Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

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Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

3.83 of 5 stars 3.83 · rating details · 2,686 ratings · 387 reviews

In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You...more In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”

Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

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320 pages

Published April 13th 2010 by Broadway (first published March 31st 2010)

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Apr 29, 2013 Anthony Vacca rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

“I never take precautions against friends”
“This is why we’re both losers.”
“Will there be another move?”
“Between friends, there are millions of moves. They’ll catch you by surprise.”
--Last Hurrah For Chivalry

As hard as it is to ever really understand the person you are standing next to (friend, middle-aged man in line who smells of alcohol at nine in the morning), or the person sleeping next to you (maybe the greatest fear of all because you can know every inch of their body but it is still a bod...more

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Jan 04, 2013 s.penkevich rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: dfw, interviews

‘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...more

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Jul 12, 2010 Buck rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: life-writing

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 bec...more 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.
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Jul 17, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 nigh...more 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.

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Jun 12, 2010 Jimmy rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more 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.(less)

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May 24, 2010 unnarrator rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 you...more

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Jun 07, 2010 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

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, perhap...more 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.)(less)

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Apr 27, 2010 Schuyler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Full Disclosure: I am a huge DFW fan, so, ya know, there was very little chance I wasn't going to like this "book".

I say "book" because it's not really a book in the traditional sense, more just a 310 page interview with David Foster Wallace during the last leg of his Infinite Jest book tour in 1996. A lot of what DFW talks about, as far as certain ideas about television, technology, entertainment, addiction, America, etc, I'd already read in other interviews (the best interview I've read with i...more

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Nov 29, 2012 Mircalla64 (free Liu Xiaobo) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: postmoderni

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

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...more 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

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?:-) (less)

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Jul 01, 2010 Matthew rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 second draft. It reads like Lipsky transcribed the...more 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 second 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 second 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?

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Aug 27, 2012 Rob rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

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 dialogu...more

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Jun 14, 2010 Josh rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

I admire DFW a great deal as a writer, and I have read enough about him since his death to start to admire his as a person, as well. He dealt with depression for much of his life, among other things, and he did so bravely until he just could take no more. But this book brought my respect for him to a whole different level. The 5 days of conversation takes place during the most exciting and terrifying time of his life, and the thoughts going through his head are utterly fascinating, poignant, and...more

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Jun 14, 2010 Dan rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 jo...more

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Jun 10, 2010 Eileen rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: lovers of DFW

This book is everything I hoped it would be and more. I was looking for a book that would give me even more of a glimpse into DFW's brain / soul / heart than his non-fiction does. This book turned out to be, not a biography, which is what I was expecting, but, instead, a five-day interview with DFW, mostly verbatim.

I feel like I'M the one asking him the questions and hearing his responses. It is so very moving to read now, after his suicide, how he felt about his successes at the time (the inte...more

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May 04, 2010 Gunnar rated it 3 of 5 stars

While Lipsky himself did little more than transcribe his tapes, his foreword and afterward were both heartfelt and sincere. In terms of the interviews, we get a picture of Wallace at one of the best times of his life---sober, stable, and content in his own way. It's for this reason that I liked the book: you really feel like you're chatting with an old friend, sitting in his messy living room with his dogs barking all the time. It's tremendously sad to wonder "what if?" at a lot of these moments...more

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May 10, 2013 Kyle York rated it 5 of 5 stars

David Foster Wallace is one of my absolute favorite writers, and this book was a rare and wonderful opportunity to just sort of, hang around him. You get to hear his thoughts on fiction in general (some great stuff on the purposes of fiction-- capturing the mental landscape our our time (how the world feels on our 'nerve endings'), breaking the wall between the interior lives of the writer and reader and combating lonlieness, being able to take the time to think about and point out things that t...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Bob Wake rated it 4 of 5 stars

