Now that I’m kayaking less as well as seeing fewer bands play outside, I’ve wanted to write more, and my manuscript work is less writing, more research, which I hate. So, when Kari from A Grace Full Life asked me about the story behind spending a weekend with writer David Foster Wallace, no less while he was writing his brilliant novel, Infinite Jest, I jumped on that.
There are so many interesting ins to this story, but let me hook you on David Foster Wallace (DFW) in case you don’t know who he was or the significance of his work. You might have seen viral video of him giving his commencement speech called “This is Water” (here’s the long version and here’s a short bit). If you have a minute, I recommend listening to the beginning of the short one, at least: it’s a compilation of what he said that day.
David’s short stories appeared everywhere people read good short fiction, and his books won awards, and he won awards, including the “Genius Grant” MacArthur Fellowship. The list is long for a man who killed himself at age 46. (It was hard for me to do the math there and come up with that age, to think of that loss, of what he could have written as an older man, of what his loved ones lost, of what he lost).
Well. There are DFW graduate courses, an annual conference, a journal, etc., dedicated to his work, the bit of work he was able to write in that amount of time. Infinite Jest, the greatest novel of several decades (so say important people) is a giant book, about giant ideas. And simple ideas.
“Infinite jest” is how Hamlet describes poor Yorick, the court jester whose skull Hamlet holds high, that gives Hamlet one more opportunity to think about life and about mortality. Yorick was “a fellow of infinite jest,” but, as with seemingly every word Shakespeare wrote, Hamlet means that literally, as in Yorick was good with funny stuff, and he means in general, life all around us, as in, life is an infinite jest. Which, I gotta agree with Hamlet on that.
Infinite Jest, the novel by DFW, is very much about the how much life is an infinite jest, like Dante’s many circles of hell but jest-ier, funny terrible, funny wonderful, and infinite-ier, because it’s not the hell we can only imagine, it’s the life we know to be impossible to wrap our heads around. That’s one theme that Infinite Jest portrays with its giant length, its eons of endnotes, its complexities and simplicities. Our own infinite jest.
What DFW writes though, is so, so funny. If you want something short and funny to read, try any essay in his collection called, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, maybe “Shipping Out,” which an episode of The Simpsons is based on. A character in The Office is named after DFW, seeing as he’s the favorite author of John Krazinski. I kid you not: when Infinite Jest fever hit the western world, DFW references were everywhere.
In my family, he was read by Mom, Kim, and myself, year after year. Mom said she wished a shrink ray were real, because then she’d shrink Infinite Jest down to the size of an acorn and wear it around her neck, to keep it close to her heart at all times. Mind you, this is a book not about flowers and love and the bridges of Madison County, it’s partly about suicide, and two of the settings are a halfway house for addicts and the boys’ wing of a private tennis academy. Not the milieu of most moms. It is that good.
Notes in my sister’s copy of Infinite Jest read,
Things I’ve endured (mostly in public) as unexpected transient states resulting directly from reading this book:
- Incontinence
- Incompetence
- Incapacitation
I’m guessing that all from laughing.
I own two copies of this giant tome (they’re in my one box of books). One copy is my signed one, full of my notes and stickies, and one is my sister’s full of her notes. We both have written in the back of ours the years the story takes place, which is tricky because, in the near future of Infinite Jest, the years are subsidized, so sometimes it’s the Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment, and sometimes it’s the Year of the Whopper. And, the narration is not linear. You really do have to take notes.
But, there’s a famous essay about the book called, “Don’t Need a Diagram,” and I’m with that writer, as well. I think Tracy read it as an e-book which means no stickies.
The actual story
I’ve written all this and haven’t even started on that weekend. Surely, I’ve told this story before? I was living in Missoula, Montana, a very cool town. (Or, it was back then; you know how it goes where every cool town gets uncool when the years go by and more people discover it. I was there in the early 1990s. It was probably cooler before I moved there, too.) I was there getting an MA in literature, taking some heady graduate seminars and playing pool with writers. Two people I hung out with often were the typical pair of guys my boyfriend knew well: big-time pot smokers, big-time risk takers. One doesn’t have the use of an arm due to a motorcycle accident; the other has one blind eye due to fireworks. They made a surprisingly dangerous duo to play pool against.
One was the president of the creative writing club. He was the one with the foresight to invite David Foster Wallace to come speak to a packed classroom, having just published Broom of the System, I believe.
I was a bit of an academic jerk at the time, so into feminist theory that I had the nerve to raise my hand during David’s talk and ask pointedly feminist-leaning questions, and he had the strength of character to admit he’s a man (yep) and that his views about women were by nature marginalizing. Turns out I had a lot to learn about DFW, as made clear by his many later female characters who blow you away with their humanity, so brilliant that your mom wants to hang a shrunken version of them on her chest.
Whatever. DFW spent the weekend at my friend’s house because the creative writing club’s budget wasn’t enough to spring for a hotel, but that was fine and dandy because we were all about the same age, and everyone back then thought of themselves as okay writers and readers and fun-time-havers, so let’s throw him into the mix.
What I remember is spending a few minutes with him alone in the ice cream isle while we shopped for ingredients to make pizzas. We talked about ice cream! That night after pizza and ice cream, we all got high as kites (except for DFW, who abstained), and we watched A Clockwork Orange. In the middle of our intensely quiet viewing (with some wry commentary by the intellectual, stoned peanut gallery), David stood up and walked away, and then we heard the shower running. Shrug. Weirdo writers, whatcha gonna do?
Little did we know, he was in the midst of writing the most consequential book of our generation, right then, and had a giant idea about how to end one major storyline. Well, seeing as how the book’s timeline is not chronological, he had an idea about one pivotal point in the storyline that would be the end, if the book had been written conventionally.
That’s it. Ice-cream shopping, Clockwork-Orange influencing.
Much later, after Infinite Jest came out to such amazing acclaim, and I read it and read it aloud to everyone who came near me, and my sister wrote about it and my mom wished its shrinking, I stood in a long line in Atlanta for him to sign my copy, and I purposefully made myself be last in line so I could ask if he remembered me. I would then invite him to come eat with my then-husband and me (whom he might also remember) and decompress in the middle of his stressful book tour. Standing in line for a long time to ask the most insanely important writer alive to sign your book tends to increase your anxiety, and I never even told him I knew him back then, much less asked if he wanted to come blow off steam with me. I am an idiot.
David struggled with depression all his adult life. He tried occasionally to get off old-school anti-depressants, and this one last time he tried to get off them for too long. He hung himself in his garage so that his adopted Rottweilers wouldn’t find him and be sad, but they found him and were sad anyway, as was his wife and his parents. They tried to stop the making of the movie about him where he was played by Jason Siegel. The movie is funny and heartbreaking, and I didn’t watch it for years to honor the wishes of his family. Now that the future DFW predicted is in part here, why the hell not. I still have not read the book he was writing when he killed himself, even though unfinished it won awards. My sister killed herself (kinda) after he did. Mom and Kim and I talked a lot about Kate, the suicidal character in Infinite Jest, and how beautifully she described her existential pain.* You can understand why I want no more of that right now, thank you.
Thanks for the prompt, Kari! I’ll take any other reasons you can offer me to avoid writing my own book.
*The character, Kate tries to tell the inept psychiatric doctors in her hospital that being this depressed and in pain is like standing at the windowsill of a tall building that’s on fire. You’re afraid, the fire at your back is hot, and you can see when you look down that you will die if you jump. But, after a while, for some people, the pain from the fire becomes so great that you have to jump.
