How David Foster Wallace Broke My Heart

A version of this article originally appeared in 2018 in Christianity Today. To read that version, click here.

I miss David Foster Wallace.

That may seem a strange thing to say, since I never met him and when he died — on Sept. 12, 2008, by suicide — I had barely heard of him.

But at different times, and in different ways, he started showing up in my life. And, slowly, I started paying attention.

And it was in that paying attention that I came to miss him.

***

If you, like me, haven’t been paying attention, then a little background may be in order.

David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 and lived for 46 years. He published just two novels when he was alive, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. A third novel, The Pale King, was pieced together from an almost finished manuscript and notes after he died, and it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He also published a couple of books of short stories, and a couple of books of non-fiction, mostly long-form journalism collected from magazines such as Harpers and The New Yorker. That’s about it.

Not all of it was excellent. David Foster Wallace could be weird and rambly and esoteric. But all of it was unique, distinctive, particular. You can lift a sentence he wrote almost at random from one of his books or essays and there’s no doubt where it came from. His writing style is as specific as Faulkner or e.e. cummings. Just as Terence Malick (some say) invented a new vocabulary for cinema, David Foster Wallace invented a new form for the novel.

Take his masterwork, Infinite Jest. It’s a 1,079-page book with a hundred pages of footnotes. Despite its mammoth length, it does not have proper chapter divisions. Sentences often go on for hundreds of words. A few are more than a thousand words long. It has so many characters it has a website, built by fans and critics, to catalog them. Some of the sentences are positively luminous, beautifully written, but one of its most common phrases, used sometimes as a stand-alone sentence, is a pedestrian, colloquial, ambiguous expression that has become a catch-phrase for a certain class of literary millennials:

“And but so…”

And but so…what?

Both critics and readers have trouble saying what the book is about. It has at least four interwoven plot lines, at least one of which fails to overlap with the others. Wallace himself said the book is about loneliness. But he also said it was about addiction. And he said it was about modernity’s obsession with entertainment. He said repeatedly it was not autobiographical, even though it was set at a tennis academy (Wallace was a regionally-ranked juniors player) and Wallace himself had various addictions, including to television, which he would sometimes sit up all night watching.

Critics may not agree on what the book is about, but they do agree that it is one of the great novels of the 20th century and the greatest post-modern novel, even though DFW himself disdained to call it a post-modern novel, except when he called it that himself. His friend Zadie Smith, herself a novelist, said Infinite Jest proved Wallace “is in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us.”

It is a massive book full of words, and it pulses with the power of those words, but it is also a book about the end of words, the limitation of words. Later, in a short story called “Good Old Neon,” he would write:

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.

And but so…

***

David Foster Wallace came by his brilliance, and his passion for words, and his melancholy, honestly. His father, James Donald Wallace was an avowed atheist and professor of moral philosophy at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus at Champagne-Urbana. His mother taught English at a nearby community college.

Despite his father’s atheism (he would not let them attend church as children, even when invited by friends), Wallace was fascinated by religion, and the reasons are many. As a close observer of American life, Wallace understood the role religion played in shaping this country and its character. Though born in Ithaca, New York, where his father was a grad student at Cornell, Wallace was inextricably a son of the Midwest. His great grandfather (on his mother’s side) was a Baptist pastor. As a child, he read voraciously and promiscuously. The mystical science fiction novel Dune was a favorite. His best friend at Amherst, Mark Costello, was a devout Catholic who neither smoked nor drank, and he seriously considered becoming a priest. (He eventually became a lawyer and co-authored one of Wallace’s early non-fiction books, on rap music.)

But religion was more than just context or background noise. His biographer, D.T. Max, said he was an avid viewer of religious programs on television. (p. 42) He would regularly attend church for months at a time. At least once (some biographers say twice) he went through classes to be received into the Catholic Church, only to veer off at the last minute because he had “too many questions.”

