The Story About the Story Vol. II

by J.C. Hallman (Editor), Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood

The essays in The Story About the Story Vol. II chart a trajectory that digs deep into the past and aims toward a future in which literature can play a new and more profound role in how we think, read, live, and write. In the second volume of The Story About the Story, editor J. C. Hallman continues to argue for an alternative to the staid five-paragraph-essay writing that has inoculated so many against the effects of good books. Writers have long approached writing about reading from an intensely personal perspective, incorporating their pasts and their passions into their process of interpretation. Never before collected in a single volume, the many essays Hallman has compiled build on the idea of a "creative criticism," and offers new possibilities for how to write about reading. The Story About the Story Vol. II documents not only an identifiable trend in writing about books that can and should be emulated, it also offers lessons from a remarkable range of celebrated authors that amount to an invaluable course on both how to write and how to read well. Whether they discuss a staple of the canon (Thomas Mann on Leo Tolstoy), the merits of a contemporary (Vivian Gornick on Grace Paley), a pillar of genre-writing (Jane Tompkins on Louis L’Amour), or, arguably, the funniest man on the planet (David Shields on Bill Murray), these essays are by turns poignant, smart, suggestive, intellectual, humorous, sassy, scathing, laudatory, wistful, and hopeful―and above all deeply engaged in a process of careful reading. The essays in The Story About the Story Vol. II chart a trajectory that digs deep into the past and aims toward a future in which literature can play a new and more profound role in how we think, read, live, and write.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Essays, Psychology, Contemporary, Literature, American

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

I'm the author of seven books, most recently SAY ANARCHA: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health.

I enjoy talking to readers, for book clubs and 1:1s. Find me at https://www.skolay.com/writers/jc-hal...

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely uncomfortable text from 1998 that puts readers in the mind of a depressed woman, written by a depressed man who would ten years later end his life by hanging himself on his back porch. One of DFW's main topics has always been human empathy, and here, he throws us into the psychological maelstrom of a mentally ill person, and not without illuminating how such an affliction challenges the people around her, especially the ones trying to help. The whole thing is even harder to stomach if you know the Salon article "The Last Lays of David Foster Wallace". Read with "The Planet Trillaphon As It Relates to the Bad Thing" (DFW, 1984; German: Der Planet Trillaphon im Verhältnis zur Üblen Sache).

[Shmuli Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

DFW had an uncanny ability to place the reader into the minutiae of the character in the circumstance of the particular moment. Here we become the woman, depressed, foreboding, lonely and self obsessed. We feel her loathing, her agony, her fear. We empathize with her, yet despise her thinking. We don't want to be her, but would agree to hug her if that would help ease the pain, a pain we no nothing about because its completely indescribable.
It's hard to read DFW's work in situ in toto without the context of the authors own suicide. I guess that makes it even more compelling, more foreboding, more real. Just more really.

[Fedelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sad, well-written essay/story offers no solutions; just an accurate description of what it's like to be clinically depressed and the many obstacles to healing, both within the depressed person's psychology (such as her self-hatred, leading to difficulty believing that anyone could truly love her) and in her surroundings (past child abuse; her "support system" of friends who are losing patience with her -- or is that in her head?). It is interesting that the depressed person is smart and knows exactly what's going on, sees how her past affects her present, understands why she thinks and acts the way she does, and discusses every little detail with her therapist and friends -- but neither having all of this knowledge nor discussing it endlessly solve her problems; she remains depressed, she still hates herself. Maybe that's part of being clinically depressed; talking and understanding are not enough to help the person heal and move on.

[Amanda NEVER MANDY · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this one up and put it down multiple times before finally getting through it. Almost every aspect of it was difficult to read and I honestly did not like it at all.

Why the four stars, you ask?

The story was difficult on purpose, writing style and content. It was meant to do exactly what it did. Had it been longer then I would have deducted a couple of stars, so the length complimented it well.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

pretty accurate portrayal of the ugliness of depression, written by someone who suffered from it. it made me, as a depressed person, very uncomfortable(in a good way), but I guess that is the point.

[laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

incómodo y brillante.

