Come diventare se stessi

by David Lipsky

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) è stato una delle figure più importanti della letteratura americana degli ultimi trent’anni. Con libri come Infinite Jest, La ragazza dai capelli strani, Una cosa divertente che non farò mai più ha saputo rivoluzionare la narrativa e la saggistica contemporanee, guadagnandosi la stima della critica e l’amore dei lettori (malgrado la complessità della scrittura, i suoi titoli pubblicati da minimum fax hanno venduto fino a oggi più di 75.000 copie complessive). A tre anni dalla sua tragica scomparsa, arriva in libreria un libro-intervista in cui ascoltiamo senza filtri la sua voce. All’indomani dell’uscita americana di Infinite Jest, inviato dalla rivista Rolling Stone a scrivere un lungo articolo su Wallace, il giornalista David Lipsky trascorse cinque giorni ininterrotti al suo fianco, viaggiando con lui per centinaia di chilometri, assistendo ai suoi reading, alle lezioni del suo corso di scrittura, ma soprattutto impegnandolo in una conversazione personale e profonda sulla letteratura, la politica, il cinema, la musica, e anche gli aspetti più privati della sua vita, compresi il rapporto con le droghe e la battaglia contro la depressione. Questa è la fedele trascrizione del materiale registrato all’epoca: il ritratto in presa diretta di un indimenticato maestro della letteratura.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Writing, Travel, Audiobook

284 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 13, 2010

About the author

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 Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other 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 author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Brief Introduction

I recently saw the film version of this and was pleased with it as a rather tasteful adaptation. There were a lot of tender moments and while it was rather surreal to see DFW as a character portrayed in a film, Jason Segel gives a solid performance as Wallace. He captured the characteristic essence of Wallace, complete with anxiety and winces, without over-doing it as a bizarre caricature (a friend of mine complimented Segel for 'not aping DFW'). What struck me most still was Wallace's own words and the lessons from them we can adapt into our own lives. Putting yourself out there, be it in art form, business, dating, just about anything, is a frightening experience where we must accept failure and humility as a possible outcome. Then again, we must accept that success is also a possibility and wonder if we are truly able to accept the curse of getting what we want. We can stress over every detail, analyze our every action until we go mad, or we can just keep on keeping on as Bob Dylan once sang. Whatever happens, you end up becoming yourself. Which is a beautiful and scary thing. Also, it was pretty awesome to see all the sights of Grand Rapids, Michigan where much of the film was shot, especially since many of the roads they are seen driving on are on my own delivery route. I recommend checking out the movie, it is good enough and survives the strange 'buddy comedy' style plot they shoehorn the course of the interview into.

Now on to the review:

‘I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone.’

Joining David Foster Wallace at the end of his 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest, David Lipskey, of Rolling Stone magazine, offers a first hand account of the celebrated author and allows the reader to be a fly-on-the-wall for their discussions and travels. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is the transcript of this voyage, Wallace and his interlocutors conversation only occasionally broken up by Lipskey’s own asides and observations, and is a wonderful way to experience Wallace as a person through the nuances of human interaction as opposed to a list of facts or posthumous biography. Through their ‘smoking tour of the United States, as dubbed by the chain-smoking Wallace – who substitutes chewing tobacco at every non-smoking instance – we read Wallace’s own opinions and reflections on everything and anything from his own life and works to music and film.

The greatest joy of this book is the way the reader experiences Wallace as a human being, witnessing through the eyes of Lipskey all of Wallace’s quirks and mannerisms, and feeling his apprehensions and awkwardness. It is like a first date, or hanging out with anyone for the first time. Initially, the vibe is so awkward that it is nearly uncomfortable to read as Wallace tries his best to not be perceived as someone who is seeking stardom and he continuously remarks about how uncomfortable interviews and appearing in the public eye make him. Beyond blushing and becoming nervous when his own students bring up his new-found fame, Wallace flat out refers to public awareness as being ‘toxic’ to his own soul and sanity. He spends a great deal of time discussing how being a young star hindered him aesthetically and personally. He details how he had to learn to ‘write for himself’ and not for others, describing how responding to the public made him feel like a glass figurine that had to be handled carefully or else he would shatters (he also mentions how this feeling is transposed onto some of the young tennis stars in IJ’s Enfield Academy).

Wallace’s self-conscious nature floods the first quarter of this book. He does everything he can to dodge being perceived as a genius, a tortured artist (he gets very uncomfortable discussing his past depressive episodes as he doesn’t want to play into a ‘romanticized’ notion of a tormented genius), or anything beyond just being a nice person. However, Lipskey points out privately that people don’t buy huge books ‘because they heard the author is a nice guy’, and will continue to probe at the uncomfortable recesses that make Wallace who he is. At the start, Wallace seems to answer questions as if he playing chess against an opponent (Lipskey’s metaphor), putting up a strong front and giving answers how he thinks he should come off as opposed to how he really feels. Several times in the first few pages he mentions that he wished he ‘could have gotten laid out of this’, referring to his book tour in an all-most rock-star fashion as he thinks people reading Rolling Stone would want to see it. As the journey progresses, his tensions subside and he really opens up. The book really becomes fun as the two spar intellectually, trade jokes, and compliment one another. Lipskey notes how often Wallace tries to bring Lipskey into his discussions, always saying something like ‘well, you know how that goes’ or ‘you’ve experienced that right?’, which he finds endearing as Wallace refuses to step up on his high platform and instead elevates Lipskey as if it is he whom is the celebrity. There is a wonderful statement at the end, where they are both comfortable with one another and talking easily while driving at night where Wallace remarks how it is funny that staring out into the dark makes them most comfortable because they are people used to working in seclusion.

The reflections on his own work make for some of the best bits. ‘If the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is,’ Wallace says. He discusses how a writer always comes across as a bottomless well of knowledge, yet admits that what is printed in his books is really the culmination of all his research and comprises almost everything he knows about a given topic. It is that illusion that makes an author so great, and what he loves most about literature, which he says has always had a magical quality for him. I enjoyed how open he was with the ideas behind his novels, telling of why he wrote things and what some of the ultimate meanings were. He discusses his time as a successful junior tennis player, and how he would see the kids that lived and breathed tennis, and always wanted to ‘get into their head’ (admitting Enfield is a step above any athlete he had personally competed against). He also speaks quite negatively about his own first novel, The Broom of the System, and groans anytime he is asked to sign a copy of it. He speaks of how he wished he had done ‘what was right for the book’, instead of essentially focusing his years of education into one novel. When asked by his editor to make a few changes, instead he had written a multi-page explanation of why the book was perfect, and why it had to be the way it was, saying that the novel has the characters caught in a metaphorical battle between the ideas of Wittgenstein and Derrida. Looking back, he sees how he failed as a writer, yet assures us that he has learned from his mistakes.

Of course, given the subject matter of Jest, drugs come up often. Wallace gets a bit cranky the second time the topic is broached, and denies the rumor that he had a former heroin problem (he does back-peddle a bit, going from flat out deny any use to saying he ‘might’ have snorted a bit once). He admits to copious marijuana consumption during college, but says he laid off the stuff as if hindered the writing process, and claims that alcohol was his biggest problem. ‘I wasn’t an interesting or Falstaffian or larger-than-life type of addictive figure’ he says, once again referring to how he didn’t want to romanticize the writer/addict cliché. He shows how his knowledge of addiction helped create realism in his novel, although discusses that the message went much deeper that simple drug use. ‘Drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.’

This book is just flat-out fun. There are hilarious bits where his awkwardness and awkward situations make us feel for him, and feel closer to him as if we had been there and not Lipskey. At a book reading (Wallace mentions how his favorite place to do a reading is in NYC because people are used to them whereas in other cities people show up ‘dressed the part’ of being an audience member), he loudly declares he doesn’t want to do a Q&A, citing that he hates questions such as ‘where do you get your ideas?’. After his reading, the host steps forward, cutting Wallace off, and says ‘Mr. Wallace would be happy to answer any questions you might have’, the first being ‘where do you get your ideas?’. Also, when told he could come onstage anyway he liked he tells them that is a mistake because if it were up to him, he wouldn’t be there (mind you, the audience is in ear-shot of this conversation). It is fun to read him speak plainly on a wide variety of topics. There is music – a big R.E.M. and Alanis Morissette fan (the two also end up listening to an ex-girlfriends workout mix tape when their tape collection runs dry), film – on Lynch’s Blue Velvet he says it is like ‘someone’s id projected onto a screen’, as well as mentioning his favorite films are ‘the kind where stuff blows up’, women – ‘say what you will about psychotics, but they tend to make the first move’, and other writers – he was intimidated by Vollmann for being able to write so many long, difficult novels so quickly (Vollmann referred to Wallace’s own book as being ‘slender’).