However, it’s possible that his most meaningful relationship with religion came through the recovery programs he attended to overcome his own addictions to alcohol and marijuana. Wallace had started smoking marijuana in his early teens. His parents were so laissez faire on the issue, that when he used the family car as a high schooler, his father rarely had any instructions other not to stink up the vehicle by smoking pot in it.

So by 1988, Wallace — in his late 20s by then — had smoked weed heavily for more than a decade. His drinking had also gotten out of control. Substance abuse had negatively affected virtually every meaningful relationship in his life, and he feared it was starting to affect his writing. Biographer D.T. Max reports that he “he worried pot smoking had ruined his brain permanently and he would never be able to write again.” (p. 103)

While a graduate student at the University of Arizona, he started attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and that brought him face-to-face with religion and religious people. The 12-Step program of AA is a far cry from a systematic and biblical theology, but for someone like David Foster Wallace — brilliant, arrogant, skeptical — AA’s principles were humbling and eye-opening, especially the AA admonition to “surrender to a power higher than ourselves.”

The experience of recovery ultimately took several years, and involved multiple relapses, time in a residential rehab facility (brilliantly fictionalized in Infinite Jest), and at least one suicide attempt. But when Wallace came out the other end, he was a different, humbler man. As D.T. Max puts it,

To do well in recovery required modesty rather than brilliance. It was not easy for him to accept humbling adages like ‘Your best thinking got you here.’ How smart could he be, the other program members would remind him, if here he was in a room in the basement of a church with a dozen other people talking about how he couldn’t stop drinking? (p. 114)

If these experiences did not lead David Foster Wallace to religion, Christianity in particular, they did lead him to admire and respect Christians, many of them “Ordinary Joes” he met in these church basements. In 1999, to one of his writer friends, he wrote, “You’re special — it’s OK — but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang.”

That respect showed up in his work, and despite his background and education, he became something of a “blue-collar intellectual.” He often wore jeans and flannel shirts and Timberland boots that were often unlaced. In the heat of Arizona he would pull his long hair back with a bandana, and the look became his trademark. Wallace would skewer the pompous and the hypocritical without a trace of pity, but he developed a quiet and profound respect for the humble and sincere Christians who often led these AA meetings, and who served as his sponsors for many years — people who desperately, un-ironically talked about a God he wanted to but could not quite embrace.

***

Another reason many Christian readers have become a part of the DFW cult is this: They have embraced Wallace is his co-belligerency on issues such as the corrosive effect of television and advertising and addiction of all types on American culture.

In fact, for all of Wallace’s post-modern street cred, drug use, and self-disclosed sexual promiscuity (at least until he settled down, in his early 40s, and got married), Wallace aged into something of an old school moralist, an artist who was to post-modernism what T.S. Eliot was to modernism: a writer who drank from the fountain of the zeitgeist, ultimately to spew it out and warn others.

It’s interesting to note that Eliot and Wallace were alike in other ways. They were both sons of the Midwest, both of them had parents who were accomplished and had high expectations for their sons, both experienced literary success early in life, and both felt the burden of that early success. Both faced crises of vocation and depression. Both became voices of their generation.

Wallace read and taught Eliot. He was especially moved by “The Waste Land,” one of Eliot’s masterworks. “The Waste Land” is famous for being allusive and abstruse, as well as for its highly unusual use of footnotes. (A poem with footnotes!?!) Allusive, abstruse, and full of footnotes could also describe Wallace’s work. Infinite Jest has, in fact, nearly 100 pages of endnotes. (The endnotes were originally footnotes. They got moved to the end of the book in a compromise with the publisher.) “The Waste Land” was an elegy to western culture, to western culture — a culture that Eliot would write elsewhere would end “not with a bang, but with a whimper.”

For the past century, Christian readers have resonated with Eliot’s diagnosis of western culture, a diagnosis taken up in different ways by Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor. (Percy’s The Moviegoer and O’Connor’s collected stories were among the surprisingly few books of fiction in Wallace’s library at the time of his death.)

