by David Lipsky
Also by David Lipsky:
Three Thousand Dollars
The Art Fair
Absolutely American
For Lydia and Sally James
And for their mother and grandparents
introduction
If writing had a logo, it’d be the anchor, the quicksand easy chair, but from the minute I shook David’s hand we didn’t stop. We hit his class, then rolled into the car keys, sodas, strangers, and hotel rooms of a road-trip movie. Airports and taxis and the eerie sensation of knowing your feet have stood in different cities in the morning and afternoon.
This introduction is the Commentary track—which nobody goes in for until they’ve loved the DVD—so I’d recommend a quick select back to Main Menu and Play Movie. The road trip was the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour, when, as a reporter, I asked and he told me the story of his life. David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake—he acted on other people like a slug of coffee—so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone. (The last day, we crossed three states by air, shot down another 140 miles of highway, and I thought it was still midnight. “That’s what your watch says?” David snorted. “It’s two twenty, dickbrain.”) Then it was over, and we were standing still again, and it was hard and sad to leave. And you’ll see me trying to cook up reporting jobs in order to hang around.
It has the feel of a highway conversation. Late at night, the only car in the world, on icy morning roads, yelling at the other drivers. It has the rhythms of the road: grouchiness, indefensible meals, and the sudden, front-seat connections—reciting high points from movies, the right song and a good view sending the radio into soundtrack, a statement that gives you the bright, runway lift of knowing that another person has experienced life the way you do—that are the stuff you go on trips for.
When you skip ahead, you should know it’s early afternoon, March 5, 1996. The air has the gray, erased-blackboard quality of weather tightening itself for a storm. David has just stepped out of his little brick one-story house. He has his hands in his jean pockets, his two black dogs are running thrilled tours of greet and patrol. He’s wearing round glasses. The look beneath them says two more or less clear words: now this. I’ve got some treasured beliefs about my own emotional tone. I’d like to think it’s grittily complex, penetrating, understanding, and deeply individual. It’s pretty obviously: please be impressed by me. At our first big conversation—our first stunning meal: Chicago-style pizza, the cheese mound and topping landslide—he’ll tell me he wants to do a profile of the reporters who’ve come stamping through, doing profiles about him. “It’d be a way for me to get some of the control back,” he’ll say. “Because if you wanted—I mean, you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.” It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices. The comedy of a brain so big, careful, and kind it keeps tripping over its own lumps. That’s what this book would like to be. It’s the one way of writing about him I don’t think David would have hated.
So it’s two in the afternoon. I’ve just dropped my bag on his living room carpet, which is a mess, but the mess feels hospital cornered, curated. (Whatever reassurance and encouragement the decorations give him is going to be tagged and sifted, for what it might explain publicly.) We’ve addressed the two women’s magazines on his counter. (David is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading “I’ve Cheated—Should I Tell?” a bunch of times a year is “fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.”) I’ve also been surprised to find the towel of Barney, the purple dinosaur and befriender of children, subbing as a curtain in his bedroom, and the big poster of complaint singer Alanis Morissette on his wall. I’ve just unpeeled and loaded a Maxell cassette into my recorder. Always a pleasant, blameless moment to the journalist; a round in the chamber, boots polished, reporting for duty. I got up at five this morning, hailed a cab at the New York hour when the city is still drifting through sleep, the streets rolling over and steam drizzling upward out of the manholes. Then I flew two hours to Chicago, signed and initialed for the rental car, drove another two here: If you were putting us in a comic book panel, you’d draw motion lines coming off my body. And there’d be black scrunches over David’s head. He’s been touring for two weeks, reading, signing, promoting. He’s walking toward me over the clumps and vines of unsorted travel memories, signaling from behind the hurricane fence of someone who’s become bewilderingly famous.
I’m thirty years old, he’s thirty-four. We both have long hair. I’ve just placed the tape recorder on top of his magazines. He’s made a request. What with all the travel, he’d like the right to retract anything that might come off awkward or nasty. (He’s about to say a hundred unbelievably honest, personal things. The one place he’ll get cold feet is where he feels he’s been a little uncharitable to poetry. The form will touch readers again once it focuses on nine-to-five and couples who spend a marriage in the same bed. The verb he used was meatier.) Otherwise, this book runs from the minute I turn on the recorder, through five days of diners, arguments, on-ramps, friends, a reading, a faraway mall, his dogs, up to the last word David said to me. It’s a word that meant a great, complicated amount to him. After he died, I read through this week again. I was surprised and moved—it seemed very much like him—to see that he used it in the context of a dance.
