“I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” David Foster Wallace wrote to his editor while writing “Infinite Jest.” He was born on this day in 1962.
Back in Urbana, Wallace felt like a failure. “A lot of the trouble has to do with writing, but none of it with having stuff to send you, publications, or careers,” he wrote to Nadell. “Nothing to do, really, with anything exterior to me.” In another letter, he wrote, “My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.” One night, he and Amy watched “The Karen Carpenter Story,” a maudlin TV movie about the singer, who died of a heart attack brought on by anorexia.
“Girl with Curious Hair” came out in August, 1989, to mixed reviews and little attention. Wallace was heartbroken. “He thought he’d written a better book than ‘Broom,’ and then the publication was this big fat zero,” Nadell recalls. And when Wallace began his studies at Harvard that fall, he was immediately disappointed. “The students did their professors’ laundry and clustered around them, and he thought that was just ridiculous,” James Wallace remembers.
Wallace picked up stories at treatment sessions, including his own. Former addicts loved to talk—part of their therapy was to talk. Eventually, Wallace was released to a quarter-way house, and then to a house with one other ex-addict. Wallace taught at Emerson College for a time. “I’ve had to educate myself about people like Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton,” he wrote Franzen in October, 1991. “Actually that’s been a blast. I had no idea they were so good.
In June, 1992, Wallace set out for Syracuse. The rents were cheap, and Wallace wanted to put the traumas of Boston behind him. He found a room to work in, opposite the food co-op. It was so small, he told friends, that his own body heat would keep it warm enough. He returned to the Project; the writing continued to go well, and he stayed focussed. Around town, Wallace was a familiar sight in his T-shirt, granny glasses, shorts, and bandanna.
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