Unless you have a really good Ouija board, this book is the closest we can all come now to hanging out with Wallace. From watching him work in the classroom, to smoking in diners, getting totally geeked over watching Broken Arrow in the dark of a theater, to driving down icy roads spitting tobacco into a Styrofoam cup, the reader feels as if they have met the man and experienced him more than they would have in some cold biography. This is highly recommended for any fan of David Foster Wallace.

4/5

Recommended listenings
The DFW interviews on Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt:
1996 pts 1, 2, 3
1997
1999
2000
2006

The Charlie Rose Interviews:
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4

Also
The BBC Documentary of Wallace's life

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

When it comes to David Foster Wallace, I’m not exactly a ‘howling fantod’—more of a casual admirer—but I still find it difficult to write about him without getting sappy. What made his death that much harder to take was the sense that we’d lost, not just a good writer, but a good man. And there isn’t such a plentiful supply of either quantity lying around that we can afford to be blasé about it.

On my emotional map of world literature, Wallace is right next door to George Orwell—which is odd because, aside from being wonderful essayists, they really don’t have much in common. The hidden link, I’d say, is their commitment to the same humble ideal: decency. This is a great word when you think about it. More down-to-earth than the pompous ‘virtue’, it’s one of the few ethical terms you can throw around without embarrassment or scare quotes. And I think that’s why they both prized it so much: it’s modest; it’s democratic. For the disabused British socialist and the anguished American post-modernist, decency was what was left over once you subtracted all the absolutes and ‘smelly little orthodoxies’. It wasn’t much, and maybe in the end it wasn’t enough for either of them, but it was all they had.

When Wallace gave this extended interview to David Lipsky back in 1996, he was about the same age I am now. Apart from the galling fact that he was already a Famous Writer and I’m, like, so not, I can relate to many of his concerns. The problems he dwells on are those of a youngish man who’s finally figured some stuff out, but whose shit is not, shall we say, as cohesively together as he would like: Am I on the right track, career-wise? How can I avoid being more of a dick than I have to be? Why can’t I keep a woman in my life, or do I even want to? Bandana or ponytail? (Neither, in my case, but it was the 90s, after all).

One of the neat things about Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is that, threaded through the book, hidden under all the slang and joshing, are the outlines of an artistic credo that Wallace is trying to get across. He’s quite diffident about it, pretends to a certain hesitation, politely considers Lipsky’s input, but what he keeps coming back to is the idea that literature mitigates loneliness. I don’t know if Wallace would’ve endorsed this image, but you sort of get the impression he saw humanity as a collection of prisoners in isolation cells--and a great book as the sound of another prisoner tapping on the wall.

It’s impossible not to read this interview prospectively (if that’s the opposite of retrospectively), with one eye on Wallace’s eventual fate. The thing is, he’s so lively here, so funny and gracious and likable, that you can’t help rooting for the guy, even knowing how illogical and hopeless that is. It’s a bit like re-reading some blubbery-sad storybook when you’re a kid and willing it, somehow, to turn out differently this time. But you learn pretty early on that it never does.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm really conflicted about this book. The bulk of it is just David Foster Wallace talking, and those parts are great. So many of DFW's essays are conversational, so a long transcribed conversation feels like a natural extension of his work. What really sucks, though, is that I think I hate David Lipsky. Like serious full-on loathing of his persona and the way he handled both the interview and the editing of the book.

This book has the feel of a first draft. It reads like Lipsky transcribed the interview, added some notes to himself so he could write more extensively later, and then he never did that. It gives the impression that the book was rushed to publication. The editing is very choppy. There are points in the interview where DFW's answers are transcribed as full paragraphs, and Lipsky's questions are sentence fragments that seem to indicate the general idea of what he asked like, "Family?" or "More?" It breaks up the conversational flow of the interview. Also, there are points where DFW asks Lipsky personal questions, and Lipsky leaves out the answers he gives. This is especially annoying because his answers are important to the dialogue. It's just another thing that breaks up the flow.

Adding to the first draft feel is the little bracketed comments that Lipsky inserts into the inteview. Much of the time they are completely unnecessary asides like "This is somehow the saddest" (after DFW says something that is kinda sad), or comments where he interprets what DFW is saying. In both cases, it's not needed! Let the reader figure out what is sad! Let the reader interpret DFW's words. He's pretty good at getting his point across without your help, Lipsky! Seriously, there are times where Lipsky's interpretation seems so off. And most of the time, the inserted comments read like notes to himself, rather than to the reader. And again, each little insertion interrupts the flow of the dialogue.

In general Lipsky has the tendency to read too deeply into DFW's word choices and interpret some comments as flattery or insincerity, when it's obvious that DFW is trying his best to be authentic and open.

Lipsky also has a serious obsession with the success that DFW has achieved. He asks MANY times the same basic question: How great is it that you're a bright successful literary star? And DFW tells him EVERY TIME that he can't think about that kind of stuff b/c it would eat him alive, and that he's trying very hard NOT to focus on his celebrity. And yet, Lipsky can't let it go. He clearly wants DFW to be like "I'm so happy and I love it and I've finally achieved what I've always wanted," and DFW won't give it to him... not out of spite, but because he knows that material success doesn't bring him happiness.

I know I'm kind of obsessing about Lipsky here, so I'll stop (but first let me mention how weird it is that Lipsky wrote a Preface, an introduction, and an afterword that for some reason is placed in the FRONT of the book?). There's a lot of great stuff in the interview. This is an important book for DFW fans, and maybe even for non-fans? There's some stuff about writing and the writing process, and a lot of focus on living a moral and fulfilling life in post-modern times, like an extension of the Kenyon Commencement Speech. While the book feels rushed and Lipsky's parts are poorly written/edited, DFW's brilliance shines through.

Oh yeah, there is a point in the interview where Lipsky and DFW are sitting in the house, hanging out with DFW's dogs (keep in mind that Lipsky has know DFW for a few days, and his dogs for only a few hours). When one of the dogs starts to whine, Lipsky taps the dog on the snout to get him to shut up! WHO DOES THAT?

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It's a transcript of a long conversation between two writers: David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky. I decided to read the book after seeing the movie version, "The End of the Tour," which I also loved.

DFW had such a keen mind that I was totally engrossed with this dialogue. Lipsky met with Wallace in March 1996, just a few weeks after Infinite Jest was first published. They talked about so many things -- books, movies, culture, relationships, the writing life, and most movingly, Wallace's struggles with anxiety and depression. There is so much insight in these pages that I used dozens of Post-It notes to mark significant quotes. Highly recommended for DFW fans and for those who like to hear writers talking about the experience of writing.

Favorite Quotes
"There's good self-consciousness. And then there's this toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic Bedouins self-consciousness."

"I think I work harder now ... I think when I was 22 or 23, I pretty much thought every sentence that came off my pen was great. And couldn't stand the idea that it wasn't. Because then you've disintegrated — you know, you're either great or you're terrible. And now ... I'm just, I'm really into the work now. I mean it's really — and I feel good about this. Because, you know, we wanna be doing this for forty more years, you know? And so I've got to find some way to enjoy this that doesn't involve getting eaten by it, so that I'm gonna be able to go do something else. Because bein' thirty-four, sitting alone in a room with a piece of paper is what's real to me."

"I'm not a particularly exceptional person. I think I'm a really good reader, and I've got a good ear. And I'm willing to work really really hard. But I'm more or less a regular person."

"What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit — to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly award of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time."

"This is the great thing about it, that probably each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. You know? For us, it's gonna be that, at a certain point, that we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?"

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A number of things I learned from reading David Lipsky’s “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace”:

- David Foster Wallace, in conversation, was an incredibly friendly, energetic talker. His interactions with Lipsky, as well as reading tour organizers, literati, press, the service industry, fans, escorts (the book tour kind, not the sex-worker kind), etc. exuded humor, patience, guarded sincerity, a natural empathy and attempt at understanding other persons- basically, he possessed an ease in his interactions with every strata of individual, even when situations were potentially thorny or annoying.

- DFW drank obscene amounts of obscure (Diet Rite) and run-of-the-mill (Diet Pepsi) soda, the cans of which he would save to use as spittoons, because he was also constantly chewing tobacco AND smoking cigarettes. The amount of nicotine surging through this guy at any given moment was nuts.

- He got terribly nervous before readings (which may have contributed to the nicotine intake indicated above), but calmed down at some point, generally halfway through, and really began locking into the flow of words, and the impression I got from this book was that he was a sort of shy-but-then-powerful presence at the podium.

-Wallace had two dogs, Jeeves and Droid, who weren’t very well behaved and kept interrupting Lipsky’s interview sessions when at home in Bloomington and showed other signs of poor discipline such as shitting on the rug and eating food off the table and whining constantly for attention. They did, however, when needing to be walked, provide lovely little interludes for Lipsky and Wallace to walk about his neighborhood observing things, and it was clear that Wallace loved Jeeves and Droid to pieces and that they were his constant companions.

