I just read this week's New Yorker article about David Foster Wallace.
I will always remember him, mostly because I was so completely annoyed by the footnotes in Infinite Jest that I couldn't go on. It wasn't his fault, it was mine.
After reading the article it's kind of easy to see what drove this genius into severe depression and his eventual suicide by hanging last year. He had so much knowledge and such a capacity to explain to people what people were, that he felt terminally frustrated by the inability of his readers and reviewers to grasp what he was trying to do. And so he just didn't know what more he could do.
As Jonathan Franzen said at Wallace's Memorial Service on Oct 23rd, "And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind Midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote Infinite Jest), 'So yo then, man, what's your story?'"
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