[☆brooklyn☆ · Rating 5 out of 5]

i know this is only 8 pages but i’m logging it, and i have a feeling i’ve cockblocked myself from trying DFW bc of the type of person who name drops him in lit classes, but i have a feeling that i was wrong and dumb, and i have a feeling that he is actually emotionally literate to the extreme that he can write compelling and fluent satire on the battered psyche, that I have really been selling him and his writing short and i have a feelingg that I will go about setting that right this year

my only complaint was that the satire in certain parts was a bit too overt but upon reading the reviews it seems that some people didn’t clock that it was satirical at all so I guess it depends. 5 stars

[Weltschmerz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Koliko surovo.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

For friends of a depressed person, it's really hard to know how best to relate to them: whether to indulge their need to talk (often difficult when one's time and energy are limited) or, on the other extreme, tell them to 'snap out of it' - cruel, yes, but how else will you go on? Whose responsibility is this thing, anyway?

That question seems to be the basic premise in this funny, whip-smart short story, originally published in Harper's magazine. But it's difficult to relate to it without mentioning the pachyderm in the quarters: Wallace's own depression and eventual suicide. The story's ending (spoiler alert, but c'mon, it's like eight pages) shows the neediness of the depressed person to be even more thoughtless and craven than we first realised - but what else would we expect when the author identifies so strongly with the self-loathing of his character?

Perhaps the picture isn't quite so bleak as it's made out to be here. Perhaps the woman's friend (revealed to be suffering silently from a terminal illness) isn't quite as put upon as she seems to be. Seen through the lens of the depression which robbed America of one of its brightest, most promising writers, it seems impossible for it to have ended any other way.

[shi ❦ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short story published by DFW in Harper's Magazine in January 1998. It's my first read of his, and if Infinite Jest is anything like it as regards the style, I will definitely enjoy it.

[Nelson Rivas · Rating 4 out of 5]

creo que nunca había leído tantas oraciones yuxtapuestas en inglés (así es, solo me he leído a emily henry en ingles y la tia no es muy fan de ellas). aún así, se disfruta mucho leyéndolo, entendiendo lo que sea que significa ‘disfrutar’ cuando lees algo como esto.

lo que más me gustó puede que sean los pensamientos de la persona deprimida acerca del proceso terapéutico. lo incongruente y absurdo que se puede llegar a sentir la (pseudo)relación que tienes con tu terapeuta. de todas formas no es ni siquiera la idea principal de la historia y se dicen muchas cosas más en ella.

dejaré de ser solo cuando lucía deje de recomendarme cosas.

[Fabio · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Rilettura a bilanciare Vonnegut sui momenti felici)
A. Mantiene la sua potenza. Quasi tutta, perché la botta della prima lettura è irripetibile. La ragione mi consiglia di non rileggerlo se non fra molti anni

B. Tutti dovrebbero leggerlo, per gettare uno sguardo nell'abisso, o per dolorosamente riconoscere aspetti noti

C. DFW è leggibile in originale, almeno nel breve. Temevo il peggio, invece SI PUÒ FARE

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life → Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail → Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar → the latter's most voted review → here.

[Rosemarie Donzanti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicole had to write a paper on this short story. I decided to read it as it was written by David Foster Wallace. Wallace wrote Infinate Jest...a book with over 1,000 pages that I swore I would read when I retired. Not so much, just yet. Wallace suffered from depression and took his own life in 2008. Reading “The Depressed Person” you get a glimpse into the isolation and overwhelming obsession with this woman's darkness. Sadly Wallace had much experience in this realm. Very touching.

[Richard O'connor · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's pretty well known that Wallace essentially wrote this as a hit piece on Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of "Prozac Nation." True that Wurtzel had sort of built her career on her mental illness--but at the same time she was working to destigmatize it. There are other examples of his cruelty, as his former lover Mary Carr tells us. Wallace was perhaps the most torn-up genius in literature in the last few decades; able to get deeply into other's heads but sometimes using that empathy to hurt.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it eerily accurate. It's clear that he also experienced many of these feelings in order to express them so clearly.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 5 out of 5]

read 20 times

You will not find more brilliant story about depression than DFW's masterpiece.

[Rebeca S.C · Rating 3 out of 5]

describe el estado mental de una persona con depresión para con su entorno y su círculo más cercano

[math · Rating 5 out of 5]

david foster wallace you are an icon

[Fnaught · Rating 4 out of 5]

'And as for the idea of girding herself and venturing out once again into the emotionally Hobbesian meat market of the dating scene...'