- He had a weird thing for Alanis Morissette’s “sloppy sexiness” and her song “You Oughta Know”, which he kept referring to incorrectly as “Want You To Know”, which he had apparently taped off a college radio station (a tidbit I found irresistibly cute); and he had rather poor taste (in my opinion) in popular music in general, which kind of makes sense- I mean, if you’re devoting your time to writing gigantic generation-defining tomes you probably don’t have a lot of spare hours to dig through crates of obscure music. But he did reveal an intimate knowledge of Brian Eno’s oeuvre and was a fan of Nirvana, both of which I found heartening. At one point he also made the connection that he and Cobain were working at the same themes, in a very similar fashion, but through different mediums. Two of the most devastating artistic suicides of our generation sharing this overlapping span of space-time, chewing on the same issues and relevancies- it’s a thought to be mulled over.

- His bouts with depression started in very early adulthood/late adolescence, and he would numb himself with excessive drinking before he was on meds, but this self-anesthetizing tapered off. His conversations with Lipsky often returned to themes like loneliness and “the continuum of addiction” and how he thought these things really defined modern America- that one of the real terrors in life is that we never have enough of anything to assuage our desires in entertainment, in achievement, in comfort- a cyclical lack of fulfillment on a societal level; that a deep, soul-bound unfulfillment was driving a lot of our cultural tendencies. Infinite Jest was his response to that.

- Being absurdly brilliant and recognized for his talents at a ridiculously young age (Broom of the System was published in his early twenties) disabused him of the notion of fame as a motivating factor for an artist’s work. Eschewing fame as a motivational force and then having fame thrust upon him was a situation he was clearly grappling with during the time of these interviews (it was a recurring subject). The fame that came to him after the publication of Infinite Jest is really almost unlike anything that has happened in modern literature- more like rock star level fame- and it’s hard to imagine that situation recurring in the current state of things now in 2011, but I’d like to think of it as a potentiality.

- The man ate tons of junk food. Like Denny’s, McDonald’s type junk food. I found this vaguely charming.

- Seeing David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in grad school reaffirmed his belief that surrealist art could speak to honest, unobscure truths as much as realism- a kind of surrealism that is only like a 1/10th variable of realism, and it is that tiny bit of offness that can really make an impact and impression on the psyche, can transform something into a personalized, lasting set of images.

- It oddly reassures me that even a man as brilliant as David Foster Wallace couldn’t resist yelling “asshole” or “motherfucker” when people did assholish or motherfuckerish things in traffic; that a big time intellectual arteeest still gets properly pissed off while driving. This just actually makes me feel better about my own anger issues.

- DFW’s work, especially while composing Infinite Jest, kept him from maintaining healthy relationships with girlfriends. This just betrays the fact that he was a man to whom work was the primary focus of his life, and when he needed to be alone and work, he needed to be alone and work. It is heartening that he eventually married. And once again his dogs seemed to be a constant in his life that women, for time, could not be.

- That bandanna was not an image-conscious affectation, but was a fashion acquired through functionality, to keep sweat from dripping from his brow onto his page (or worse, he feared, into an electronic typewriter, causing a shock) in the Tuscon heat. It later became a more personalized symbol of keeping his shit together, “not losing his head”.

- He liked movies where “shit blew up”. In fact it seems, under all the avant-garde proclivities, that he possessed a very normalized, American taste for entertainment, and confessed a great fear that he could easily slip into a numbed zombie state watching TV. He eyed television as a kind of super-potent drug and kept a healthy distance from it. But the point here is that the high-brow and the low-brow held equal fascination for him, and the fact that he could sense the revelatory in the pedestrian stuff is a key to his ability to transform the banal aspects of a media-saturated culture into some really redeeming intellectual matter in his essays. He didn’t outright reject the dreck of pop culture as is the tendency of a lot of academics, but attempted to find the illuminating things whirling in the rubbish cyclones.

- I challenge you not to tear up when Lipsky, toward the end of the book, makes a sort of compendium of the objects decorating Wallace’s house, a kind of litany of his most endearing possessions.

- David Foster Wallace believed in the magic of literature, like to the core of his bones, in its power to connect, to overcome loneliness, to teach a kind of morality, to show us that we are smarter and better than we think we can be, that literature is vitally important to the experience of being a human being, at now or any time in history, that literature can save us in some way. It didn’t save him. But his work could save others, could at least point a flashlight in the darkness. Two quotes:

”...if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, 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 good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely love more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.”

”Today’s person spends way more time in front of screens. In fluorescent-lit rooms, in cubicles, being on one end or the other of an electronic data transfer. And what is it to be human and alive and exercise your humanity in that kind of exchange? Versus fifty years ago, when the big thing was, I don’t know what, havin’ a house and a garden and driving ten miles to your light industrial job. And livin’ and dyin’ in the same town you’re in, and knowing what other towns looked like only from photographs and the occasional movie reel. I mean, there's just so much that seems different, and the speed with which it gets different is just...

The trick, the trick for fiction it seems to me, is gonna be to try to create enough mimesis to show that really nothing’s changed, I think. And that what’s always been important is still important. And that the job is to find out how to do that stuff, in a world whose texture and sensuous feel is totally different.”

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there had been three copies of this book given to Connor last week instead of two I would own my very own copy of this. Right now this book would be on my bookcase, figuratively (but not actually, because I have no order to my books) between my copies of Everything and More and Oblivion, aka the DFW books I'd been 'saving' for a rainy day to stave off the long periods between his work, that will now most likely never be read because that perfect day to read them will never come and because they tied in with own superstitious forms of magical thinking. Instead I only had this copy on loan for me to crack into its virginal pages before it gets passed on to Karen and then MFSO and whomever he then passes it on to.

That figurative place on the shelf will instead be filled by Pale King, a book I am eagerly awaiting but which I'll probably never have the fortitude to actually read.

I'm shitty about writing about DFW, I've tried before to write a review of Infinite Jest but it's never been anything that I've wanted to share, or liked very much. I think I did write a review for This is Water, but I don't remember what I wrote in it, and I think if I re-read the review I'd end up deleting the review, and thus losing any votes I got for it. Because for some reason those votes matter, they validate ourselves somehow (believing I'm only writing reviews read by the same people out there consciously or not trying to get the most votes possible).

Or maybe the votes are only a validation that what is essentially a lonely activity means something besides whatever it is that drives one to read books in a culture that entertainment can be sought after that takes much less time or effort to appreciate. We get acknowledgment and have some simulacrum of interaction, in the form of a number of votes. It's kind of pathetic when thought about this way. Is it sad that the votes are a sign that someone somewhere out there has read what you've written, or at least enough of it to click the yes button? I don't know, I'm not even sure where I'm going with this.

Serious reading isn't an activity for the healthy, it's not the kind of thing happy well-adjusted people do these days, they don't have anxiety attacks if others intrude on their time they normally spend with their books. I mention this because I can't picture a casual reader enjoying Infinite Jest, it's not the kind of book to read a few pages of before bed, or just on the train or wherever people read who don't structure their lives around their reading (not that you must be as nonfunctional with the world as I perceive myself to be to enjoy difficult books, I just don't know where a reader of James Patterson, who takes a few weeks to finish a book, or a 'reader' who reads like 20 books a year actually reads, this isn't a slight on people who read considerably less than myself, more maybe how an alcoholic looks in wonder at the person who can have a couple of drinks, enjoy themselves and then not drink too much or have another drink for a few weeks or something). It's a demanding book in a lot of ways. Why subject oneself to demanding books? What does it matter if you read a book that takes effort on your own part to get something out of it, why does it make the book feel more rewarding than reading an escapist piece of literature that lets you get a few cheap thrills as a respite from whatever else is going on around you?

These are some of the 'questions' raised in the conversations DFW and Lipsky have during their few days they spend together on the butt end of the IJ book tour in 1996.

Most of this book, well all of it actually except for the forward, introduction and afterward, are interviews. As a note to publisher: please put the afterward in the back of the book, after the text, or else re-name it something else, like preface? This is something that bothers me, and I feel would also bother DFW and anyone else who takes words even slightly seriously.

Most of the book is just DFW talking, and that is awesome. Unfortanetly there are very intrusive 'modern-day 2010' parenthetical asides from Lipsky. Too many of these are really awkward, state the obvious or feel belittling to the reader's (well my) intelligence. I think it's fairly safe to say that the type of person who is going to want to read a 300 page interview with DFW probably is already somewhat familiar with him, or is the type of person who doesn't need to be coddled.

There are quite a few interesting things I've learned in this book. For example I now feel committed to tracking down original versions of all of the pre-published stories in Girl with Curious Hair to read what the differences there are between them and the book version.

Towards the end, in what I think of as one of the climaxes of the non-narrative structure of this book, the reader finds out the reasons for his bandanna wearing and the awkward position the attention that has been given to his bandannas has put him in.