In the sad days following the suicide of 46-year-old writer David Foster Wallace in September 2008, when the Internet seemed to spontaneously erupt with eulogies far and wide, novelist Steve Erickson wrote: “There are no statistics to prove it, but the anecdotal evidence is that he may have influenced the upcoming generation of writers more than almost anyone else.” There’s his narrative style, certainly, discursive and intellectual, yet brimming with colloquialisms and concise twelve-stepisms....more In the sad days following the suicide of 46-year-old writer David Foster Wallace in September 2008, when the Internet seemed to spontaneously erupt with eulogies far and wide, novelist Steve Erickson wrote: “There are no statistics to prove it, but the anecdotal evidence is that he may have influenced the upcoming generation of writers more than almost anyone else.” There’s his narrative style, certainly, discursive and intellectual, yet brimming with colloquialisms and concise twelve-stepisms. The dizzying footnotes. The convoluted self-consciousness unfolding like Chinese boxes of innerspace, compulsive, chatty. A humane and witty voice both inviting and wounded. George Saunders’s 2009 short story “Victory Lap” with its hypertext parentheticals is only one of the more recent examples of Wallacean influence.

David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace is not unlike one of those always fascinating Paris Review author interviews. Supersized, of course, befitting the author of Infinite Jest, the still notorious big fat dystopian novel of twining plots converging on addiction and recovery, cinema and suicide, tennis and terrorism. Lipsky’s book, apart from some graceful introductory material, is essentially a 300-page transcript—from what must have been a mountain of cassette-tape research for a Rolling Stone profile that subsequently wasn’t written—of Lipsky’s conversations with the writer during the last five days of the 1996 book tour for Infinite Jest.

Because Wallace—suddenly and explosively famous—was written about and interviewed extensively during and after this book tour, some topics of conversation will be thematically familiar to fans: the cigarettes and chewing tobacco that often got the better of him (“I’ve got a raging nicotine problem. That like that I really need to quit, at least the chewing tobacco. It makes your fucking jaw fall off. You know?”); John Updike is overrated (“And you just have to wade through so much purple empty writing to get to anything that’s got any kind of heartbeat in it. Plus, I think he’s mentally ill”); Stephen King is underrated (“He’s got an almost Salingerian feel for children”); the influence of filmmaker David Lynch on his writing (“I mean, most of the word surrealism is realism, you know? It’s extra-realism, it’s something on top of realism. It’s the one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off”).

He talks about the too-easy resort to irony and ridicule that he finds in David Letterman and Rush Limbaugh. “I don’t know what’s going to come after it,” he says, “but I think something’s gonna have to.” Lipsky then asks Wallace to speculate—“What do you think it will be?”—and Wallace’s answer is startlingly prescient of an Obama-like appeal to civic virtue and our better instincts:

My guess is that what it will be is, it’s going to be the function of some people who are heroes. Who evince a real type of passion that’s going to look very banal and very retrograde and very … You know, for instance, people who will get on television, and earnestly say, “It’s extraordinarily important, that we, the most undertaxed nation on earth, be willing to pay higher taxes, so that we don’t allow the lower strata of our society to starve to death and freeze to death.” That it will be vitally important that we do that. Not for them, but for us.

Wallace struggled in his teens and early twenties with drug addiction and clinical depression, successfully overcoming the former while keeping at bay if never fully banishing the latter. Lipsky’s resurrected transcripts give us Wallace speaking openly about his past while cautioning that “there’s certain stuff about this that I won’t talk about.” To the extent that he feels remorseful about having pressured Wallace to the point of irritation in hope of some juicy disclosure about a rumored dalliance with heroin (“Why is this of particular interest?” Wallace asks, in a tone described as “annoyed”), Lipsky makes clear that he was himself feeling pressured by his editors to take this tack. All in all, his role as archivist and tour-guide is impeccable and heartfelt. Lipsky, like so many of us, clearly shares a deep sense of loss, as in this bracketed aside in response to Wallace recalling his troubled college years: “Wouldn’t it be great to fall in through this transcript, back to that house, and tell him to live differently, explain to him how it was all going to go? It’s suddenly odd that this isn’t possible.”(less)

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Dec 09, 2012 Jeremy added it

