Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
"What does 'every love story is a ghost story' mean? It captures, I think, the futility of Wallace’s quest." A not-so-close look at an author who looked too closely at things.
David Foster Wallace, hopefully not an unfamiliar name to readers, was blessed with once-in-generation belletristic1 talent. It would hardly be an exaggeration to classify him as one of the most influential and original writers of the latter half of the 20th century. His work has probably entered the expanded Western Canon along with some of his proximal influences: Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Cormac McCarthy. Both his fiction and creative nonfiction captivated the culturally ascendent readers and tastemakers of the 90s and early 00s. Wallace or “Saint Dave” or more commonly DFW has maintained a tight hold on the minds of the literarily inclined from his untimely death at his own hands through to the present. In fact, it is difficult to entirely extricate his literary legacy and enduring readership from his suicide and his tumultuous personal life. Wallace attracts mounds of attention even from those not usually enthralled by literary fiction. There is kind of a vague, general sentiment that Wallace was maybe the first and last literary rockstar. A view seemingly propelled by his aesthetic similarity to 90s Grunge figures (despite being philosophically quite the opposite of Grunge).
Wallace is quite the test case for Barthes’ “Death of the Author” theory, the idea that an author's intentions and biography should hold no special sway over the interpretation of a literary text (if ever such a myopic theory should be treated with utter seriousness). Given the great interest in not just the work but also the author, it was unsurprising that a biography soon followed in the wake of his death. D. T. Max, New Yorker staff writer, penned a short biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, just four short years after Wallace’s suicide in 2008. Maybe the more surprising fact is that this biography remains the most detailed and complete accounting of Wallace’s life.
In Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (2012)2, D. T. Max offers the first and only (from what I can tell after a cursory search) comprehensive biography of David Foster Wallace. It is based on extensive research and interviews with Wallace's family, friends and colleagues, including review of his correspondences with other literary figures like DeLillo. Max’s biography is more narrativized and less minutely focused on details, but it still follows a chronological arc. It traces Wallace's life from his childhood in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he showed an early talent for writing and mathematics, on to his college years at Amherst, and then to his postgraduate work, an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona and a brief failed stint as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard. Max connects the details of Wallace’s intellectual and literary interests and personal experiences to the distinctive style and voice he became well-known for as an author. Then, he follows the trajectory of Wallace's literary career, from his debut novel The Broom of the System to his magnum opus Infinite Jest, which established him as a literary star and cultural icon, to his final collated of The Pale King prior to his suicide. Max, of course, chronicles Wallace's personal struggles: severe depression, persistent anxiety, drug experimentation, alcohol dependence, fraught romantic entanglements, and creative droughts. This is probably the greatest value add from the biography in addition to the excerpts from his correspondences. Wallace was understandably cagey about his psychological and substance abuse issues, sometimes even with his loved ones, so the full accounting from Max really laid bare its enormity and poignancy. And most importantly, I think Max conveys the urgency and consistency of Wallace’s search for meaning and accomplishment through the creative process.
Max's biography is a pithy retelling of the salient details of Wallace’s life, and illuminates his ideas about literature and the nature of his creative work. It is a little lighter than I wished on the analysis of Wallace’s actual work, but what Max does work to provide is quite enriching. Max shows how Wallace's fiction reflected both Wallace’s own personal experiences and philosophical ideas. We get a satisfying glimpse into Wallace’s engagement with philosophy, literature, pop culture, and politics (e.g. Wallace was a fan of HBO’s The Wire). He also examines Wallace's themes of loneliness, addiction, irony or meta-irony, sincerity and empathy, and how they resonated with readers and critics alike. He also provides a subtle case for Wallace's place atop the roster of contemporary authors of literary fiction. Max’s work highlights the ambition and vision that inspired Wallace’s fiction, including his continued attempts to explore the possibilities of language’s philosophical limits and the moral power of storytelling.
Interpolated Biography of DFW (for those who haven’t already visited his Wiki page)
David Foster Wallace was born on February 21, 1962, in Ithaca, New York. Both his parent worked in higher ed. His father, James Wallace, was a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, was an English teacher at Parkland College. Wallace grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois with his younger sister Amy, where he attended public schools. He was a talented student and athlete, excelling in tennis and mathematics. He also developed an early interest in writing and literature, influenced by his parents and by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Wallace attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he majored in English and philosophy. Despite taking five years to complete his undergraduate work due to a few mental health incidents, he still maintained very high grades. He wrote two theses: one in philosophy on modal logic and mathematic and the other in creative writing. This latter work eventually became his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), completed while obtaining his MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona. He pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University but left after one year due to a confluence of personal and professional issues. Wallace spent some time at the writer retreat Yaddo, where he connected with other creatives and writers like Jay McInerney. Wallace’s habit with alcohol at this time exacerbated, but put out a dazzling short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair (1989), that was well received. Despite this success Wallace’s addiction trouble mount. By the end of 1989, Wallace spent four weeks in psychiatric care and completed a drug and alcohol detoxification program at McLean Hospital. In this confusing mix of low and high points, Wallace had truly entered the scene as an exciting new and interesting author. This moment also sort of marks his long odyssey to complete Infinite Jest.