One also learns that there are all of these other things that he wrote that were either never published or which in his deep depression of the last 1980's thought were crap and never did anything with them. I have a feeling he's the kind of writer who would destroy something he hated, but I hope he isn't, and that the two novellas he claimed to have written around the time he wrote the story Westward are still in existence somewhere. I also would love to read his first long essay on the porn industry that included a lot of visits to porn sets, which had been arranged by Playboy but never published. I have no idea if any of this stuff still actually exists though.

The DFW parts of this book are definitely five stars, it's only the awkwardness of the layout and handling of the editorializing that make this less than a five star book. If one isn't already in love with DFW this book is probably not going to make you like him anymore, but for fans of his, this book is precious...

[Franco Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The point of books was to combat loneliness.”

Siempre es bueno leer a Wallace. En este caso, leerlo en esta extensa entrevista que le hizo David Lipsky en su gira "Infinite Jest".

Un libro que me hizo replantear mucho de lo que creía. Se tratan temas como los peligros de la fama, la televisión, la soledad de la sociedad y su relación con el consumismo y el entretenimiento, lo que es ser un escritor, el exhaustivo y frustrante mundo editorial, el narcisismo, el rol del arte, el modo en que nos comunicamos y, sin duda lo más importante, lo que significa ser un ser humano en un planeta tan artificial.

Excelente y muy emotivo. Una visión única e imperdible de la vida a través de la brillante mente de David Foster Wallace.

[Jimmy Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm constantly at a loss for words, or just generally inarticulate whenever I attempt to explain why I think David Foster Wallace is such an extremely important writer and thinker. These attempts often result in an adjective-laden stream of fawning praise; the sort of comments that I try to avoid when I can. In the end, I'm just too frustrated to speak or write, especially when I'm left with the task of defending him in a social environment. And I'm now especially frustrated because there are so many neurotic layers of self-conscious thought about what happened in 2008, and it's just, it's just such a damn sensitive subject.

The most immediate, and, I think, accurate defense that I can muster up is that it's this brilliant generational sympathy that his books embody, and that Wallace's stylistic and narrative voice seemed to articulate my own symptomatic and conditional, cultural and social neurosis. He did, what I think many of the postmodernists did; he offered some semblance of artistic cohesion to the vast network of data, closed systems, pop-culture, and media that I call my everyday reality. Surely, this all sounds simultaneously way too verbose, and yet mind-numbingly vague. Yet, the onslaught of contemporary vignettes contained in Infinite Jest spoke to a condition, one that I can only allude to, much in the same way I can only really allude to what I think defines postmodernity. I should really stop using that term anyway. As I've mentioned before, if Fredric Jameson has taught me anything about postmodernity, it's that this term is utterly meaningless, and this lesson of his was in no part intentional.

An Infinite Jest review that I've been planning since I created a profile on this site, is probably going to sound much like this one, so you have been forewarned. I really just need to reread it; it has been about eight years. In fact, I haven't read a DFW book in about five years. I find it difficult to at this point. And now The Tale of Genji beckons with its length and practically indecipherable cultural references, so I feel that the timing is sort of off.

Anyway ... Lipsky's book ...

Can one really call it Lipsky's book? Who is this schlemihl anyway? I mean, all that I can really say about his input as a journalist (and I understand that this all sounds sort of silly, as this project is responsible for there being like a book-length collection of DFW insights and aphorisms, and more of his generally wonderful argot and slang) makes the interview sound like Tuesdays with Morrie for the Yaddo set. A number of aspects of his approach to the piece are really just reprehensible, and it's this standard Rolling Stone bullshit about past drug abuse and racy stories that leaves me with no wonder whatsoever about the fact that this was the first piece that the notorious pop-culture rag had done about a young writer in ten years. And any half-aware reader can detect this passive-aggressive attempt on Lipsky's behalf to sort of call Wallace out on a contradictory and/or hypocritical writing philosophy.

What this all comes down to is the fact that if you put Wallace in front of a ten year old kid asking questions about his favorite color, and what dead personage he would, like really enjoy playing tennis with, he would probably give glowing and hyper-insightful responses. And I'm complaining, I know. And even though Lipsky did sort of grow on me in the end, all I'm saying is that I am not attributing the greatness of the piece to his accomplishment as a journalist. It's just more Wallace, which is like brain candy to me.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid.”
― DFW, quoted by David Lipsky in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself



At first, I thought Lipsky was kind of operating in that opportunist zone (and I'm sure there is a little of that, b/c journalism never can claim to be opportunist-free). Lipsky had, packed away, tapes and tapes of unused RS interviews with DFW. DFW has just killed himself, wow, a perfect time to rush it to press. The more I read, however, the more I realized in many ways I preferred the rough, transcription-like, quality of the book AND that it wasn't as simple as it first appeared.

The dialogue between Lipsky and Wallace provided an interesting, unfiltered look into Wallace's method and a peek into his head (even though ultimately, I think Wallace was guarding that sanctum sanctorum pretty well). Wallace, during the road-trip interview, once remarked that writing was an intimate connection of the writer's brain voice with the reader's brain voice. Later, he expanded this theme when talking about how there are things that really good fiction can do that other forms of art can't do as well --

"And the big thing, the big thing seems to be, sort of leapin' over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience. And setting up, I think, a kind of intimate coversation between two consciences. And the trick is gonna be finding a way to do it at a time, and for a generation, whose relation to long sustained linear verbal communication is fundamentally different."

So, in that way, Lipsky's piece, while appearing at first to provide just a simple throw-up of all those unused RS interview notes and tapes, actually provides an avenue to see DFW's intimate 'brain voice' conversation. While at one level Lipsky has given us an interesting conversation between the author and DFW, it ultimately seemed to be a conversation DFW is having with himself (Lipsky here seems like a pretty good looking-glass for David Foster Wallace).

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in my misspent early twenties I labored for far longer than was prudent on a short story. The story involved a young writer who had stumbled into becoming the epicenter of the cultural zeitgeist of his day. People were so enamored with his thoughts and found his insights so refreshing that the books themselves soon became superfluous. When the corporate overlord types realized that the fans were getting an adequate fix from merely basking in his aura at readings and the occasional late night talk show appearance they scrambled for a way to monetize the situation. What they came up with was to build a beautiful addition onto the writer’s home under the pretense that it was a thank you gift for all of his hard work. The addition included a bathroom with all of the amenities. Unbeknownst to the writer the walls of the bathroom were soundproof, one-way glass, and on the other side of the glass were several sets of metal park bleachers. Fans would pay ten bucks a head to sit in the bleachers and stare in wonder as the writer took care of his biological necessities. When his facial expressions would change from a strained grimace to a peaceful slack the crowd would assume that a profound, “writerly” thought had just whooshed through his head and would respond with thunderous applause, high-fiving in the aisles, etc. There may have even been top secret corporate memos flying around in the background that proposed secreting more fiber into his diet over long weekends and the summer months, but it gets hazy from that point.

The reason that I mention this silly story is because I somewhat identify with the generically faceless, doe-eyed fans in the bleachers as it pertains to David Foster Wallace. His work that I have encountered up to this point, both fiction and nonfiction, have been very appealing to me at some level. Part of this is that he seems to have been totally brilliant but still able to speak to readers at different levels without belaboring the point that he was the smartest guy in the room. Although he stated several times that the voice used in his nonfiction essays was intentionally designed to sound more like a blundering everyman than he considered himself in everyday life, there was still a modest, Midwesterner way in which he carried himself that I find totally endearing.

Obviously with this attitude going in this book was going to give me everything that I wanted. The title sums it all up, as it is a series of interviews with DFW while he was wrapping up promotional work for Infinite Jest in early 1996. The main theme running through these interviews is that shortly after the book was released DFW got picked up by this unanticipated tsunami of being a literary celebrity and is trying to reconcile that with his own social phobias and perceptions of what a writer’s life should be like. If that is not your cup of tea there are also plenty of fun little factoids that wander into the conversation. Examples of these include allusions to the fact that he was a very lackluster housekeeper and that he had a major crush on Alanis Morissette during this time period.

So we get conversations with DFW (in Midwestern vernacular, no less) along with a cool pic on the cover and those unevenly cut pages that I love so much (even though I still don’t know the technical industry word for that). This is looking like a five star review….except…

There was one big problem that I had with this book, and his name is David Lipsky. Lipsky is a fine enough interviewer and seems to be a great writer if the introductory materials are any indication, but the way that the book is set up is very irritating. If this book is being presented as conversations that took place during a road trip then further exposition was needed in order for the framework of the road trip to illuminate the conversations. Otherwise, it would be more effective to format the book as a straight series of sit-down interviews. Aside from the final reading of the tour that Lipsky attended with DFW, the travel itinerary makes little sense to a reader trying to put it into context. It seems almost as if they just drove up and down I-55 and stopped at every Denny’s.