Shelves: non-fiction-about-language

While I like David Foster Wallace, I have a hard time believing that every word he ever wrote or spoke needs to be preserved and put on display. To be sure there are passages in here where he speaks brilliantly and movingly about cinema, american generational struggles, our need for entertainment and the lonliness it portends... the usual things that made Wallace such a compelling, irresistable fiction writer and essayist. But there are also parts that Lipsky should have either edited down or si...more

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Nov 16, 2012 Justin de la Cruz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Re-reading this one but I remember what happens so I think it's fair to write a review at this point. Lipsky went on the tail end of Wallace's book tour for Infinite Jest. Lipsky was covering the hype that Wallace's novel was receiving for Rolling Stone. Except Lipsky did this multiple-day interview, went to write and edit the piece and then Rolling Stone killed the piece before it was published.

So after Wallace's death, Lipsky put together this nearly complete transcript of his few days togeth...more Re-reading this one but I remember what happens so I think it's fair to write a review at this point. Lipsky went on the tail end of Wallace's book tour for Infinite Jest. Lipsky was covering the hype that Wallace's novel was receiving for Rolling Stone. Except Lipsky did this multiple-day interview, went to write and edit the piece and then Rolling Stone killed the piece before it was published.

So after Wallace's death, Lipsky put together this nearly complete transcript of his few days together with the author. (Nearly complete because there are a lot of breaks due to switching audio tapes --- this was done in 1996 --- and there are some other parts that are just summaries of what happened rather than straight transcripts.)

What emerges is a very intimate portrait of Wallace. David Lipsky is also an author (though I'm not familiar with his books), and Wallace makes it clear in the interview that he only allowed this kind of multiple-day thing BECAUSE Lipsky was a fiction author. So they become close (though they apparently didn't keep up contact after the interview) and Wallace simply rambles about a lot of what is going on.

Wallace talks a lot about hype, books, technology, tv, American culture, movies, fiction, writing. He does open up quite a bit, and Lipsky obviously leaves in a ton of things that he wouldn't have published if Wallace were still alive (a few places DFW will say "this is off the record," for example). But Wallace is still guarded a bit, something that DT Max illuminates in his 2012 biography of Wallace. Infinite Jest (Wallace's novel) deals with a lot of kinds of addictions, among them drug and alcohol and TV/entertainment and athletics. Lipsky asks quite a few times about the nature of DFW's drug and alcohol past and his current state and Wallace tells quite a bit about the past but maintains that he's not a part of Alcoholics Anonymous or any other recovery program. (Infinite Jest has a bunch of intimate details about AA.) But in fact he was a member from 1989 until his death. AA just has a guideline about not talking to the media about being a part of the recovery group --- they don't want to get a bad reputation. But if you read closely, you will see that DFW does outright deny his participation, but he hints that he is really a part of it.

Outside of that kind of "author as alcoholic" thing (which Wallace fights really hard to say not to glamorize it), there is just a ton of information on the author's upbringing, his friends and family, his views on culture, and his thoughts on writing. I'd say only about 15% of the material is actually about Infinite Jest (the book that Wallace is touring for and that Lipsky is supposed to be interviewing about). The rest of the time they're talking about art and movies and all kinds of things.

There are some parts that drag. And some parts that are REALLY annoying because Lipsky will add in comments about what they're talking about. He'll add in his own current-day observations about what happened, and it gets to be really too editorial and weird. I would've just let the conversation speak for itself!

Anyway, I think this is the closest thing we have (outside of his own writing) to getting an inside perspective on Wallace's life and theories and views.

