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

This is a really engaging book on David Foster Wallace. Sure, people might say that Wallace's life is what makes this book good, but it's not. There would be too much of it to make sense of it all without a good deal of sifting, editing and moulding, which D. T. Max has done here.

It's a chronological book that undoubtedly puts Wallace up front, even though I get the feeling that's what Wallace would least of all have wanted, during his lifetime.

Having read "Infinite Jest" and "The Pale King" before I read this biography, I must say it was completely eye-opening at times, when it comes to his works.

Starting off with Wallace's childhood, we learn of his connection with language and play:

No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: "greebles" meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; "twanger" was the word for something whose name you didn't know or couldn't remember. She loved the word "fantods," meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of "the howling fantods," this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace's work. To outside eyes, Sally's enthusiasm for correct usage might seem extreme. When someone made a grammatical mistake at the Wallace dinner table, she would cough into her napkin repeatedly until the speaker saw the error. She protested to supermarkets whenever she saw the sign "Ten items or less" posted above their express checkout lines.
Yeah, his mother was a language nazi, which he also turned into. Although Wallace seems to have been very gentle about that, except when admonishing his own work and correcting his students (and his editors and proof readers).

He was great at learning stuff that seemed finite, but in other cases he faced problems:

His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: "How do you know when you can ask a girl out?" "How do you know when you can kiss her?" His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.
While discovering life and earning top marks in school, he started writing.

One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called "The Clang Birds," about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass.
His literary turn to honesty as a main driving force is clearly visible throughout his growing up, partly because he was an alcoholic, but also because lying seemed to permeate society:

A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: "Hi, I'm Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger." The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.
He answered letters from fellow authors - notably writing with Don Delillo and Jonathan Franzen - and was often apologising:

He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess. He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that "I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8% real," then crossed that out and wrote in "98.8%," noting in a parenthesis in the margin, "Got a bit carried away here."
When writing about boredom in "The Pale King":

As he wrote in a notebook: Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace's predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating--the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn't replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System.
It didn't seem like Wallace would ever fall victim to hubris:

In time these early Internet users took up Wallace for their fan communities too, a transition that particularly discomfited him (though to be fair anything that reinforced the masonry of the statue did). When in March 2003 a member of Wallace-l told Wallace about their email list at a taping of a reading for The Next American Essay, a compilation of creative nonfiction edited by John D'Agata that Wallace had contributed to, his response was, "You know, for emotional reasons and sanity I have to pretend this doesn't exist."
And, in the very end:

They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she'd be "the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened." They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.

It's a lovely book, it really is. It's easy to draw parallels between the lives of DFW and Bill Hicks, both persons being gentle, humble, passionate, thinking and self critical.

Disappointing. I knew little of DFW and was eager to learn all I could. This book comes across as voyeuristic. It is poorly written, superficial, and contains enough errors and misspellings that it makes me question a fair bit of the stories. What was Viking thinking in publishing a book about such a gifted writer in this fashion? Page 160 "Avril is now in a relationship with her late husband's brother" is just plain wrong. I can't help but think DFW (and his family) would be cringing at this for many, many, reasons. As another commenter stated, too soon. Better to learn about him through his works and on line interviews for a more personal look at what made him so special. - RIP

I found this biography to be compelling, well written and meticulously researched by D.T. Max. There are so many intimate details about David Foster Wallace's life that it was like reading personal journals. I thought that the author remained for the most part nonjudgemental and objective.
There were two areas that I found not clearly explained or explored. One was Wallace's relationship with his Mother. The second was Wallace's relationship with the writer Mary Karr. The level of rage allegedly exhibited by Wallace towards Mary Karr despite the fact that he is clean, sober and on antidepressants is baffling to me. Did he really try to throw Mary Karr out of a moving vehicle? It is one bit of information that without a police report and witnesses I felt could have been left out of the story.
The biography is well paced. Although I knew at the beginning that David Foster Wallace would commit suicide, I did not know what event(s) would push him over the edge. Without giving away the final scenes of the book, it was not what I expected.
Writers, people in recovery, people familiar with severe depression and those who have admired David Foster Wallace's work, including countless students he taught over the years will glean much insight from this biography. Wallace's wisdom grew with his sobriety. One cannot help but like him and feel great compassion towards him. It made me wish I had known him and had the opportunity to take one of his courses.
This is one of the best biographies I have ever read.
Note to D.T. Max: In your footnotes, Chapter 5, 26. It should read "Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink." We alcoholics could never stop with just one.

Generally, one buys a book about a favorite writer in order to "bridge the myths" involved in the writer's life. This amounts to wanting simultaneously to see the writer as a God and as a flawed human being. The "bridge" holds up if the book enables the reader to navigate ultimately a smooth transition between the God and human aspects of the writer.

D.T. Max's recent biography of David Foster Wallace, "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," accomplishes successfully this transition. By showing the tensions and contradictions in Wallace's life, Max articulates a sophisticated and nuanced portrait of a brilliant but deeply troubled mind.

