Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
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- ISBN13: 9780307592439
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
“If you can reflect of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and like, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really excellent, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I reflect it’s probably possible to achieve that. I reflect part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a small pious.”
– David Foster Wallace
An quick portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns amusing and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour
In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, veteran, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”
Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally legendary. They lose to each additional at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They suffer a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They glide back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to like. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.
A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Apt Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few veteran this fantastic American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own tale, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are tales of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your thoughts of who you should be and who additional people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Fleeting Tales, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many additional publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the leader of the novel The Art Honest, a collection of tales, Three Thousand Dollars, and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.
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There is a road trip, THE INFINITE JEST book tour, and the participants are David Foster Wallace and the leader, a journalist. Wallace is thirty-four and Lipsky thirty in 1996. It takes place during a week in March. It is poignant to Lipsky in retrospect, after Wallace’s death. David Foster Wallace was a death by suicide at age forty-six. He hung himself. Before that he had written acclaimed books, received the genius award, and had accepted a position to teach writing at a college in California. Jonathan Franzen had been his best friend. In the year before his death David had tried to get off of his long term anti-depressive medicine and substitutes for it hadn’t worked.
The occasion for the week in March of 1996 was that the leader’s employer, ROLLING STONE, wanted a piece on David. Lipsky taped the interviews. Witnessing David’s teaching, “Advanced Prose”, Wallace tells the students the writer’s job in the first eight pages of a work is to make sure the reader doesn’t want to throw the book against the wall. There is a need to differentiate private interest from public entertainment. Later when Wallace and Lipsky are alone David Wallace says he was at Yaddo twice and that writers can be dreadful about measuring each additional. Writers are selling their brain, not charm, and it is personal.
Lipsky feels that Wallace on the road has a celebrity glow. It turns out that Wallace likes reading once he is able to forget himself, but he doesn’t like question and answer sessions following book talks. After appearing at the Hungry Mind Bookstore in Minneapolis, there is an interview on NPR, ‘All Things Considered’. Wallace directs Lipsky to talk to Steve Moore at the Dalkey Archive Press about the book. Wallace says he doesn’t have a television because if he had one he would watch it all of the time. He says there is a miasma of hype surrounding his book and that is why ROLLING STONE is interested.
There is an dreadful lot about recent pop culture in this book and it is open in an appealing manner. There is even a special section in back tabulating the subjects mentioned. A book of a long interview works. One feels as if David Foster Wallace is present.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
My first exposure to David Foster Wallace was through a deft, endearing article by Lipsky in Rolling Stone, the text of which is included in the preface of this book. Lipsky made a wise and modest choice in offering a verbatim transcription of his five day interview with Wallace. He does interject, regularly with brief and insightful commentary, merely posing his interpretations of Wallace’s statements.
The title of the book is derived from a passage in which Wallace describes the transformations of identity which one is theme to throughout the influential years of life- we meld and mold and break away and imitate and expound- ‘Although of course…’
If you are a fan of Wallace’s you’re likely to find much of the same valuable sentiment, intelligent discourse and indiscriminate humor embedded in his books. It is obvious how painfully insecure he was, and studying this direct self-assessment is an incredibly sad reminder of the ills which would come to overtake him.
“Although of Course…” is one more quick portrait of an artist for the canon, and a sure pick for the shelves of the literary-minded.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
When I told my now-spouse that I was reading Infinite Jest on our second date in 2004, he told me (much later) that it was probably what sold the deal for him; so I guess you can say that we’re huge fans. David Lipsky’s book is the written transcript (sort of) of the conversation Lipsky had with DFW while promoting Infinite Jest. It is being billed as an autobiography/biography which I judge is an brilliant description.
The insights and comments made by DFW were sometimes painful, knowing what came later. His mysterious ability to tap into the greater American social consciousness was, for me, a very special part of this book. My favorite line: “..this thought that pleasure and comfort are the, are really the essential goal and meaning of life. I reflect we’re starting to see a generation die…on the toxicity of that thought.” In all, the revelations into his mind made it all the more so obvious what a fantastic loss DFW’s death was to the literary world. Lipsky describes in his preface that DFW was the type of person that you wanted to be near; people from Harper’s were tickled to be around him. Reading the book, you get just a tiny glimpse of what that would have been like. What is also very evident throughout the book is how self-conscious and perhaps insecure DFW was about his work and his novel. That came as a surprise to me.