Lipsky also throws in tons of parenthetical asides that feel like afterthoughts, many of which could have been more judiciously arranged within the text. An example of this is that throughout the book Wallace keeps reaching over and turning Lipsky’s tape recorder on and off for no explainable reason, and Lipsky notes every instance of this in parenthetical tape recorder status updates. It almost comes off like an ongoing facial tic within the conversation. Finally near the end of the book (pg.291) Lipsky reveals that the reason for this is that DFW is editing and revising his answers on the fly. I wouldn’t have been nearly as annoyed by the tape recorder shenanigans if that bit of information would have been revealed much sooner.

Perhaps I just didn’t get it. Maybe Lipsky intentionally formatted the book in this way to show us the stilted, chaotic nature of travel and human conversation. I would like to think this, but my suspicion is that Lipsky just turned in a pile of jumbled notes and the publisher just had it typeset as it was because DFW’s name could be plastered on the cover. The reason that I have descended into a nasally bitch/moan about all of this is that there are some great insights in this book, but I fear that this will be a throw-away item with very little longevity – the literary equivalent to all of those Michael Jackson t-shirts in stores exactly a year ago.

[Tom Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read "Infinite Jest" in 2016. 20 years late, but in my defense I was only 11 when it was first published and hardly equipped to read such a masterwork -- not mentally, not emotionally, and probably not even physically capable of lifting the sucker. I am glad I read it at age 31, since it's a sad book that is made much more poignant with the experience of time. I read it, and I felt such a personal connection that I was surprised, really taken aback and impressed by how this man, this Wallace guy, he seemed to be intimately familiar with my own inner workings.

I fell in love, in short.

What I like about "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" is that you can tell David Lipsky fell in love too.

He writes of Wallace with admiration, with adoration. He is tender and celebratory--especially in the preface and afterword. Plus I really dig Lipsky's style, his flourishes and imagery and appeals to a very literate audience. Then when we get to the transcript itself, we get a glimpse into DFW's personality and persona. It's genuinely fascinating to hear someone deeply entrenched in writing talk about their craft, to pontificate about things like authorship and reader interpretation and the purpose of fiction. The format of an interview transcript is somewhat limited and it takes a bit of time to warm up and get rolling, but it's real. Real and genuine. And I found myself deeply appreciative of it.

5 stars out of 5.

(Read in 2017, the first book in my Alphabetical Reading Challenge)

[Donovan · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are really two books here: the book Lipsky seems to think it is--reflected in his framing devices--and the one that emerges from Wallace's words. The latter is fascinating, troubling, complicated, messy, occasionally banal, occasionally beautiful--a kind of stream of raw data that I grappled with, even (or especially) as I dealt with my inevitable guilt at exploiting public mourning and cultish genius-worship.

Unfortunately, and embarrassingly, Lipsky believes this is a book about _his_ growth and development as a writer as he interacts with Wallace and ponders the implications thereof. And so the words are undermined by bracketed musings on the interview that commit the mortal sin of _telling us what this all means_. These can range from merely annoying to truly vile: witness Lipsky's intrusion after Wallace notes that the kids in "Infinite Jest" are the age that his (Wallace's) children would be, the next generation. This is a complexly sad moment, to be sure, demanding reflection. It's also, you know, ambiguous. So what does Lipsky write? "Intersting and very sad: setting the novel the year after his death, somehow this is heartbreaking. His having no idea this is coming." This is the worst kind of telegraphing and distrusting of the audience. Wait, you mean Wallace had no idea he would hang himself twelve years later? And that it's "heartbreaking" that his novel was set thereabouts? Shocking! For a moment there I almost came to my own conclusions and responses. Ugh.

Also, starting with a chess game between the two of them and then continuing to note how "competitive" Wallace is in correcting quotes and generally one-upping him--you know, like a continuation of the chess game!--is not only trite as a narrative device but tiresome and again self-flattering in a way that helps no one. This is not Updike swinging by Roth's place to chat about craft and Vineyard barbecues. It is a journalist overstepping his bounds and, to address my worst fear, perhaps using this as a chance to promote his own literary voice, even subconsciously.

The slapdash cover (why a plane when the title has the words "road trip" in it? Why put DFW's name in huge print everywhere?) and disorganizd index give a sense of the publisher rushing to fill some kind of void--furthering the uneasy capitalization...

...and yet there is the inescapable moving, reflective quality of the interview itself, which becomes a meditation on the very art of interviewing: why delve into personal details, even when repetitively asked (Lipsky comes up with five different variations of "how did it feel to see that long line at the reading?", e.g.)? Why does the public seem to want famous writers to suffer and be happy? And when talking about the pure process of writing IJ--the sheer physical task of it--I was riveted. Would that the interviewer trusted us to inflect our own doubt and happiness where we find it in the sprawl of the conversation, rather than where he demands it.

[Sean Gibson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lipsky’s account of the five days he spent interviewing David Foster Wallace at the end of Wallace’s 1996 tour for the celebrated and densely impenetrable doorstop Infinite Jest is both an indelible and achingly realized snapshot of a time that no longer exists and a meditative discourse on literature, mental health, technology, addiction, the creative process, and authenticity.

It resonated with me for two primary reasons: 1) I worked in the commercial publishing world just after Infinite Jest’s publication (and worked for the book’s publisher) and Lipsky’s bittersweet ruminations about how much has changed in the relatively short time since then—so many fewer bookstores, so many fewer book tours, a promotional machine that looks wildly different—hit my nostalgia spot like a mouse hitting the food pellet button at the end of a maze; and 2) I loved the hell out of The End of the Tour (in large part because so much of what Wallace said—channeled through the nuanced performance by Jason Segel—resonated with me).

Unless you’re a lit fic superfan or have been inside the NY commercial publishing scene, I’m not sure this will be a particularly riveting read, but I loved it—obviously, your mileage may vary.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the only book I've ever pre-ordered from Amazon. Its structure and content are no secret - it's right there in the title. The road trip in question took place as DFW was winding down the book tour for Infinite Jest ; David Lipsky had been assigned to interview him for Rolling Stone. That interview never came to fruition - instead, Lipsky brings us this account of their 5-day road trip from March 1996.

I thought I'd devour it in one sitting, but it actually took a while to warm up to it - the first 100 pages meander somewhat and are a little repetitive. But then, as the two men get more comfortable with each other, Lipsky hits his stride - the unwinding, ongoing conversation gets more and more interesting. The final 100 pages are fascinating, moving and bittersweet - as is so often the case with DFW, you come away with the mixture of exhilaration and sense of privilege that comes from experiencing him at his best, and his suicide is all the more heartbreaking. This may not necessarily win him any new fans, but for someone like me, with a long-standing intellectual crush on DFW, this further chance to experience his wit, smartness and decency seemed like a blessing.

David Lipsky has done a good thing by sharing the story of his time with DFW. He seems a little uncertain about how best to structure the narrative, and I wouldn't say that all of his choices are ideal. I mean him no disrespect, but the parts that worked best were the straight transcripts of their conversation, with minimal interruption. For the most part, his efforts to sprinkle in atmospheric details were sporadic, unhelpful, at best boring and at times profoundly irritating. For example,
[Silverware sounds, beeping sounds, working restaurant: talk and hum]. Dude, who gives a s**t? Nobody is reading this book to hear your description of Denny's.

But actually, writing this book can't have been easy for Lipsky; to do it well, he had to keep his own presence as muted as possible. (Though I guess that's no more than taking a reporter's role, rather than an author's) It's to his credit that he does this reasonably well - I'd be lying if I said that his occasional commentary is particularly insightful. In fact his questions over the first 100 pages seemed vapid and/or tactless; this problem did not persist, and he does a good job of drawing DFW out in the later parts of the book. There were a few instances where Lipsky was downright obnoxious - badgering the writer repeatedly about some third-hand rumor that Rolling Stone had fed him about a possible heroin addiction in his past. DFW denies it point blank at the outset, but Lipsky keeps gnawing like a jackal; after a while you realize that it takes him the better part of the entire trip to understand - finally - that having an addictive personality (i.e. prone to addiction) is not the same thing as being an addict. But, to be fair, nobody is going to come off looking smart when interviewing David Foster Wallace. Though Lipsky should probably have read IJ more thoroughly beforehand, given he was about to spend several days with the author

AT this point some of you may be rolling your eyes and muttering that I must have drunk the DFW Kool-Aid. Guilty as charged, I suppose. I can only point out in my defence that no other author has this effect on me.

Concretely, what might one expect to learn about DFW from this book?
He was clearly hugely ambivalent about the potential price of success, fame and the associated hype - this is a recurrent theme throughout. There's some biographical material about his earlier life that may be unfamiliar, assorted trivia about his taste in movies and TV shows, but the true pleasure is in the journey, getting to spend more time with DFW, if only figuratively.