After an exhausting development and editing process, Wallace's magnum opus was Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. The novel, which is massive, is a sprawling and manic tripartite story that revolves around a mysterious film called "Infinite Jest" that is so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all interest in anything else including life - the ultimate weapon for the confluence of entertainment and technological terrorism. The three intertwined narratives mostly follow Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy; Don Gately, a recovering drug addict; and Remy Marathe, a parapalegic Quebecois separatist. The novel presciently explores themes of addiction, entertainment, depression, tennis, politics, and culture. There is a frequent use of footnotes with a manic mix of high and low language. Infinite Jest or IJ as it is fondly called was a commercial and critical success and probably most importantly served as a prodigious influence on other contemporary authors: Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggers. It more or less birthed an aesthetic movement that has been pejoratively described as “hysterical realism” by critic James Wood.
Wallace also wrote several nonfiction works that demonstrate his keen powers of observation and analysis and gift with humor as well as his amazing range as a public intellectual. His essay collections include A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), which contains essays on topics such as television, cruise ships, tennis tournaments, and David Lynch; Consider the Lobster (2005), which contains essays on topics such as pornography, lobster festivals, and John McCain; and Both Flesh and Not (2012), which contains essays on topics such as Roger Federer, mathematics, and “Terminator 2.” He also wrote a book-length essay on rap music titled Signifying Rappers (1990), co-authored with his friend Mark Costello and a book-length essay on infinity titled Everything and More (2003). For those who are new to Wallace’s work, it is rewarding to start with the nonfiction essay. “E Unibus Pluram” and “Authority and American Usage” are two stellar works.
Wallace struggled with depression and substance abuse throughout his life. He attempted suicide in 1989 and was hospitalized several times. He underwent electroconvulsive therapy and took antidepressants for many years. He also attended Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings regularly. In 2007, he stopped taking the MAOI Nardil, which had help him manage his depression for decades, due to concerns about the risk of hypertensive crisis. His condition quickly worsened over the next year, and he attempted suicide again in 2008. He hanged himself at his home in Claremont, California, on September 12, 2008. Wallace never had children but he was married to a woman Karen Green at the time of his suicide. In addition to his writing, Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, where by all accounts he was a dedicated and inspiring instructor.
Wallace died in the middle of his creative years. He was just 46 years old. Wallace's legacy lives on through his works, which have been widely read, studied, and admired by readers, writers, and critics around the world. He has been hailed as one of the most original and influential writers of his generation, and as a voice of his generation (a Gen X voice despite being a very young Boomer). He has also been the subject of several biographical profiles and critical/scholarly analyses. Additionally, a film adaptation of Interviews with Hideous Men was directed by John Krasinski and a biopic, “The End of the Tour” based on a Rolling Stone profile are in circulation.
Amuse-bouche: A Taste of Wallace’s Voice
Biographers, they're snoopers. There isn't a locked door they won't pry open or personal letter they won't read. They track down your exes and all your real and theoretical one-night-stands. And that's just the start. Then, they start digging into your history of drug use and dependence on alcohol. They air out all that dirty laundry for all the gawkers to gawk at in their sneering and incredulous way. Every narrative strand you culled from support meetings or the various alarming but sympathetic characters you happened upon in rehab (including the one that becomes the deuteragonist of your best work). All rehashed. Just flayed open. Then, finally, they get to the really raw stuff: family. All your intellectual insecurities about not measuring up to your father and your tumultuous relationship with your "grammar Nazi" mother - a predilection you of course inherited. Every time one of your loved ones had to have you committed or placed under supervision for your benefit. There's not enough Nardil in the world to keep you going after that. Too much mushy and embarrassing stuff dredged up for all the oglers. It's the stuff of life, sure. But it's too much.
