Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest â€� David Foster Wallace

From the Bookshelf of Infinite Jest â€� David Foster Wallace…

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

D.T. Max

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What Members Thought

Apr 12, 2012 Moira rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2012-50-new-books-challenge

Yeah, this was just. Terrible. I don't even really have any smartassed thing left to say here after the inchoate spew of status updates - it was just sort of depressing to read the last anemic thirty pages or so. It's a little heartbreaking how very terrible this was. was great wasn't: a possible warning?). His participation in was great. I was really looking forward to this book. I was disappointed by but thought, maybe that was a ...more

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Aug 24, 2012 Stephen M rated it really liked it

Shelves: tears-of-beautiful-laughter, 3-cheers-4-complex-characters, diet-dfw, idiot-heart

An excerpt from one of DFW's first undergraduate stories entitled "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster", a post-modern spoof on a Hardy Boys-type novel:

"Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the brothers!

Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.

'Crikey!' exclaimed Joe. 'It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's bo An excerpt from one of DFW's first undergraduate stories entitled "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster", a post-modern spoof on a Hardy Boys-type novel:

"Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the brothers!

Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.

'Crikey!' exclaimed Joe. 'It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's book or we'd be goners!"

I remember the first time that I was exposed to DFW was through a creative writing class in which we read â€œIncarnations of Burning Childrenâ€� and it piqued my interest enough to search for his name on youtube. There I found his interview with Charlie Rose that Iâ€™ve, as of today, watched some seven times all the way through. I was struck, first of all, by his complete discomfort and what seemed to be, total aversion to social interaction. More importantly, I left the interview in complete awe of his intellect. I couldnâ€™t believe that a person could be as intelligent, articulate, and well-spoken as he was. The combination of intelligence and emotional damage seems to be the entire focus this biography, and the focus that many take towards him. Although there much more to DFW than just that, no Bio could be a complete compendium of a personâ€™s life, and when Iâ€™m honest with myself, these two traits are what has made me feel so close to himâ€”the combination of deep genuine emotion and mind-bending intelligence. No author has made my â€œhead throb heart-likeâ€� to quote DFW himself. It was these two things that I noticed when I first saw him through the screen of my computer and it was these two things toward which I felt an immediate pull. I vowed, at the time I first discovered his work, that I would some day, far off in my maturation as a reader, conquer the mammoth beast that Charlie Rose flipped through and referenced in their interview.

Flashforward nine months later, to when I gave the book a first go. I set out the goal of reading thirty pages a day, and with that rate, I figured I would finish the book in about a month. Oh, how naive I was then. I found the book to be not so much challenging and overly-difficult as it was time-consuming. The thirty pages a day challenge seemed modest (Iâ€™d surely read more than that on most days), but I soon realized it was too many pages. And each day I dreaded having to dive back into all those disparate plot-lines, hundreds of different characters, and page-dominating prose blocks. It was something of a mental workout routine to get through some of the sections. In desperation I reached out to online resources which provided full length descriptions of each character and plot line (I ended up spoiling some of the â€œrevealsâ€� later on in the novel in the process), but even this was not enough to keep me motivated. I soon gave up and moved on to other books with the promise that Iâ€™d return to the book some day.

Leap forward another six months, and I had found myself, once again, feeling the call of the Jest. A friend of mine had begun reading the book and singing its praises, mostly of the sections just beyond where I had left off (beyond the 200 page mark). I read chapter summaries of the sections that I had read in my first go-around, and started the book again from about page 140. With this new resolve I charged forward through doubt and occasional incomprehension. It took me about a month and half to get through it this time, but I actually finished it. The book had hit me like no other hadâ€”with the full-immersion experience, brought about by the intense concentration that I had to have in order to really get into its pulse. That, coupled with a new-found ability in my own reading, turned it into quite a powerful experience. Every time I sank into the book, I felt as if I had completely lost myself in another world, even if only to glean a small sense of what DFW was after with his fractured, broken story about addiction and entertainment. It also helped that I had recently found myself in the throws of a severely debilitating mental condition that I had thought was far behind me. I grew extremely attached to the book as it seemed to totally get everything that I was going through, had gone through and what I would go through. Thereâ€™s something about the mere fact that another human being has experienced what you have that makes everything that youâ€™ve gone through so much less terrifying and abstract; it made the whole thing feel so more human. And thatâ€™s what the book did for me, anyway.

I read Infinite Jest at the exact time I needed to and that was essential for making the experience what it was. And even though the timing of IJ was perfectâ€”as far as who I was as a person and as a readerâ€”I, of course, discovered DFW long after he had given up the ghost. There was no real reason for me to ever grieve over his lossâ€”the knowledge of his death underlay my coming to be a fan of his work. But there was always a vague sense of disappointment and sadness that I hadnâ€™t known about him while he was alive and thus, would never have the chance to meet him. But upon reading the final four pages of this biography, the reality of his suicide, what it must have meant for those close to him, what it must have meant for his fans, and what it meant to me as such a devotee to his work, hit me then and I became a huge mess, wailing into my shirt sleeve; it was pretty ugly.

I apologize that this isnâ€™t really a review of the book itself, but Iâ€™m not very good at those kinds of reviews.

You can take the star I docked from the otherwise five-star rating and file it under the part of the review labeled â€œD.T. Maxâ€™s clunky writing/numerous typos/bad transitions and other things that I donâ€™t really give a shit aboutâ€�.

â€¨I hope Iâ€™ve written enough now. ...more

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Aug 01, 2012 Joseph Michael Owens marked it as to-read

Shelves: paused, nonfiction

Pretty sure I need this book!

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Sep 11, 2014 Lkhx rated it liked it

I read this because I haven't yet mustered the energy to embark on Infinite Jest. It was an interesting read, though maybe what I liked most about the book was the title. ...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Christopher Hellstrom rated it really liked it

It would have been great to have more personal insights into his life ( and death) but it is worth reading. It also is a good overview of each of his works.

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