Highly recommended for fans of Wallace. Encouragingly recommended for people interested in literary fiction, '90s culture (which they talk a lot about), postmodernism, and, to a lesser extent, addiction and depression and recovery.(less)

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Sep 05, 2012 Edward S. Portman rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Difficile commentare questo libro, che forse libro vero e proprio non si può definire. Non è un romanzo, ma in qualche modo non è neppure una lunga intervista. È la sbobinatura, nuda e cruda, di tre giorni passati dall’autore con David Foster Wallace, al termine del tour promozionale di Infinite jest.
La critica che si può avanzare a Lipsky è quella di non aver dato un taglio preciso a questo suo “figlio”. L’impressione è di trovarsi di fronte a un prodotto nato dall’urgenza di dare alle stampe...more Difficile commentare questo libro, che forse libro vero e proprio non si può definire. Non è un romanzo, ma in qualche modo non è neppure una lunga intervista. È la sbobinatura, nuda e cruda, di tre giorni passati dall’autore con David Foster Wallace, al termine del tour promozionale di Infinite jest.
La critica che si può avanzare a Lipsky è quella di non aver dato un taglio preciso a questo suo “figlio”. L’impressione è di trovarsi di fronte a un prodotto nato dall’urgenza di dare alle stampe un qualcosa che potesse vendere, ovvero questo Come diventare se stessi. L’occasione è, seppure in ritardo, la morte di Wallace, difficile non crederlo. È vero che tra il suicidio dello scrittore di Ithaca e la pubblicazione di questo oggetto misterioso sono passati tre anni, ma è anche vero che tra le chiacchierate trascritte qui e la data di pubblicazione, gli anni trascorsi sono anche di più (Infinite jest è uscito nel 1996 ed è presumibile che la fine del tour sia sempre nell’arco dell’anno o comunque in quello subito successivo, e 2011-1996 > 2011-2008). Come mai questo materiale non è stato pubblicato prima? E come mai, soprattutto, non è stato curato meglio? Ci sono delle parti che, francamente, avrebbero potuto essere eliminate in tutta tranquillità, senza togliere nulla al risultato finale, anzi rendendolo forse anche migliore. Sono presenti digressioni o parentesi di ragionamenti del tutto fuori contesto dovute alle situazioni che vedevano coinvolti i due (Wallace e Lipsky) che vanno bene in una conversazione dal vivo, ma su carta, in lettura, sono difficili da capire o da capirne il motivo. Che senso ha lasciare traccia in un prodotto del genere delle esclamazioni di sorpresa di un Wallace-autista quando una macchina lo sorpassa e gli taglia la strada? Una cosa del genere potrebbe anche trovare spazio, tanto per testimoniare come fosse Wallace alla guida e quanto si lasciasse travolgere da situazioni comuni, ma questo spazio avrebbe dovuto essere ritagliato a margine e non andando a interrompere bruscamente un discorso magari neppure troppo profondo ma certamente più interessante di un “guarda questo stupido!”.
Questo è quanto c’è da dire su Come diventare se stessi: secondo me, e difficilmente riusciranno a togliermi questa idea dalla testa, è un prodotto puramente commerciale, nato con l’intento di sfruttare la figura di un grande scrittore che purtroppo non è più tra noi. Per il resto, i contenuti espressi da Wallace, ci sono cose assai interessanti, altre puramente di contorno, altre invece curiosità adatte solo agli appassionati o ai fan accaniti di. È altalenante, come è appunto una conversazione o la vita vera: è difficile parlare sempre e solo dei massimi sistemi della vita e avere in qualsiasi momento qualcosa di interessante da dire. Questo, per certi versi, rende ancora più pregevole il lavoro di Wallace.(less)

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Sep 04, 2012 Alex V. rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm comfortable with the fact that I enjoy things written about David Foster Wallace than I do David Foster Wallace's writing. I look at his work the way I look at barbed wire fences - there might be really exciting or really insightful things behind those fences, and once upon a time I was spry enough to clamber over intellectual obstacles like that but now I just don't have the patience.

