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

by David Lipsky

I think probably, what I’ve noticed at readings, is that the people who seem most enthusiastic and most moved by it are young men. Which I guess I can understand—I think it’s a fairly male book, and I think it’s a fairly nerdy book, about loneliness. And I remember in college, a lot of even the experimental stuff I was excited by, I was excited by because I found reproduced in the book certain feelings, or ways of thinking or perceptions that I had had, and the relief of knowing that I wasn’t the only one, you know? Who felt this way. Who had, you know, worried that perhaps the reverse of paranoia was true: that nothing was connected to anything else. I remember that early on in Gravity’s Rainbow, and really getting an enormous charge out of it. And I think if there is sort of a sadness for people—I don’t know what, under forty-five or something?—it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on, that maybe I can hope that parts of this book will speak to their nerve endings a little bit.