preface
Because I’d like to clear the set as quickly as possible, the rest of what I have to say about David I’ve put in the afterword—important stuff: what he looked like, how he died, how his friends saw him, the people we both were when we met. He’d just come off a success so giant-sized it was going to shade and determine the rest of his life, and we’re going to talk a lot about that. (Four years later, after reporting on the 2000 election, he’d ask his agent to send the piece to his editor, to show that “I’m still capable of good work [my own insecurities, I know].”) I’ve published two books, am about to publish another, but I’ve never had a success (the experience has been all near misses, standing in a crowd while people around me are pegged by golden bullets), and that professional position has led to an interesting social approach: I believe that if I can’t impress people by how much I’ve accomplished, I can maybe be impressive with how practical my ambitions are, how little I expect. So I’m always reminding David—while he jumps ahead to big and speculative things—about the small reliable pleasures. A good night of TV, a closed deal, a morning coffee. That’s one of our arguments: He wants something better than he has. I want precisely what he has already, and also for him to see how unimprovable his situation is. That’s all in the afterword. David will make a funny remark about how books work toward the end of our time together. Re Infinite Jest, he’ll say, “It’s divided into chunks, there are sort of obvious closures or last lines—that make it pretty clear that you’re supposed to go have a cigar or something, come back later.” When you hit one of those cigar breaks, read the afterword. Because I love David’s work, what I like best about these five days is that it sounds like David’s writing. He was such a natural writer he could talk in prose; for me, this has the magic of watching a guy in a business suit, big headphones, step into a gym and sink fifty foul shots in a row. This is what David was like at thirty-four—what he calls “all the French curls and crazy circles”—at one of the moments when the world opens up to you.
And here’s a guide to the people he’s going to be talking about. Bonnie Nadell is his agent—cool, motherly, though sh
e’s only a year older than he is. (Visiting David at the hospital in 1989, the first thing she did was track down scissors and cut his hair.) Michael Pietsch is his editor on Infinite Jest. (Pietsch is now the head of Little, Brown, David’s publisher, and is a very nice guy.) Jann is Jann Wenner, the owner and editor of Rolling Stone, and so the person I report to. And I think that’s it, all you need to know. David has written two books before Infinite Jest: They’re called The Broom of the System (another freeway of a novel) and Girl with Curious Hair (short stories). Yaddo is an artists’ colony, whose seat cushions have borne the imprints of a lot of famous writers. David talks in the universal sportsman’s accent: the disappearing G’s, “wudn’t,” “dudn’t” and “idn’t” and “sumpin’.” His two dogs are named Drone and Jeeves.
afterword
David was six feet two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete’s saunter—a roll from the heels, as if any physical thing was a pleasure. He wrote with eyes and a voice that seemed to be a condensed form of everyone’s lives—it was the stuff you semi-thought, the background action you blinked through at supermarkets and commutes—and readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style. His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student through high school, he played football, he played tennis, he wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors and writers fall moony-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand-page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.
Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning. It has an event gravity: Eventually, every memory and impression gets tugged in its direction. I was asked to write about David’s death and spoke to friends (all writers, all called away from keyboards, all stunned) and family (who were smart, and kind, and nearly impossible to talk to). One thing they struggled with was how alive, how delightful, David could seem. I talked with a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who spoke in quick, lucid, emphatic phrases, as if facts were neutral but could turn sad if handled for too long. The professor did what experts do. Reminded me he hadn’t treated David personally, but could illustrate the basic principles. Which are: nobody likes to take medications. “I mean, I sympathize,” the doctor said. “I don’t like to take any medicine myself.” I told him what I’d learned: that from 1989 on, David had been prescribed a powerful first-generation antidepressant called Nardil. It came towing a boxcar of 1950s-era side effects, the worst of which was a potential for very high blood pressure. In 2007, he’d decided to stop taking the drug. The doctor made the kind of quick silence that’s the telephone equivalent of nodding. “There’s a pattern. When an agent has worked particularly well, people can’t possibly imagine getting depressed again. So there’s this false security. They feel like they’re fine, they’re cured, it’d be great to get off the medicine. Unfortunately, it’s quite common to see people can and often do experience a recurrence of symptoms. And then they might not respond the same way to previously effective treatments.”
Here’s how it happened for David. Nardil comes with a long interdicted menu—chocolate, cured meats, certain cheeses, for some reason overripe bananas. And then there are off-book ingredients waiting in dishes, to combine and catalyze. The previous half decade of David’s life, everyone agrees, was the happiest. Marriage, tranquility, California—the sunset, happy-ending coast. In late spring of 2007, David; his wife, Karen; and his parents, Jim and Sally, sat down at a Persian restaurant. Something in the food took him wrong. Terrible stomach pains, for days. Doctors were surprised to hear how long he’d been taking Nardil—a workhorse medication, from the predigital era of leaded fuels and antenna TV. They suggested he go off the drug, try something new.
