The Dish has closely followed the release of D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. In a revealing, moving interview, Max describes how he went about talking to the grieving friends and family that Wallace left behind:
David left a lot of grief—grief in his family, on the part of his wife, his friends. I know grief firsthand—I lost both my parents relatively young. And so I know that grief has a number of sides—part of grieving is sometimes narrating, telling before it’s forgotten. Grief can also circle back and grab a person a second time, a third time. Researching a book like this does not take you on a linear path. You aren’t writing about Thomas Hardy or Plotinus. You’re writing about someone people knew and loved just a few years ago. My approach was if you didn’t want to see me you didn’t have to, but in the end nearly everyone did want to.
What that process produced:
The book is the product of interviews and email exchanges with, probably, 200 people. They were his family, his wife, his teachers, the students he taught, the women he dated, the boys he played tennis with in high school and even the video clerk from whom he rented movies. David didn’t just brush against people. He tried to inhabit their minds on some level—and then he left. Suicide is the ultimate withholding gesture—I’m going to withhold myself from you. And because of his abrupt end, all these people are still trying to reconcile the person they knew with the ending they know. And with Every Love Story published, they are also now trying to reconcile it with the story I tell.
In bonus DFW reading, The New Yorker just ran an excerpt from the biography that details Wallace’s time recovering from drug and alcohol addiction in Boston.