Mr. Lipsky does a fantastic job nursing Mr. Wallace's tenderness and scaling his towers in this book length...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Devin Wallace rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

David Foster Wallace is at his most un-edited in this days-long interview with David Lipsky, over the course of many meals, many states, and many insights into the mind that was, and continues to be through his work, Dave Wallace. But the best parts, the raw Wallace speaking his mind on topics from his own work to that of his peers, to television's corrosive impact on the American mind, to film and politics and faith and drugs, turn out to be the downturn. It's incredibly difficult to slog throu...more

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Jan 22, 2012 Jeanne Thornton rated it 4 of 5 stars

Made me want to read Infinite Jest, which no combination of sociocultural pressure, friend recommendations, or DFW's previous books could do. The two black specks on the surface of the facing mirrors' glass here: Lipsky's habit of rendering DFW's speech idiosyncrasies in dialect, which is fine and endearing when he does it in the introduction ("by the way, DFW says 'dudn't'") and less fine when he actually swaps out the word in DFW's transcribed speech, usually when DFW is talking about somethin...more

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Nov 26, 2011 Jennifer rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-reads

It reads like the set-up for a buddy comedy.

Two young writers – one a wide-eyed journalist still cutting his teeth with Rolling Stone after a less-than-successful attempt to make a living as a novelist, the other the somewhat burned out recent author of a ten-pound tome taking the literary world by storm – team up for a road trip where the former covers the latter’s final stops on a whirlwind press tour. Flight cancellations, diner food, and late night conversations ensue – as do enough “No, we...more It reads like the set-up for a buddy comedy.

Two young writers – one a wide-eyed journalist still cutting his teeth with Rolling Stone after a less-than-successful attempt to make a living as a novelist, the other the somewhat burned out recent author of a ten-pound tome taking the literary world by storm – team up for a road trip where the former covers the latter’s final stops on a whirlwind press tour. Flight cancellations, diner food, and late night conversations ensue – as do enough “No, we’re NOT dating” jokes to stock any staple ‘80s film. Only in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, the cast includes David Foster Wallace as the literati heartthrob and David Lipsky as his reporting sidekick, and documents the tail end of Wallace’s stumping after the publication of his 1996 masterpiece Infinite Jest.

Lipsky’s “bio” covers the five days the two men spent together traipsing through the Midwest fourteen years ago, bouncing from book signings to NPR interviews and back again. To those unfamiliar with the cult of celebrity surrounding Wallace – particularly after his suicide in 2008 – that may seem like a thin premise for a book. To those who’ve read Wallace, and Lipsky’s posthumous profile of him in Rolling Stone – which won the journalist a 2009 National Magazine Writing Award, and gets reworked here as part of the “Afterword” – it might seem like the author trying to squeeze water from a headstone. Lipsky appending his interview notes to that essay and publishing it as a book feels less an homage than an exploitation, or a desperate grab by his publisher, Random House, to get a little piece of the David Foster Wallace pie that’s controlled by Little Brown and Norton.

The structure of Although is awkward and somewhat forced. After a series of preambles, the rest of the book takes the form of a transcript. Lipsky’s questions appear in italics, Wallace’s answers in standard font. Interpolations from Lipsky’s notes and his observations from the future get framed in brackets. Rolling Stone isn’t famed for hiring dud writers, and the early sections show Lipsky’s prodigious talent. It’s only when he tries to out-Wallace Wallace by aping the famous ironist’s meta tricks that things start to falter. Worse, the reader begins to suspect that the journalist’s being a bit disingenuous. Is this truly a meeting of minds? DFW answers the questions, sure – but aside from the admittedly fascinating trivia, they’re frequently answers that recap opinions he espoused elsewhere, occasionally almost word for word. Once, when questioned about a breakdown he experienced in Boston, Wallace’s answer is downright misleading regarding the treatment he received. Lipsky himself dodges personal questions, or answers safely off-tape, in a way that belies his claim of this being an uninterrupted dialogue from start to finish.

What does ring painfully true throughout is Lipsky’s continual pestering of Wallace about the author’s new-found literary superstardom, and his attempts to get DFW to acknowledge that his fame has meaning/makes him happy/has changed his life. Wallace consistently refuses. Lipsky strikes the same note so often and so desperately that the reader keeps waiting for Wallace to pat him on the head and assure him that, yes, one day the Blue Fame Fairy will come along and make him a real boy, too. Lipsky does, in fact, go on to have a Time Magazine Best Book of the Year when he publishes Absolutely American, a nonfiction tale of cadets at West Point, in 2003. That book, which clocks in at 384 pages, famously took four years and 14,000 pages of transcript to write. It’s worth noting that Although – which chronicles the author’s one meeting with Wallace over a course of less than 120 hours – stretches 317 pages. That’s the power of dead celebrity for you.