Isolated remarks or information that stuck with me:

(on the literary scene in New York) the enormous hiss of egos at various stages of inflation and deflation
(while confessing his fondness for Alanis Morrissette) Sheryl Crow made me want to vomit, from the very beginning.
I liked that the omniscient DFW misidentifies Frank O' Connor, author of "My Oedipus Complex", "First Confession" among other stories, as "Frank O' Hara". It humanizes him.
I loved that he pissed off his editor by printing out the first draft of Infinite Jest single-spaced in 9-point type, to try to make it seem shorter than its actual length, and that the editor screamed at him and forced him to print him a fresh copy, double-spaced.
Throughout the conversation, Foster Wallace also gives a pretty cogent explanation for the type of deliberate complication of the reader's experience that is an integral part of Infinite Jest . For anyone specifically interested in hearing him talk about his writing, one of the best bets is still Laura Miller's 1996 interview in Salon.com:

http://www.salon.com/09/features/wall...

DAMN. Now I'm sad all over again.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit---to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person... It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff and develop... and just, and think really hard. What not everyone has the luxury to do. (p. 41)”


In 1996, author David Lipsky embarked on a five-day road trip/interview with David Foster Wallace, in which the two waxed philosophical on everything from addiction, fame, sex, television, “Die Hard”, Alanis Morrisette, the current state of American literature, the meaning of life and death, and Wallace’s book, “Infinite Jest”.

Lipsky had intended to write a full-length cover feature for Rolling Stone, the magazine for which he was working at the time. It never actually appeared, which for the shy, new-to-fame anti-celebrity Wallace was probably for the best.

Several years, a few more books, a marriage, and a long-fought battle with severe depression later, Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in his living room one day in September 2008.

Saddened by the news, Lipsky dug out the tape-recorded interview of that ’96 road trip, transcribed it, and published it in 2010 under the title “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”. Several years later, the book was made into a movie called “The End of the Tour” with an excellent performance by Jason Segel as Wallace.

The book is exactly what one would expect from a road trip interview with Wallace: heady, intellectual, somewhat pretentious, fascinating, enlightening, depressing, and humorous.

There is no doubt that Wallace was a genius, literary or otherwise. His book, “Infinite Jest”, a 1,000-plus page magnum opus remains my Mt. Everest of books. The farthest I have ever read in the book was about 400 pages before I was utterly stymied. It is a book which captivates and infuriates in equal measure. The writing is clearly beautiful, but the book is so dense with information and written in such a bizarrely experimental fashion that, at times, it is almost unreadable. For me. I have heard some people say that they did not have a problem reading the book at all. I hate these people.

Anyway, upon the publication of “Infinite Jest”, which nearly broke the publishing industry and thrust Wallace into an unprecedented rock star-like fame (at least among his fellow literary cognoscenti), Wallace was uncertain and not at all prepared to deal with his new life; a life which didn’t look all that different from his old life except that now he was on the cover of TIME magazine.

Lipsky’s interview reveals a candid down-to-Earth “regular guy” in Wallace, a talented writer who knows he has a gift while at the same time questioning whether he deserves it. Of course, Lipsky questions whether the “regular guy” is a persona that Wallace is simply trying to create to hide his troubled genius.

Wallace’s mind works on a different level than most humans, according to Lipsky. It is always working, always processing, always thinking, always on.

As someone who has dealt with clinical depression (although admittedly nowhere near the level of Wallace), I can relate to that feeling. For me, though, it was manageable, and it was never something that lasted long periods of time. I have lived most of my life in periods of clarity. I think, for Wallace, his experience was the opposite. His struggle was a life-long one, and, in the end, his depression beat him.

Wallace’s genius was his ability to channel that uncontrollable tumultuous mind, rein it in and create some amazing literature.

Lipsky, thankfully, did not do much editing or parsing of Wallace’s words. He wrote the entire interview verbatim with limited editorializing. Occasionally he would set the scene or add a few details (songs playing on the radio in the background, Wallace’s facial gestures at the time, etc.)

He just lets Wallace talk, and Wallace was a great talker.

One of the things that Wallace was great at doing, in his writing, was extrapolation. In the few parts of “Infinite Jest” that I actually read, Wallace imagines a future in which we have essentially destroyed ourselves---our society, our culture, our world---through overindulgence with entertainment; entertainment as an addiction.

Wallace saw the writing on the wall. He saw the stirrings, in ’96, of evening news being guided not by a pursuit of truth but by ratings and entertainment value. He foresaw the coming of social media like Facebook and Twitter; a nation of people staring into glowing screens, believing that they are connecting to the world when in reality they are more alone than ever. He imagined a world in which real Art was dead, supplanted by dime-store entertainment that offered no substance or lasting value.

And while Wallace could not have foreseen the 2016 election year or its candidates, he nevertheless eerily predicted a scenario in which a Donald Trump presidency was a possibility: “The thing that really scares me about this country---and again, I’d want you to stress, I’m a private citizen, I am not a pundit. Is I think we’re really setting ourselves for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do---or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by---is getting so bad, um, that I think it’s, there’s even a, [Friedrich] Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, I mean, makes a similar argument economically. But I think, you know, in Pat Buchanan, in Rush Limbaugh, there are rumbles on the Western horizon, you know. And that it’s going to be, that the next few decades are going to be really scary. Particularly if things get economically shaky, and people for instance---people who’ve never been hungry before, might be hungry or might be cold. (p. 158)”

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read, primarily because this type of book is so rare. I felt the same way about this as I did Stephen King’s On Writing, however the primary difference was I had a slight feeling of guilt and pervasion and voyeuristic shame after delving into this partially “off the record” account of Lipsky’s time with Wallace. There is nothing new I learned about Wallace the person in here but there was plenty I learned about his creative process. There’s no comment to be made on the style/prose as it’s a raw transcription of the tape recorder that’s contents would have been stripped down and edited had Lipsky’s Rolling Stone piece transpired and so it’s clunky, messy and occasionally confusing, but ultimately extremely insightful. The formatting and shaping of Lipsky’s notes occasionally jarred and every now and again I did find myself mistaking Lipsky’s internal monologue and place setting for dialogue between the two. This wasn’t a major issue at all. This is a great read for Wallace fans, pop-culture junkies, lit-fiction fans, movie-lovers etc. The book is filled with discussions about music, cinema, Gen-X America, contemporary society’s relationship with fiction, the eighties, postmodernism and how it feels to be a polarising figure in fiction. Oh, and the physical copy is lovely.

[Ligeia · Rating 4 out of 5]

come diventare uno scrittore onesto

nonostante il titolo imbecille, pare quello di un manuale di auto aiuto, si tratta di una bella intervista a DFW durante il tour promozionale di Infinite Jest

David era agli inizi della fama, aveva già pubblicato ma questo era quello giusto per farsi notare, c'era una certa cautela nel percepire quel che accadeva, e la verità è che lui aveva una gran paura di abituarsi alle aspettative che la fama induce, e aveva paura di rimanere deluso...il vuoto e la paura tornano di continuo nelle sue parole, e se è per questo anche nei suoi libri...
con una certa onestà racconta il periodo dell'ospedale psichiatrico, dell'università e dei primi libri, quando era un promettente giovane scrittore, che però per un certo periodo si è messo a fare l'addetto agli asciugamani in una palestra...ovviamente ha piantato tutto appena si è visto nello specchio della fama di un collega...divertenti i siparietti con gli allievi e lo spaventoso racconto dell'editing di IJ, deve essere stato un incubo, e questo racconta da solo l'infinita volontà di affermazione che preme per uscire a dispetto di tutto...gli amici che gli fanno da correttori di bozze, la sorella che lui paga un tot a pagina per farsi aiutare a scovare i refusi...interessante soprattutto perchè racconta meglio di qualunque altra cosa il modo in cui il suo immenso cervello elaborava le informazioni più pericolose e indigeste...

due parole sulla prosa saccente di Lipsky: non si sentiva davvvero il bisogno dei suoi commenti sull'accento del sud di David, delle sue precisazioni su come pronuncia questo e quello e, quel che è peggio, nemmeno delle sue tirate su "non sarebbe bello poter tornare indietro a quel momento e dirgli cosa lo aspettava?"
no, non sarebbe nè bello nè auspicabile, David già aveva abbastanza paura così, probabilmente si sarebbe ucciso prima se avessa saputo quello che Lipsky sapeva quando compila, inspiegabilmente con tanto ritardo, il diario di quei giorni...

postilla
alla fine l'ho trovato a metà prezzo e me lo sono preso
ecco, metà del prezzo di copertina per me è quanto vale questo libro, alla faccia della Legge Levi e delle case editrici che siamo sempre di meno e più cercano di spolparci, ma che furbi, vero?:-)

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re a fan of DFW, you won’t go wrong with reading this. A nice addition to understanding the man, even if only through a series of conversations that are often cut short by him, car troubles, the author, flight issues, or waiters and waitresses butting in. A few things:

- I am so annoyed that we don’t get to hear DFW’s opinions on Toy Story. The tape cuts just before he answers.

