Now Wallace was wondering whether he hadn’t become a literary statue, “the version of myself” as he wrote a friend at the time, “that I want others to mistake for the real me.” The statue was “a Mask, a Public Self, False Self or Object-Cathect.” What made the statue especially deadly to Wallace was that it depended for its subsistence on the complicated interplay between writer and public. Not just: You are loved. But also: You love being loved. You are addicted to being loved.