Throughout Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Wallace and Lipsky frequently revisit the concept of loneliness, and how the reading of books attempts to alleviate that empty feeling. This book attempts to alleviate a specific kind of loneliness, trying to fill the hole in the hearts of the literati left by the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Given the level of talent of both its main players that it fails is nothing less than a crying shame.
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Oct 20, 2011 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2015-challenge

David Foster Wallace is my favorite writer. Reading Infinite Jest was a life-changer for me because I felt like, for the first time, someone had really captured what it's like to be alive right now. The internal voices of his characters sounded like me or like people I knew, and they dealt with problems and conflicts that are real right now. Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008 made me incredibly sad.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is about a road trip that he took with writer David...more

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Aug 09, 2011 The Awdude rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

For me, DFW is pretty much the first writer (or for that matter, the first personal idol of mine from any realm of celibritas) whose private biography and self-everydayness has, apart from my interest in his brilliant fiction, quietly and mysteriously fascinated me. I'm sure this is due in no small part to the hype, the tragedy, etc. But there's also something uncanny about the feeling you get from just being in the presence of his presence--like an aura I guess--and it strikes me again and agai...more For me, DFW is pretty much the first writer (or for that matter, the first personal idol of mine from any realm of celibritas) whose private biography and self-everydayness has, apart from my interest in his brilliant fiction, quietly and mysteriously fascinated me. I'm sure this is due in no small part to the hype, the tragedy, etc. But there's also something uncanny about the feeling you get from just being in the presence of his presence--like an aura I guess--and it strikes me again and again as truly inspirational--and I mean inspirational in the most sappy, cliched, gut-type sense of the word--and the whole experience always leaves me with this like totally renewed affection for myself and the world at large. This book is basically just a transcript of the conversations that DFW had with a Rolling Stone reporter (who gets in the way of the thing sometimes, but mostly I liked him a lot too) during the roadtripping-ish last leg of the Infinite Jest book tour. The arc of the narrative, I guess, follows DFW's painfully self-conscious efforts to articulate how it feels to get everything you ever thought you wanted in life (literary fame, the genius epithet, fans, the works). He mostly talks himself into circles, paradoxes, and uncomfortable corners, while trying desperately to convince Lipsky, readers, and most of all himself, that he's not enjoying anything about anything. DFW's mind is perpetually stuck in a feedback loop of meta-commentary and self-interrogation that I'm sure most serious writers and artists are all too familiar with. The difference, though, with DFW, is the staggering amount of energy he devotes to communicating about the loop from the loop for the sake of the loop. He's determined (although of course you end up becoming yourself) never to let himself become himself until he gets to himself first. There's a certain sincerity about one's insincerity involved here, a certain honesty about the fact that it's impossible to be truly honest with anyone, including and especially oneself. This is a project, essentially, that necessitates a kind of openness through closure; in other words, this kind of genuineness can only be achieved with painstaking attention to limits, failures, and impossibilities--not for the purpose of overcoming or transcending them, but rather for the sake of digging through all the world's nonsense in order simply to find them and live them. Like DFW repeatedly says when he gets flustered, the whole thing is very complicated. I read this thing in one sitting after finishing Infinite Jest, mostly because it was astonishing to come across so many instances of what felt like my own verbatim thoughts, idiosyncrasies, and general misgivings about life and about writing--from the dishearteningly scripted social performance of grad school and literary academia in general to the gnawing prosthetic voice of the I-need-to-be-loved-for-all-the-wrong-reasons ego which really if we're honest is the whole reason we got into this business to begin with--and by the end of it I was left with a kind of intimate, personalized sting of the infinitely sincere irony that seems to permeate DFW's whole oeuvre: all the reasons I'm quitting fiction for philosophy are also the very same reasons I probably won't be able to. I recommend this book to everyone, if for no other reason than it's just refreshing and liberating to hear someone speak about the kinds of intimately personal paradoxes that frustrate and confound every human mind every single day--all the little solipsistic complexities about human consciousness which, if we forget to pay attention to them, can sometimes make us feel really really alone.