I had a dream last night that I was in some African country: stabbing at the hotel, a long beach. I am about six years younger, smoother faced and significantly more insane. I look down over the pier and into the crystal water where I expect to find some exotic wildlife suddenly dossing around, where I spy a geometric, basically 3d turtle spinning about in a big black shell, and I say 'Wow' to myself before being spirited off into the next enclosure of the dream. This was a night spent recovering from the alcohol I was drinking the night before -more significant than usual- and the memory of a big south east asian steroid user repeatedly threatening me at the bar and calling me a faggot until I took issue with it and we nearly got in a fight before he bought me a shot. My point is this is something, but it's very different from being The Depressed Person, i.e. the absolutely self-hating, David-Foster-Wallace-but-With-Tits, void that this story is all about and that I used to be.

You're now dealing with someone that is "moral" for purely religious reasons, someone who used to let himself be shoved around by politics of a palpably feminine and repressive sort. But now that's all absolutely gone. And if I was born as sensitive as I am in DFW's generation, it would have killed me too. Not the drugs, but the sensitivity to others' feelings and the sheer desperation to have their approval and in some sense be their equal, plainly and simply suffocates your soul as a superior person. So reading this story is like watching an eagle try to be a chicken, as in the old tale. Come on, David. You are better than them. You are better than this, or would have been.

Those that admire you are.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

And but so David Foster Wallace fearlessly explores the psyche of a Depressed Person and all of the neuroticism, despair and self-awareness/-ishness that he (i.e. Wallace) I’m sure knew all too well.

Some interesting tidbits about coming to the realization that perceiving one’s therapist as a best friend while simultaneously knowing close to nothing about them seems to imply abject narcissism, how the defense mechanisms developed in childhood out of necessity never go away and cause hell in adulthood, and the knowledge that the speaker on the other end of a phone call could be making any number of derisive gestures or faces to whomever else in the room.

“[Some people are] addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.” - Infinite Jest

[Sepehr Omidvaar · Rating 5 out of 5]

نفس‌گیر و هولناک و پر از لحظه‌های والاسی....

[Biddy Mahy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apparently this story is about Elizabeth Wurtzel... sooooooo now I really want to read Prozac Nation

[Tom Simmonds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree

[Maggie Cox]

Excellent!

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story too close to home for me, for the author, and for friends. And that’s what makes it important.

Wonderfully modeled on the depressing spiral of searching within oneself to find an answer to a problem that IS oneself. She exists in a place made of her faults, with no real connection to others. The story comes full circle with the titular character begging for honesty, for sincerity. It’s a theme that is repeated again mid-story by watching her roommate make disgusted face while talking sweetly into the phone; by wanting the therapist to just be blatant about eyeing the clock.

Yet, is she too busy asking for honesty to listen to honesty? I couldn’t help but feel that simple acceptance, with less rumination, was the key here. Yes she was a burden (to read about, and to her Support System friends). But her inability to just let herself be a burden for a while – her hatred at knowing she was a burden—began again the circle that steered her away from what could actually help ease that burden for her and her friends. From her flows a bottomless well of sorrow, breaking forth in hour upon hour of phone conversation.
We see too, at the end, that she is so obsessed with her own pain that she cannot inquire about the pain (or joy) of others. All her conversations are one-sided. But it is this missing inquiring about and listening to others that would form the connection with others.

The author seems to be saying that it is only this connection that can fill one’s own ache. Yet there is a fear that one can never truly be sure of the sincerity of such connection with someone outside one’s self—even when one blatantly asks for it. And thus the spiral of depression begins again.

[Everett Dvorak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me feel horrible about myself

[Omolara Anisere · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spectacular insight into the coprophagic nature of the depressed person. Placing the reader in the psyche of the frightfully parasitic mind of someone so deeply obsessed with their commitment to suffering.

[Divya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A devastating exploration of depression’s cyclical nature on how it distorts perception, alienates sufferers from others, and resists resolution. Wallace’s unsparing portrayal refuses to offer comfort, instead laying bare the paradox of a mind that longs for connection but is imprisoned by its own pain. The story remains a poignant, albeit painful, reflection on mental illness and the limits of human empathy.

Key Quotes:

- The impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain.

- What kind of person could seem to feel nothing—nothing—for anyone but herself?

- As long as the depressed person had the depression’s affective discomfort to preoccupy her, she could avoid feeling the deep vestigial childhood wounds.

[Ariya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tangible, very solid and absorbing. It's the opposite of happiness, well, what I mean is it's very depressing as fuck that you want to read while continue tearing the pages apart to release the suffocating madness. Gladly, I'm reading this online.