“So at that point,” his sister, Amy, said, her voice sounding sober, bruised, “it was determined, ‘Oh, well, gosh, we’ve made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I’m sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.’ They had no idea that was the only thing keeping him alive.”
The course David followed is called a washout; David would slowly taper off the old drug, then taper onto a new one. “He knew it was going to be rough,” Jonathan Franzen told me. Franzen’s novel The Corrections won a National Book Award; he was the best friend of the second part of David’s adult life. “But he was feeling he could afford a year to do the job. He figured he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil wasn’t perfect.”
It’s something Franzen wanted to stress. (Franzen, interviewed, had a writer’s not quite off-duty quality; part of him wanted to shoulder me aside and tell the story himself.) David had a level of self-criticism that sometimes made him the one person whose company he didn’t enjoy in a pleasant room; now he was happy. He loved his marriage, his life. “This is the main narrative, it’s reason number one among the nine. It was from that position of optimism and happiness and strength that he tried to take another step. All the signs were pointing in the right direction. Because things were going well, he thought he was in a strong enough position to make some fundamental changes. And he had bad luck, it didn’t work.”
Doctors began prescribing other medications, each one a failure. By October, David’s symptoms had landed him back in the hospital. He began to drop weight. That fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he’d just stepped off the Amherst green.
When Amy talked to him by phone, he was sometimes his old self. She said, “The worst question you could ask David in the last year was, ‘How are you?’ And it’s almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don’t see regularly without that question.” David was very honest. He’d answer, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”
The year ran good and bad, fast then slow, ascents with sudden pits, the sky looking very distant overhead. In early May, he sat down at a café with some graduating seniors from his fiction class. He answered their jittery, writer’s-future questions. At the end, his voice went throaty, he choked up. Students assumed he was joking—some smiled, a memory that would cut later. David sniffled. “Go ahead and laugh—here I am crying—but I really am going to miss all of you.”
No medications had worked. In June, David tried to kill himself. Then he was back in the hospital. Doctors administered twelve courses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment that had always terrified David. “Twelve,” his mother repeated. “Such brutal treatments,” his father said. “And after this year of absolute hell for David,” his mother said, “they decided to go back to the Nardil.”
Franzen, worried, flew to spend a week with David in July. David had dropped seventy pounds in a year. “He was thinner than I’d ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at ten percent strength.” David could now make skinny jokes: he’d never before noticed, he said, “how hard certain chairs in the house were.” Franzen would sit with David in the living room, play with his dogs, the two would step outside while David lit a cigarette. “We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, ‘A dog’s mouth is practically a disinfectant, it’s so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.’” When he left, David thanked him for coming. “I felt grateful he allowed me to be there,” Franzen told me.
Six weeks later, David asked his parents to fly west. The Nardil wasn’t working; the great risk with taking time
off an antidepressant. A patient departs, returns, and the medication has boarded its doors. David couldn’t sleep. He was afraid to leave the house. He asked, “What if I meet one of my students?” His father said, “He didn’t want anyone to see him the way he was. It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I’m sure.”
The Wallaces stayed ten days. David and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs, talked. Sally cooked David’s favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods—pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. “We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive,” his mother said. “But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn’t take it.”
One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor beside him. “I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor.”
In the middle of September, Karen left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself. “I can’t get that image out of my mind,” his sister told me—and said another smart, kind, impossible thing. “David and his dogs, and it’s dark. I’m sure he kissed them on the mouth, and told them he was sorry.”
Writers tend to have two great topics, on heavy internal rotation, a very abbreviated playlist. Their careers, their ailments. There’s a famous story, about the party where James Joyce ran into Marcel Proust. You expected heavyweight-champion banter. Joyce said, “My eyes are terrible.” Proust said, “My poor stomach, what am I going to do? In fact, I must leave at once.” (Joyce topped him: “I’m in the same situation, if I can find someone to take me by the arm.”) David wasn’t like that. For one thing, he never told anyone, beyond the tiniest audience, that he’d been diagnosed as a depressive. For another, he didn’t much look the way you imagine a writer; he looked like a stoner, a burner. (The writer Mark Costello was the best friend of the first part of David’s adult life; the Illinois term David taught him, he said, was “dirt bomb.” “A slightly tough, slightly waste-product-y, tennis-playing persona,” Costello said.) David looked like someone who’d played a little varsity, then proceeded to too-cool his way off the squad. A big guy, with the bandanna and flop of hair, someone who was going to invite you to play Hacky Sack, and if you refused, there was a possibility he was going to beat you up.