That Wallace offers a similar diagnosis is perhaps why many Christian readers have responded to Infinite Jest, in particular. Infinite Jest likewise diagnoses the cultural malaise, blaming an American mind addicted to entertainment. Indeed, the book’s title is also the title of a film, often called “The Entertainment,” that is so addictive that anyone who watches it is rendered essentially comatose — dead to the world, one might say. If Infinite Jest has a plot (and that question has been debated by critics and deflected by Wallace himself) then the plot is the search for the master copy of The Entertainment, the film “Infinite Jest,” so it will not fall into the hands of tyrants who could use it to completely subjugate the world.

It is easy to hear Orwell and Huxley in Infinite Jest. Cultural conservatives may hear echoes of Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, particularly the chapter on electronic media that Weaver called “The Great Stereopticon.” Weaver said our entertainment culture necessarily and inevitably “decomposed reality.” That was essentially what Wallace said in an interview soon after Infinite Jest came out: “The American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at. We quite literally cannot imagine life without it.”

Wallace also attracted fans who admired Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death, published about the same time as Infinite Jest. (This book was also in Wallace’s library when he died.) When the on-line publication Medium asked him if “amusing ourselves to death” might be a way to describe Infinite Jest, Wallace answered:

To an extent, although really the book is strategically set in the future. It’s not really supposed to be a reflection of the way things are now but a kind of extrapolation on trends. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where everybody has TVs coming on rods out of their foreheads and everybody’s watching TV all the time… it’s not quite that. When you think about how first HDTV’s going to come, then there’s going to be virtual reality, and then there’s the prospect of things like virtual reality porn.

After which answer, one might reasonably respond, “And but so….” Neither denial nor affirmation. An enlargement, a prophesy — and one that has largely come to pass.

***

This moralistic streak showed up most publicly, perhaps, at the commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005. As D.T. Max wrote, it was here, the world discovered, “a slacker exterior hid an intense moralist, someone whose long experience in recovery had made him into an apostle of careful living and hard work.”

A linchpin of the speech is a story about God and belief.

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God. The atheist says: “Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

Wallace goes on to explain the point of his own parable: the non-religious guy is just as dogmatic in his unbelief as many religious people are in their beliefs. “Plus,” Wallace adds, “there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help.” That kind of close-mindedness, Wallace concludes, “amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.”

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement for religious faith, but it is an acknowledgement that faith in God cannot with certainty be ruled out, either. Wallace concludes his speech with an even more direct argument for faith.

There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and thing, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

As he recites this laundry list of things not to worship, he interjects a telling comment, wisdom earned after discovering in substance abuse recovery that “your best thinking” won’t get you to where you want to be. That knowing the right thing is not as important as doing the right thing. “On one level,” Wallace said, “we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

He concludes his speech with a simple and heartfelt benediction: “I wish you way more than luck.”

***

The first severe bouts of depression hit David Foster Wallace when he was an undergraduate at Amherst. Smoking dope and drinking were massive contributors to his depression, and over time Wallace came to acknowledge that. “I’m a depressive, and guess what?” Wallace said in 1989, at the beginning of his recovery. “Alcohol is a depressant!”

But being free of alcohol and drugs did not free him from depression. For most of his adult life he was on the anti-depressant Nardil, a powerful oxidase inhibitor that often takes a while to get the dosage “dialed in” and has a number of side-effects. Most of the side-effects are relatively innocuous, such as dry-mouth and headaches, but some are more serious, and all were a reminder to David Foster Wallace that he was not totally off of drugs.

However, the Nardil helped — a lot. Though as Wallace took greater control of his life, they also seemed to him to be a sign of weakness, a crutch. That’s an attitude common in 12-step programs, and those who hold it even have a name: recovery fundamentalists.

He worried, too, that the anti-depressants may be dulling his senses in other ways, affecting his writing. Biographer Max put it this way: “Wallace had never been certain that being on Nardil was the right thing, and whenever he was not writing well, he wondered if it played a role. But the memories of how it had saved his life were also always present.”

