Daniel Matthew Varley reads William Styron’s Darkness Visible alongside David Foster Wallace’s writings on depression, finding the latter the more able guide to despair:
With Styron, we got the sense that he went through something terrible, came out of it and then wrote about it a head-scratching way as if describing some alien spaceship that fell in his backyard. Wallace comes off as someone going through it, describing something that was and always be inside of him. Wallace writes because he needs our support just as much as we need his. We identify with Wallace’s pain, and it enables us to conceive of others identifying with our own. That is powerful and full of beautiful incandescent meaning and creates a crazy-glue bond between an author and reader.
It also comes back to human nature, I guess. Who wants to hang out with the know-it-all who’s got his life together, writing his perfected prose on the back of a doily? Or would you rather be with the the guy who’s a lot more like you, still figuring things out, having moments of brilliance interspersed with royal fuck-ups but still searching for grace? If you answered the latter, you’re probably like a lot of other people who feel a strong bond to Wallace.
The Dish 