- Boy, do not bring up John Updike with DFW.

- Seriously… Jonathan Franzen Franchise Redemption Run?

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of Stephen King's greatest characters ever, Roland Deschain of Gilead, was a Gunslinger. In King's universe, a Gunslinger was a kind of "walking justice" that roamed the worlds trying to keep order where disorder reigned. These men were by no means sages or smiling monks. They were filled with a sense of right and wrong in the world that made them lethal when they needed to be. But it was their knowledge, their ability to understand others around them, that made them best suited for their jobs.

Without sounding cheesy, I believe David Foster Wallace is a type of Gunslinger in our world. He just did it with words rather than bullets.

I thoroughly enjoy DFW's work because it is so deep, so funny, and filled with moments where you say to yourself, "I know the exact feeling from which that passage sprang." He's like a painter who paints a scene that you can look through and say, "I've seen that, and I felt the way the painter does."

DFW's knowledge of the world, and of the human condition, really comes through in this book. Reading the transcript of his interviews with David Lipsky makes you feel happy to be a human being, and happy that there are other people out there who feel compassionate about the written word. Wallace was one of those rare men who could be hilarious one moment and genius the next. He proves that simply because something is complex does not mean we should shun it; we should embrace it because we will learn more about ourselves when we do.

To understand him more, read the book.

There are many moments when I am reading that I wish he were still alive.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh how we enjoy glimpsing beautiful minds. Lipsky presents the mostly likable genius in a mostly interesting way. I have to admit, though, that I was probably looking too hard for signs of the tragic loss that was to come. DFW’s self-consciousness about how different he was seemed to clash with his Dale Carnegie cum cool exterior. I read the Afterword last, despite its placement at the beginning, and I think it was better to do it that way. It discussed the years after the interview, especially his last one, in enlightening detail.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 300-page interview reads like a transcript of the best conversation you've ever had in your life, with the most interesting, erudite, and cleverest person you've ever known. It made me want to go back in time to my college years and seek out the people I knew then who used to set my brain on fire with our 2 a.m. debates about what it means to be alive, and how best to be an above-average human being. Above all, this book made me wish that I still had friends like that in my life and, perhaps more importantly, that I had the faculty to engage in such a deep conversation these days.

It also reminded me of one of my favorite movies, My Dinner with Andre (which Lipsky himself references in the book). It seems hanging out with David Foster Wallace might have had the capacity for altering your mindset. Though, ironically enough, as I learned in this book, I would never have had the opportunity to do so as one of his many fans, since Wallace was incredibly uncomfortable interacting with his readers on a personal level. (As, indeed, most writers probably are--they just don't admit it.)

I suppose it goes without saying that reading the book is also incredibly sad. But it's worth it, and though I wish I'd read the book with a pencil so that I could call attention to the lines that really lit up my brain like in the old days, in a way I'm happy that, to reexperience those lines I'll need to reread the book--and that's something I look forward to even one day after having finished it. (Particularly since it took only one sitting for me to plow through the first 200 pages of the interview.)

As moved as I was by the contents of this book (not to mention how choked up I got by the section in Lipsky's afterword that describes one of Wallace's final interactions with his mother), I would say it's primarily for Wallace fans, not for someone who has never read any of Wallace's work (be it fiction or nonfiction). But then again, there's no one who shouldn't be a fan of Wallace's work. If you haven't read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again you should. It's hilarious.

(NOTE: You can find an index of the book here: Ghostwood Hotel.)

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

DFW is maybe in the process of achieving literary sainthood, so this transcript is like a textual shroud of Turin. The open rawness of watching DFW "wrestle with burly psychic self-consciousness figures" and talk in "crazy circles" lets you spend some serious time with the three-dimensional writer saint himself. Lots of riffs were familiar from essays/other interviews, but this seems like the real raw thing, a pretty comprehensive swipe at everything important to him at the time, all of it animated with dogs, copious dip spit, gestures, atmospherics -- in fact, I liked thinking of it as a screenplay for an animated film like "Waking Life," except not nearly as philosophically sophomoric/bad.

It's an invaluable document about his thoughts on Infinite Jest, how it got written, published, and publicized, his reaction to its reception, etc. Sometimes it started to feel like a long therapy session, not in a bad way -- I was struck by how often he used words like "fear" and "afraid" and "terror" when talking about pop culture and media. At times such talk feels a little dated, like a document of a comparatively peaceful American era after the fall of the Soviet Union, before 9-11/the rise of Al Qaeda, and before the collapse of the economy, when the only thing to fear was the hole in the center of swirlin' whirlpoolin' empty-calorie sense data. Interestingly, at one point he presages Obama's speeches about taking responsibility, which reminded me that he died a few days after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate -- I'd linked the two immediately, not really knowing the extent of his "cancer of the soul."

[I had no real complaints with the bracketed interjections -- I thought they were sometimes a little underdeveloped/unnecessary, but they always treaded lightly and respectfully:].

Anyway, after a point I couldn't stop reading -- I welcome all further artifacts of this peculiarly infectious, enlivening, explicitly intelligent, compassionate consciousness.

[Jody Sperling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, every time I return to something written by or about David Foster Wallace I fall into that same spell of really deep love and admiration. He’s such an important influence on my life and my writing that I can’t quantify what he’s given to me. Sad we lost him.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, um, like enjoyed. Some of, uh.--ya know, David's [Foster Wallace] insights, commentary, and general analysis of uh things. As he saw them. I didn't [dudn't] care for David's [Lipsky] presentation of the uh interview. In which he like just seems to have really really transcribed the tapes. [Tape ends here]. This means he um uh um recorded all of the--hey lay down [talking to my dog]--anyway. All the hedgers and ya know are like in the book. Plus the--I said lay down--the context is almost totally like. It's just that. Well there's like no context given.

That was painful, and I must add that I like DFW even more now and that Lipsky should have looked to Jann (Wenner), who wrote an amazing oral biography of Hunter S., for guidance.

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as I originally gave it credit as being on my first read. I believe I was too emotionally involved back then and my love affair with all things Wallace clouded my judgment. After watching the film based on this book, and the horrid and pathetic character David Lipsky was portrayed as, I could not read a page without seeing this person and making me sick to my stomach. I think the interview actually sucked now, and just the opportunity back when the book first came out for me to reconnect with DFW another time sent me soaring with love and devotion. I am not so enamored anymore. My apologies to anyone who actually cared.

[Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate this author; this may be one of the worst books that I've ever come across. I really like listening to DFW, but somehow the author is able to make the book about himself. And while DFW and his philosophy / outlook are the subject, ultimately I have to judge the book by the author's handling of the subject. Hence, the one-star. This is one of those books that you are embarrassed to have on the shelf.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Lipsky has done a laudable service for both David Foster Wallace and his readership with this jaunty road-trip/interview/memoir. As Infinite Jest was being launched in 1996 and Wallace was nearing the end of his book tour, Lipsky, a rising name in journalism, followed Wallace through the last week of the tour, the Midwest portion, and recorded almost every word spoken. (The piece was supposed to run in Rolling Stone , but never did. Bad timing due to the untimely death of a rock star and other foibles of the industry.) Lipsky interviewed Wallace without ever being obtrusive or intrusive. He allowed their relationship to form organically, gradually, and avoided a forced fellowship. Rather than a stilted outcome of an interview, this cohered with warmth, wit, warts, a wink here and there, and a wily charm. A salty, chatty Wallace emerges as a captivating and unreliable narrator of his own life.

Lipsky precedes the interview with a mighty potent "afterword," a several page editorial that is also filled with specific facts about Wallace's depression and suicide. I sprung a leak; it was like he died all over again and I had to mourn him once more. It was tender, frank, and genuine. This is also the only section where it is revealed that Wallace had been on MAO inhibiters (an old-school anti-depressant) since 1989, a fact that Wallace chose not to reveal in the interviews. On the contrary, Wallace fairly denied being (currently) on any medication for depression. But, throughout the text of the interview, Lipsky tells the reader each time the author's watch beeped an alarm. It took me a while to put it together--it seemed extraneous to tell us that. But, I think that Lipsky was allowing the reader to connect the dots and draw the arguable conclusion without making any personal statements. Wallace was forthcoming about his depression, and even about his ECT treatments (electroconvulsive therapy). But he was opaque about his current medication regimen. He chewed tobacco almost ceaselessly, drank Coca-Cola like water, and enjoyed the occasional draught beer. And he ate like a lumberjack. (He was 6'2" and robust, athletic.)

Throughout the three hundred pages of this protracted interview, I engaged with the momentum of Wallace-speak. Because his verbiage is unedited, it is sometimes necessary to read his sentences more than once. They are often choked with articles, prepositions and conjunctives that, idiomatically, are natural, but difficult on the page initially. However, I got into the zone and flow. Wallace is an enthusiastic interviewee if erratic at times. He vacillates from agile, amiable, and arch to repetitive and awkward. There are also words that hold a lot of charge for him, such as "continuum." In fact, Lipsky relates looking up that word after he went back to his hotel room, because it was so fundamental to Wallace's formal conception of the psyche.