ZVZ: thank you, and sorry for the booknapping. But also maybe I'm not sorry, since I don't see myself mailing this back to you, because I mean really just thinking about it is a pain in the ass, and as a general rule I try to avoid that kind of personal discomfort.(less)

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Aug 06, 2011 Ron rated it 4 of 5 stars

The story gets off to a horrendous start, with Lipsky offering up a forward, a prologue and an afterward at the beginning of the book in what is ostensibly an homage to Wallace's style (it is not the 'blue magic' Nabakov called imitation). Lipsky's asides into Wallace's psyche are, throughout the first 2/3s of the book, horribly intrusive and seemingly ill-considered--despite the fact that he vainly attempts to back up his assertions by name-dropping the other famous authors the duo know in comm...more

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Aug 05, 2011 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

My cuz, Christina sent me this book and I didn't even bother looking up what it was. I figured it was something she knew I'd like.

I'm kind of ashamed to like this book, which is basically a transcription of a Rolling Stone editor's road trip with DFWallace. I'm ashamed because it means I'm one of those fans who likes the author as a celebrity as well as what the author writes.

The best thing about this book was how inspiring it was that DFW had so many ups and downs. How he spent an obscene amoun...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this more than I did.

And I did like it. I found myself taking notes on the more quotable bits, cross referencing in the margins, remembering how much I love DFW and his works and his words and his world view. I was blown away by his general decency. I was riveted by his explanations about why work I would normally consider to be "good" or "excellent" is really not all that great when you start breaking it down. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that DFW is admittedly not a...more

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Mar 12, 2011 Greg Zimmerman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Right off the bat, let me apologize to my readers for this too-long and rather narrow post, subjectwise — I fully realize that this post and the book it's describing won't appeal to anyone who hasn't read Infinite Jest or who doesn't care about David Foster Wallace. But I loved reading "Becoming Yourself" and wanted to write about it in some detail in case someone out there is a DFW fan and hasn't come across it yet.

And but so, if you ARE as big a fan of David Foster Wallace's writing as I am, t...more Right off the bat, let me apologize to my readers for this too-long and rather narrow post, subjectwise — I fully realize that this post and the book it's describing won't appeal to anyone who hasn't read Infinite Jest or who doesn't care about David Foster Wallace. But I loved reading "Becoming Yourself" and wanted to write about it in some detail in case someone out there is a DFW fan and hasn't come across it yet.

And but so, if you ARE as big a fan of David Foster Wallace's writing as I am, then reading this book may be as difficult as it is illuminating. The reason: How do you square the light-hearted, good-natured writer that splashes jokes and humor throughout these pages with the man who suffered from a crushing depression and hung himself 12 years later? It's truly tragic, and while I loved reading this, it made me immensely sad a lot of the time, too.

But let me back up for a second: The story behind this book, for those unfamiliar, is that in early 1996 at the height of David Foster Wallace's newfound Infinite Jest-resultant fame (and he was quite the literary rock star!), Rolling Stone sent reporter David Lipsky to follow him around on the last leg of his book tour. The article was never published, but the result instead is this barely edited transcript of their conversations about life, literature (both traditional and avant garde), television and film, dogs, drugs, depression and dozens of other topics over the course of five days.

