internal evidence; hal-dfw-surrogate adjacency)
Stance: advances (biography-side; no IJ-internal engagement)
Evidence:
- [secondary] Post-launch, in private: "I need someone who isn’t impressed with me." — the same attention-without-intimacy discomfort the fame material elsewhere documents, said to an intimate with no publication horizon.
- [secondary] On the finished novel: "I threw everything I had into that book," he said. "I don’t think I could do that again." — the exhaustion/next-book dread at the moment of success.
- [secondary] The pre-1996 fear-of-success formula: "fear of success is just fear of failure wrapped in a tight phobic circle."
- [secondary] The illness itself as lived fact — the 1980s suicide attempt and ECT, the depression he downplayed — biographical ground the autobiographical reading draws on.
Notes: Biography-side only, exactly as the Krug note routes its fame-discomfort material: none of this is evidence about Hal in the text. The archive's routing discipline (biographical substrate vs IJ-internal evidence) applies. hal-dfw-surrogate is recorded as adjacency, not a block: the essay never engages Hal or any IJ character, so it supplies no independent support for the surrogate reading beyond the shared fraudulence/fame-anxiety biography.

Themes

Grief and its long half-life (the ghost who still "pops in," the molecular return to a younger self); loving a famous man and disappearing beside him (the secondary-character erasure); depression and addiction seen up close but partly hidden (the disappearances, the covered indulgences, the downplayed seriousness); fame and its costs (the persona she didn't recognize, the seduce-me-out-of-being-impressed plea); the making of Infinite Jest (the working pages on the bathroom walls, the wax-wrapped presentation copy); the posthumous saint-vs-villain problem (neither portrait fitting the man she knew); the conduct question, first-person and bounded.

Cross-references

krug-wapo-dfw-fateful-correspondent — recaps both of this essay's flagship Walden lines secondhand; this note is their primary home, and supplies the scoping the recap drops. Krug's own conduct testimony (politeness plus boundary-pressing obsessiveness) is the professional-orbit companion to Walden's intimate-partner testimony.
dtmax-every-love-story — the biography Walden read from inside; carries the Karr coffee-table and moving-car incidents and the gun story she casts first-hand doubt on. Read her essay as a named witness's partial dissent from, and partial confirmation of, that record.
gc-ep021-clare-hayes-brady and larb-hayes-brady-2018-interview — the scholarly side of the misogyny question Walden approaches as memoir; her refusal to sanctify or prosecute sits beside Hayes-Brady's "not that simple."
lipsky-becoming-yourself — the Rolling Stone reporter Walden mentions shadowing Wallace on the last tour leg; her "I need someone who isn’t impressed with me" is the private counterpart to the fame-thesis of those tapes.

Notable passages

"I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed." (on first seeing him, 1985)
"My own relationship with him did not include physical violence, but there was no way to be close to him and not be hurt by him, whether you were male or female."
"He was not a good boyfriend or partner. But he was one of the best friends I’ve ever had."
"I cannot question another woman’s account. In fact, some repeated stories have caused me to question my own memories, to wonder if I minimised things."
"the David I knew hated guns and knew they were unsafe for him to have around, knew he was more likely to turn one against himself than anyone else." (on the Karr gun story)
"I need someone who isn’t impressed with me." (after the New York launch)
"I threw everything I had into that book," he said. "I don’t think I could do that again."
"The walls of the downstairs bathroom were plastered with working pages from Infinite Jest."
"a posthumous persona was emerging, that of a wise saint, a genius of boundless kindness."
"I became a secondary character, as women often are."