Kill DFW to Understand DFW
The above is my facile imagining of DFW's response to his own biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. It is a glimpse into his own recursive introspection and crippling yet insightful self-consciousness. Wallace does it much more brilliantly than me. And the content of that passage is a reading that I fear is inescapable to anyone familiar with Wallace's fiction. Both his persona and his biography loom so large in the reading of his work - bigger than the elephant in the room or the albatross around the mariner’s neck; it’s a psychological atom bomb hidden in every passage, every never-ending sentence just waiting for detonation in the reader’s mind.
It is deeply unfortunate, of course, in many way that much of the poignancy of Wallace's fiction is now colored by his suicide. I try and struggle to transcend such readings of his work because I think it sells him short. It bequeaths him a predominantly sentimental persona especially susceptible to cringeworthy and off-putting hagiography (the whole Saint Dave Schtick). In the hands of his latter day fans, especially those whose interest in his work is less genuine than posed, this hagiography incidentally alienates some of the psychologically sensitive readers Wallace hoped to reach. Many still recognize DFW's talents, though some are inclined to see his distinct voice as an accumulation of parlor tricks and clever self-marketing. But I think, in maybe a clichéd way, think DFW importance has less to do with his cleverness and more to do with his deep honesty. This doesn't mean he is above fabrication in his creative non-fiction or the self-aggrandizing exaggeration anyone can be prone to. I mean that he burrowed into a certain type of mind that was particular to the late 20th/early 21st century, or at least new at the time, and returned then to the surface brave enough to recount his findings in compelling and accessible detail. He was a Cassandra of the smartphone and social media will bring psychological ruination theory (one championed by well-known social psychologists like Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge).
As an observer of the sociocultural effects of the mind, he was nearly unparalleled, especially in that he could vividly recreate his voyeuristic and solipsistic sojourns through our chaotic world. He recognized the natural malaise and terror inherent to the (post)postmodern state. The generalized creative crisis heralded by the rapid march of technology into the sphere of media (i.e. the replacement of social and stimulating art with anti-social, ironic detachment, and empty filler) was paired with the deconstruction of Truth via the denial of clear meaning through language. And he desperately tried to escape this quagmire and pull the rest of society with him despite being a child of it, being the television addict and PoMo fan boy he was. Wallace’s mission was fatal and terminal, but his choice to still make the attempt and to do so with manic flair makes him a hero of letters.
Back to the Ghost Story
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story does actually do reasonable job of plumbing Wallace's depth. Although it is muddled in some ways, Max's reportage is balanced and complete enough to be a worthwhile read even to those decently familiar with the DFW canon and its extended universe. The bio is also fairly free of presentism, moralizing, and condemnation - something that is terribly common in discussions of Wallace's life today, especially with respect to his relationship with the poet Mary Karr. Wallace is presented as the complex person he was without any evidence of an agenda on Max's part other than an interest in his work and life. Despite my awareness of many aspects of Wallace’s life, I was still surprised to learn interesting tidbits about him: his full mental health and drug addiction history, his varied relationships with women and other authors, the trajectory of his writing career, and the likely cause of his suicide (a failed transition off Nardil, an MAOI he had been taking for decades).
There are still many things I wish this biography did in greater detail though. Max was able to contextualize and describe Wallace's style and literary philosophy succinctly, but I think a deeper exploration was warranted. This could have been achieved by walking readers through critical and close readings of some of Wallace's work. This is mostly done at a superficial level. I would have loved a closer examination of “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” and “Authority and American Usage," which are Wallace's most explicit descriptions of his literary mission. Both of these essays demonstrate an incredible prescience about the nature of political discourse and the effects of technological intermediation on psychological experience and cultural production. The power of their insight was probably not as evident in 2012 when this biography was published than now in 2023. Subsequently, I think a new addition of this biography should be issued with an afterward that explores this and comments in greater depth on DFW's legacy in society and the academy.
Despite some of its flaws, I still recommend this biography of DFW, especially to those who want to get as complete of a perspective as possible on an author they read closely.
Relevant Conversations
The Fraudulence Paradox (David Foster Wallace's "Good Old Neon")
Existential Poker-Face (David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram")
One of DFW favorite words; an adjective derived from belles-lettres that means of, pertaining to, or having the characteristics of belles-lettres, fine writing.
“Every love story is a ghost story” is a line that appears in section 23 of Wallace’s posthumously published, unfinished novel, The Pale King. It also appears in Wallace’s short story “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko” from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and a letter Wallace wrote to Richard Ellman in 1986. The exact provenance of the “Every love story is a ghost story line” is somewhat ambiguous, but Wallace may have come by it reading a magazine version of The Things They Carried. See D. T. Max’s New Yorker piece on this question.