Several themes emerge from the conversations:
1) DFW was hyper self-aware, but also almost painfully shy and self-conscious and always self-deprecating — Almost every important answer DFW gives is couched with a sort of disclaimer that he's aware how what he's saying could be misinterpreted in print. He's constantly asking Lipsky to be nice and portray him positively in the article — which is one of the reasons why Lipsky is terrified to actually write the piece (thankfully for Lipsky, RS canceled the article). One of the best parts of the book is near the end of their time together when Lipsky asks him about his "act" of appearing as a normal person, when everyone knows he's so much smarter than everyone else. This is one of the questions (along with questions about his past drug use) that really rubs DFW the wrong way, because DFW insists that he's been nothing but genuine throughout. He's not posturing or being anyone but himself. It's easy to understand Lipsky's skepticism, because it's amazing to think that someone who was as smart as DFW was really can come off as a guy you'd love to have some beers with — making jokes about being disappointed that his fame hasn't gotten him laid, discussing music and movies, or warning Lipsky about using the bathroom 'cause he "just wreaked a little havoc."

2) DFW was uncomfortable with his meteoric rise to fame, especially after a somewhat pockmarked past, including a stay in suicide-watch ward in the late 1980s — He really had no idea how Infinite Jest would be received. He knew he'd written a good book, because he'd worked so hard on it, and at that level he was satisfied and proud. Finishing that book was his personal justification (even with two other published books under his belt) that he was truly a writer. His reaction to the critical acclaim and massive attention as almost a pop culture icon (every girl wanted to date him, every guy wanted to be him) was only that it would erode his credibility as a serious writer, both in his own mind in the mind of his readers. In fact, his biggest concern was that the fame would affect his writing — that he would be so worried about making his follow-up as impressive and worthy-of-attention as Infinite Jest, that he'd get bogged down in a loop of perfectionism. Here's how he puts it: "I have an enormous ambition to be centered...I mean this stuff, it's really scary...I'm now so scared of having the ambition to be regarded well by other people."

3) DFW was as incredibly smart and incredibly funny in person as he is in his writing — In the introduction, Lipsky describes DFW's voice as a writer as "the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style." I couldn't agree more, and DFW's wit, charm and intelligence is best illustrated with some quotes from the book:
— On reading vs. TV (and DFW LOVED TV): "...a book has to teach a reader how to read it. You teach the reader that he's way smarter than he thought was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you're dumb." Later, when they're talking about why books are losing ground to other mediums (and remember this was 1996!), DFW argues the reason is that reading requires its consumer to do work, whereas TV doesn't — it's incredibly passive, and Americans are incredibly lazy.
— In response to a flight attendant who has announced that "Smoking only is permitted outdoors." DFW: "Permitted only outdoors. It's not the only thing that's permitted outdoors." Lipsky adds: "Irritated as a grammarian and as a smoker."
— NPR radio guy prior to interview DFW: "We're gonna record digitially. I hope that's okay." DFW: "So, only yes and no answers?"
— On being a writer: "I don't think writers are smarter than other people. I think they may be more compelling in their stupidity, or in their confusion."
— "Although of course you end up becoming yourself" — DFW is talking about the influences of your parents, but then, of course, at some point you diverge and forge your own identity.

The one thing that bothered me as I read this book (other than the fact that Lipsky seems to be constantly trying to prove how smart he is to DFW, and thus inserting himself quite frequently into the narrative) is something I read in a recent interview. Lipsky said he never talked to DFW again after the time they spent together, and I wondered why. The two have such a great rapport, and admit to each other that they think of each other as friends after the time spent together. So what happened? (less)

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About David Lipsky

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...more

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“My ambition is to not embarrass myself--which, if you know me, is a pretty serious ambition.” — 9 people liked it

“David Foster Wallace: 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. And that the reasons…

That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.

Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuageable by outside stuff. And my guess is that that’s been what’s going on, ever since people were hitting each other over the head with clubs. Though describable in a number of different words and cultural argots. And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the outside, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.

Personally, I believe that if it’s assuageable in any way it’s by internal means. And I don’t know what that means. I think it’s fine in some way. I think it’s probably assuageable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself.

It’s more like, 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 loved 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 this.” — 6 people liked it

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title link	preview: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
avg rating	preview: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Goodreads rating: 3.83 (2686 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6916961-although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320553939l/6916961.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6916961-although-of-course-you-end-up-becoming-yourself?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky[/url]

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

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