Robbie Bruens’s Reviews > Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace > Status Update

"At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about without the frustrating contrivance of the novel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters."

"Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone's behavior (it did not change his own - at the festival one evening, Green remembers, he enjoyed two lobsters for dinner), but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency."

"He wrote a friend that there were times when he'd walked into the twelve o'clock recovery meeting and found that he had slept with three of the ten women there, 'and come close' with one or two others. His behavior seemed, even to him, at times hard to justify; he was leaving a lot of hurt in his wake. But his bigger worry was that all of this seducing was most damaging to himself."

"Other than the classroom, his favored venue for meeting women was St. Matt's, the church in whose rectory his recovery group met. Other recovery members warned him to stop, citing the emotional dangers of dating the newly sober, which, from his crazed relationship with Mary Karr, Wallace was no stranger to. But Wallace could not stop himself."

"Wallace affected not to care that some of the women were his students. He told his friend Corey Washington that he was trying to get himself fired."

"He played Trivial Pursuit with one undergraduate and her friends in their dorm. To another he read Velveteen Rabbit. With a third it was charades. The women would wind up sharing his bed with him, Jeeves, and The Drone for a time, cajoling him about what one called "the food with no color" in his fridge - crackers, cream cheese, cereal - and then, sooner or later, they were sent on their way."

"He was, he wrote a friend, 'literally crazy' on the subject of sex. Once talking to Franzen he wondered aloud whether his only purpose on earth was 'to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible.'"

"Corey Washington went to a reading in Washington D.C., and saw two hundred people there, Wallace sedulously signing copies of A Supposedly Fun Thing. A young woman came up to them afterward. 'I told you not to come here,' Wallace snapped."

"At his readings were long lines everywhere he went, abundant "audience pussy" - a phrase Mary Karr used. He came back from one reading in New Orleans to tell Francis B. he had slept with a girl who was underaged."

"Sex, and the intense, complicated interchanges it brought with it, filled a place in Wallace that nothing else could. Promiscuity had been part of his life for a long time now. But being famous increased the number of women who would sleep with him or perhaps his sense that he needed to sleep with them."