Still, by the summer of 2007, Wallace wanted off the drug. His original plan was to change from Nardil to another, newer drug. But in what some might call a foolhardy act, and some might call a heroic grasp for agency, for self-discipline, for freedom, Wallace decided to “white-knuckle” his way through a cold-turkey withdrawal from the drug. He went off Nardil, and immediately fell into a depression so severe he had to be hospitalized.

The episode scared him enough to go back on anti-depressants, though his doctors convinced him to try newer drugs. For the next year, they struggled to find the right dosage, and Wallace spiraled downward, losing 30 pounds, not able to write or even think clearly for much of that year. Finally, he decided to go back on Nardil, but he was too depressed and anxious to give the drug time to do its work.

On September 12, 2008, ten years ago this week, David Foster Wallace arranged the fragments of his novel-in-progress The Pale King in the best way his addled brain would allow. He wrote his wife a two-page suicide note. Then he stood up on one of his patio chairs and hanged himself.

***

One of David Foster Wallace’s best essays is “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” It was ostensibly a review of tennis star Tracy Austin’s autobiography, but it ended up being a meditation on what it means to be a gifted prodigy, to have success at an early age, and inevitably to disappoint the world and oneself for not being as gifted in other areas of life.

In other words, he was almost certainly writing about himself, and his readers’ relationship to him, and his relationship to his work and life, when he wrote:

So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: Watching the performance is not enough. We want to get intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them. We want The Story.

But, he concludes, “Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate.” It’s not that they lack intelligence.

Anyone who buys the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or a basketball coach’s diagram of a 3–2 zone trap…or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a court’s corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching?

Such athletes, Wallace concludes, “can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-consciousness in two.”

***

It is the most foolish of fool’s errands to speculate what might have happened to David Foster Wallace if the forces of biology and celebrity and genius and distraction had not broken him in two.

But it is an errand almost impossible to resist for anyone who has read David Foster Wallace and caught even a glimpse of what he was trying to do with his work.

It is interesting to note that some of the people in Wallace’s orbit converted to Christianity. One of them was Mary Karr, the poet with whom Wallace had a tempestuous relationship in the 1990s and who served as the inspiration for Joelle Van Dyne — PGOAT, or the “Prettiest Girl of All Time” in Infinite Jest. To another girlfriend he gave a copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and he once included it on a list of his ten favorite books.

It is also interesting to note that after Wallace got his alcohol and drug use in hand, he developed a passion for Dostoyevsky, whose Christian vision was a central feature of his work. Wallace read everything Dostoyevsky wrote, plus Joseph Frank’s four-volume biography, which he reviewed the “Village Voice.” It is impossible to read Wallace’s description of a crisis in Dostoevsky’s early-adulthood and not wonder if he was actually sharing a bit about himself:

What seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer — a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory — into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values.

David Foster Wallace once said he wrote to discover and to reveal what it mean to be “a fucking human.” It’s an expression that — despite its profanity or perhaps because of it — Flannery O’Connor herself might have loved. What, indeed, does it mean to be flawed human, striving for truth, in a beautiful but broken world?

***

And that, perhaps, is why I miss David Foster Wallace, and why his death — even 10 years later — breaks my heart perhaps in the same way Tracy Austin broke his: Because it reveals what we do not want to know, but in the end need most to know: that even the most brilliant of us fall far short of the glory we seek. It is our sickness and theirs that leads to our hero worship, whether that worship is of great tennis players, or great writers. The genius of such people is real, and marvelous, but it is a singular genius, and we too often ask of it more than it can deliver, and those who possess it think it is enough to deliver them from the brokenness that we humans share. We ask too much from artists like David Foster Wallace. He asked too much of himself. It “broke him in two.”

Still, I miss him. I miss him because of a sense that he was our best shot at achieving this enormously hard thing: to articulate what it means to be a flawed human in a beautiful but broken world. And he’s gone. We have what he left us, and it is great enough to last a hundred years, maybe a thousand years. But it nonetheless feels truncated, incomplete, unfinished, not enough.

In short, I miss him because I need him — or someone — to finish what he began.

We all do.