Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

by D.T. Max

(“I’m telling you this in advance to like prepare you emotionally”), a way to shorten the book without having to cut it beyond where it could be cut: endnotes. At the back of the book in smaller type they could stick “harder stuff—data, medical lore, 19th-century asides, ESCHATON math calculations (which I’m attached to because darn if I did find a neater and more elegant way to prove the Mean Value Theorem for integrals than anything that’s in the texts) and certain scenes.” He went on: I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it. it allows me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence, 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically “back and forth” in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns…5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff. Aware that he was wandering back into the experimental terrain he had worked so hard to exit, he added, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.”