Lipsky’s book is in no way a perfect biography. What he wanted to do, as he states, was allow DFW to “write” his own biography. In a way, Lipsky was right to his word, but it is only a tiny glimpse into DFW’s life. Lipsky does do a more all-purpose synopsis of DFW’s life in the foreword, but it is a matter of a few pages long. It was there, but, that I learned that DFW took his life as a side effect of withdrawal from antidepressants.
But Lipsky did not stay entirely right to this premise. Scattered throughout the book in brackets are Lipsky’s thoughts and assessments, including Lipsky’s own psychological analyses of DFW’s behavior — i.e. “He [DFW] has a Midwesterner’s shy unwillingness about standing out” or regularly he would point out that DFW was courting him, satisfying, or flirting. I judge I would have preferred a straight-forwards presentation of the facts and not Lipsky’s commentary or additional interpretation to DFW’s words.
Moreover, I establish the set-up of the book a small confusing to read. In no way was this as simple reading as if you were to pick up reading a regular biography. It’s reading dialogue–and pure dialogue is very hard to read on paper. Lipsky is generally in italics and DFW is in block print. But the brackets include Lipsky’s post-interview analyses; Lipsky’s thoughts as they came at that time; synopses of parts of the interview that were omitted; background information regarding the subjects that DFW & Lipsky were discussing; and descriptions of background noise was happening on the tape at that time. I did appreciate, though, that Lipsky included a comprehensive list of the well loved culture references made throughout the book.
In the end, I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone except persons who were familiar with the work of David Foster Wallace and had more than a passing interest in how the man ticked. I would be very interested if Lipsky plotted on releasing the tape recordings themselves as part of this book’s audio version.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
At the heart of this ironically addictive, reluctantly illuminating, and uncomfortably human book is one whopper of a lie from its indecipherable theme, the late, fantastic, wunderkind, super-writer, pomo ironist-extraordinaire, David Foster Wallace (DFW). And the lie is this: on page 65, when questioned about whether or not he has tried anti-depressants, DFW flippantly notes that he briefly tried them a few years ago, but they made him feel “stoned and in hell.” He goes on to categorically state that he has not tried any since.
The truth of the matter is that he was, at the time of the Lipsky interview, dependant on a powerful anti-depressant called Nardil, and would remain so for many, many years. In fact, Wallace’s 2008 suicide can be directly linked to his disastrous attempt to wean himself off Nardil while replacing it with a more modern tablets with fewer side-effects.
Because suicide decisively and memorably closes the book on a person’s life, the tragedy of DFW’s self-murder permeates and hangs over every word of ALTHOUGH OF COURSE. Certain passages will haunt you in a way that they never would have if you did not already know of his premature demise, or if you hadn’t read about it in the riveting afterword which, ironically and appropriately enough, precedes the actual book.
The one fantastic personality flaw I perceived while reading ALTHOUGH was that Wallace seemed haunted by an ongoing, yet seemingly inexplicable, sense of personal bring shame on. He comes off as being nearly incapable of simply living in and enjoying the moment, treating even the spoils of literary fame – money, respect, attention, groupies, Rolling Stone interviews etc. – as supposedly fun things he’d rather not try again.
For all his prodigious charm and laser-like wit, this was one very much introverted, lonely, and depressive individual. In my opinion, the paradox boiled down to something like this: DFW was a pathological over-thinker who, through his enormously brilliant and successful writing, strove to out-reflect himself out of his problem of over-thinking.
Again, the irony.
But in closing, let me assure you that this book is anything but the doom ‘n’ gloom manifesto that my preceding comments may have made it out to be. On the contrary, ALTHOUGH is every bit as insightful, cerebral, hilarious, philisophical, challenging, inspiring, and, yes, occassionally baffling and unsettling, as DFW’s celebrated novels, tales and essays.
Lipsky sums it up well by stating that Wallace was that rare writer who spoke in person as brilliantly as he wrote, and the result is nothing fleeting of the excavation of a lost literary treasure – DFW’s road-trip memoir of his INFINITE JEST glory days.
Delight in the ride.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I would read the lyric sheet to a recording of a tuba and accordion band if the tunes were in any way about David Foster Wallace. In that spirit, I’m glad I read this book. I loved Lipsky’s prefatory notes, and I loved following him and Wallace on their journey. But the text itself is mostly just the transcript of the tapes Lipsky made of himself and Wallace talking, coupled with bracketed editorial notes from the Lipsky of the present, which were occasionally appealing but mostly annoying.
I’m glad this book exists. It might be excellent that it exists in this form. I’m glad I read the book. But I can’t say it’s excellent. As a replacement for, I’ll say it’s insightful to watch Wallace feint and parry and ultimately reveal himself (albeit sideways) to his interviewer.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5