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

by D.T. Max

You are responsible for making your own life meaningful. No one else can help you but you. Wallace knew how easy it is, in the modern age, to watch the world turn.

This hopeful, hurtful, energetic, angry, despairing, optimistic, shy product of the American Midwest, for all the dark moments of his life, never stopped being a purer version of ourselves.

Wallace and his sister grew up alongside others like themselves, in houses where learning was highly valued. But midwestern virtues of normality, kindness, and community also dominated.

Foremost is the idea he debuted in his Arizona stories that our passions are no longer our own. In the age of media, we are nothing but minds waiting to be filled, emotions waiting to be manipulated. There is a sense—again brought to full boil in Infinite Jest—that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love.

For Wallace, the great flaw of most fiction was that it was content to display the symptoms of the current malaise rather than to solve it.

‘It’s going to take me, like, two weeks to learn everyone’s name, but by the time I learn your name I’m going to remember your name for the rest of my life. You’re going to forget who I am before I forget who you are.’”