For the most part, I was illuminated by the book-sized interview. Wallace shares in-depth insights on growing up, his scholarly pursuits, tennis, depression, love, and of course, the process of writing. He discusses (not all at once, but at episodic intervals) the themes of Infinite Jest and the fear that we are in a culture of entertainment addiction. Additionally, Lipsky and Wallace deconstruct movies--from Lynch to Tarantino and several stops in-between. I was delighted that he waxed about my my favorite movie scene of all time--the scene in True Romance between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. They argue and examine literature and gossip a little about other writers and celebrities. Wallace had an almost childlike crush on Alanis Morissette, permeated with a fetching adoration and wonder.

There are about fifty pages in the middle that lost steam. They were repetitive and grinding at intervals and seemed to be placed there in order to add to the "road-trip" ambiance. I got antsy and wanted to move ahead to more luminous discussions.

By the end of the book, I felt closer to understanding Wallace, who yet remains an enigma and a haunting cautionary tale. Unintentionally, I felt a pull toward Lipsky, too. His observations are quick, inconspicuous, and often sublime. I was impressed by his tasteful treatment of Wallace's memory, of his regard for integrity, and his ability to capture the essence of this beautiful and tormented man and phenomenal author.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished watching the film THE END OF THE TOUR. It was my third or fourth viewing,
(of this excellent film) and each time I come away a bit depressed, saddened by the reality of DFW’s passing. I think David Foster Wallace was a genius, something a man of his insecurities wouldn’t like hearing, but it’s true. And it pains me to think of the great novels he still harbored in that mind. Actor Jason Segel brings DFW to life on the screen for 90 plus minutes in that film, speaking the very words David Lipsky recorded during his road trip with DFW on that final book tour for his novel INFINITE JEST: this is the book, Lipsky’s book, on which the film is based.

Back in 1996, writer David Lipsky is sent by Rolling Stone to join David Foster Wallace on the final leg of his INFINITE JEST book tour, to get to know the man who has just become internationally famous for his acclaimed 1,000-plus page novel. ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is the transcription of the tapes from those days on the road with DFW.

I supposed you’d have to be something of a DFW admirer to enjoy this book -- I mean, to really enjoy it, and since a lot of it entails discussions about INFINITE JEST, and what DFW was trying to say in that novel, having read INFINITE JEST would also be a prerequisite for full enjoyment of Lipsky’s book. What DFW makes clear in his conversations with Lipsky is that INFINITE JEST is about entertainment, about how entertainment is on a continuum of addictions which we, as Americans, seem peculiarly susceptible, TV, in particular. DFW envisions in IJ a near future where a video exists which is so entertaining that it holds the viewer in a reverie so powerful that he dies from starvation and sleep deprivation -- the viewer literally cannot stop watching. This is all told, of course, in Wallace’s unique prose style -- it’s comedy, science fiction, a foretelling.

I loved BECOMING YOURSELF because I loved DFW’s writing, and reading his words -- the words from DFW the writer and the man, not a character in one of his novels -- is about as close to a conversation with him as I’ll ever get. This book, for that reason alone, is a treasure.

[unnarrator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sure, you were sometimes kind of a jerk, Lipsky, with your relentless, page-after-PAGE obsession with getting Dave to admit that he was revelling in his slender post-IJ fame...but I'm deeply grateful to you anyway, for hustling this into print and giving me a few more hours with the guy. I really needed them, today. So thanks again, for that—and for having grown up quite a bit in between interview and publication, so that you could wryly perceive and admit to us that a) he was mostly yanking your chain, and b) your impressions of him were more about you than about him, about his reality. Which is true for all of us when it comes to Wallace, right? Nothing extraordinary, really; just another artist done in by the weight of our projections. Still how thankful I was today for even the fantasy of his ephemeral literary companionship. And for his humanity.

[Carrie (brightbeautifulthings) · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been a few years since I picked up a Wallace book. It reminds me of something lovely in my life that went terribly wrong, and judging by the random fits of crying that accompanied starting this book, I’m not over it. Part of me worries that I waited too long to come back to it, but the rest of me thinks I needed that space. Since this isn’t really a novel, I was trying to ease myself back in gently with mixed results.

Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky joins literary fiction author, David Foster Wallace, on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest. The book is creating more hype than anyone expected, throwing Wallace abruptly into the spotlight. Lipsky meets Wallace at his house in Bloomington, Illinois and travels with him to Minneapolis and back for his last reading. While the Rolling Stone article was never published, this is a transcript of the audiotapes from their time together as two writers discuss everything from fame to fiction.

Roberta from Offbeat YA is going to laugh at me for this, but one of my biggest problems with this book is that it has no STRUCTURE! What am I supposed to talk about in my reviews if not the structure?! I’m a major advocate for not reading introductions until I’ve finished a book, but I broke my rule here and read it anyway. I also read the curiously-placed-at-the-beginning-of-the-book afterword, although Lipsky recommends reading it on a “cigar-break” in the middle of the book. Why not just place it in the middle of the book if that’s where it goes? Why call it an afterword when it comes at the beginning?

I also didn’t really understand the content of the afterword, since the topic is mainly Wallace’s death in 2008. It got strangely biographical about that time period, which is at odds with the rest of the book, and I couldn’t understand the need for it. Is it because the Wallace biography, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, wouldn’t come out for two more years? I can’t think of a good reason, but that seems to apply basically to the book as a whole. I can’t think of a good reason for why any of it is put together the way it is. The title seems like a throwaway line (if Wallace can ever be said to have those), and I have trouble applying it to the book except in the most maudlin sense. If Lipsky is referring to Wallace, it seems to imply that the success with Jest has helped make Wallace the person he’s meant to be, which is not exactly supported by the text. If it’s about Lipsky, then the egos here are overwhelming.

The rest of the book is, predictably, a very long and meandering conversation between two intellectuals. There are frequent, unaccounted for breaks in topics, which isn’t surprising as it’s a transcript of real conversations, but it makes for rough transitions. Lipsky doesn’t always pursue topics that I find interesting, but he circles back to the fame regarding Infinite Jest a maddening number of times. It’s alternately exasperating and insightful (maybe a little more of the former, at least for me), and there’s really no sense of plot development or closure because this isn’t a novel; it’s real life, and despite Lipsky’s clumsy attempts to pull some kind of moral or message out of their time together, real life doesn’t usually have that. It’s just life. It’s a glimpse into the mind of an extremely talented and intelligent person, but it’s also stonewalled by its own context. Wallace and Lipsky can never forget that Lipsky is a reporter and that, no matter how genuine he might appear, some of Wallace’s speeches are, in effect, being performed for the press–and they never let us forget it either. It hamstrings pretty much all the emotional impact of the book.

I have the same sense about it that I had about the movie adaptation, The End of the Tour, and it’s that this story is at least as much about David Lipsky as it is about David Wallace. If this were a novel, I wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for the Lipsky character. Call me churlish, but I did not appreciate his attempts to mediate the conversation. His asides in brackets try to interpret Wallace’s comments for the reader and at least half the time seem way off the mark. I wasn’t there; I didn’t hear it, but he rarely goes for the most charitable interpretation. I feel like he suspects Wallace of “putting on” way more than he actually does. He seems determined to keep up with Wallace on an intellectual level, which is impossible. The man got an award for being an actual genius; why even try? His asides also have the occasional obnoxious observation about Midwesterners or women, which struck me as completely unnecessary. He notes when Wallace’s female students are female (but not when they’re male) and compares one of their mouths to a celebrity’s. Dude, your sexism is showing. I’m way less offended by Wallace wanting to get laid on this tour than by Lipsky objectifying female college students. There are also a handful of ableist jokes on both sides that aren’t flattering to either party.

In terms of reflecting on Infinite Jest and that time in Wallace’s life, this book is interesting, but I’m not sure how much people who haven’t read the novel will benefit from it. Mostly, though, I didn’t feel like it was bringing anything new to the table. I’ve read a handful of Wallace novels/story collections and probably more than my fair share of interviews and essays, and there were very few things in this book that I felt hadn’t already been said elsewhere and better. It’s at its best when they’re talking about fiction because it’s the thing that Wallace knows best, but in terms of fleshing out those ideas, I’d recommend his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” and Conversations with David Foster Wallace before I’d recommend this.

I mentioned this in a blog post (before I shut down my Wallace blog) that The End of the Tour didn’t have “the click” for me. To continue using his words, one of the beautiful things about Wallace’s writing is that it sounds so much like your own brain voice. It “clicks” in a way that feels really personal and important, the way some of the best writers out there do. The End of the Tour didn’t have “the click” for me, and neither did Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. It’s about him, but it doesn’t “feel” like him the way his writing and even some of his other interviews do.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.