Max takes us through many of the contradictions of Wallace, his wish to avoid irony only to become a sad irony himself, a personality that was hard to embrace, but somehow at the same time hard to push away, but above all, a person who, despite having a hard time living in the world, nevertheless, had a most intense intellectual engagement with his world.

Max succeeds's in a postmodern sense of showing that in nuance there is ambiguity.

I recommend this book highly.

I must advise you, however, to budget yourself six to eight hours of free time right after you purchase the book, because once you start it, you will not be able to put it down until you have read it completely.

I've always found David Foster Wallace's fiction difficult to like, but I appreciate his importance as a writer, especially in the literary and academic culture of the last 30 years. That's what drew me to read D.T. Max's book, and it was an immensely satisfying read. It moves quickly but not because it is shallow. Max, unlike many literary biographers, tightly constructs his portrait of the man and the work and moves it forward with sensitivity and energy: there are many details but few digressions, a salubrious ratio of meat to fat on the historical bones. He concisely illuminates connections between DFW's life and art in ways that are both crystal-clear and provocatively insightful. Wallace the person, in my view, is not much more likeable than his fiction: but while I laid down Infinite Jest after a few weary hours, I happily stayed with this book until the end.

An excellent biography of DFW. Very well written and researched. If you want to know the details of DFW's relatively short life then you will not be disappointed with this book. Max takes you from Urbana, IL (some of the best farm land in the world), to Amherst College, to Tucson, to Yaddo, to Boston, to Syracuse, back to Illinois and on to oblivion. What is in this book is all I know about DFW other than the 2005 Kenyon commencement address. I do plan to see the movie The End of the Tour about DFW's promotion of Infinite Jest. I do not plan to read Infinite Jest. It seems to me that the precocious DFW was raised in a stable and loving middle-class family in north central Illinois. The parents were well educated, stable and provided for the family. DFW and his sister were encouraged to be good students, good citizens and freethinkers. At about 15, DFW decided to partake in the frequent ingestion of cannabis. His parents knew and looked the other way. A mistake? I don't know. Towards the end of the book DFW concludes that his mother was most likely abused by her father. I do not know if this was true or not. I only bring it up because DFW adopts the all too common standard of blaming his problems on his mother. This seems very unfair to me and I have a feeling that this was a subject that Mrs Wallace would not discuss with Max. A little more input from Mr Wallace (the father) would have also been helpful. DFW suffered with bouts of great depression. When he was a young adult his mother (and father) were there for him during breakdowns. DFW smoked way too much weed. He seemed to enjoy the life "recovery" and his recovery groups. Almost a lifestyle. I really did not have much sympathy for him, he seemed to be another tortured soul who brought many of his problems upon himself. An eternal child but not a bad guy, just immature. His mother's fault I guess. Good job Mr. Max.

Biographies of famous people aspire to insightfulness. They often end up becoming workmanlike as the story catches up to information we already know. That's not a criticism. It's probably a necessity for cradle to the grave bios. Walter Isaacson's great "Steve Jobs" bio starts with a blast of fresh information and settles into a march of familiar products: behind-the-scenes with the ipod, itunes, the iphone, the ipad, etc. "Every Story" is workmanlike too, and a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff works well, especially to fans of Infinite Jest and those familiar with Wallace's cagey and fabulist interview persona. Surprising to me was how autobiographical IJ is--something I probably sensed (but naively discounted because Wallace said it wasn't so) and can now confirm. He didn't just create the rehab experience from dropping in on a few Boston AA meetings, as he suggested in interviews. He lived it. Much of Max's biography, to its credit, is unflinching. Wallace could be callous toward women, did insane things for them, slept with an underage girl, supposedly bought a gun to kill one infatuation's husband, tried to kill himself many times, hit rock bottom many times, threw snowballs at kids (when he was a kid), was sometimes a bully and vindictive toward students. One thing that softens the experience of reading about Wallace I think is that we know where we're heading--clinical depression and suicide. We're braced for the worst. And we certainly get it. I have two complaints, or "issues," with Max's biography. Neither has to do with the overwrought analysis of certain of Wallace's works--as some reviewers chided--Max is a smart guy and wants to stretch his legs; nothing wrong with that, especially when his subject is a preternatural literary legend; or with the speedy treatment of the end (with one tawdry exception), which others have complained about--things fell apart for Wallace pretty quickly and tragically just as he was entering the happiest phase of his life; Max didn't need to overdramatize; the abruptness seems oddly right. No, my two complaints are at best pedestrian and at worst low brow. No. 1: Where are the pictures? Every biography I've ever seen has a picture section (or sections) inserted in different glossy-like paper somewhere around the middle. (I'm not including memoirs, like Hitch-22, which is a different genre). Even Team Of Rivals had pictures! Here, not one. Near the end there's this great description of a picture Wallace and his wife used to announce their marriage showing Wallace jumping in the air and clicking his heals. It sounds charming and unlikely. Would've been nice to have seen. No. 2: Wallace wrote a lot of letters in his life, including multiple suicide notes. Is it too lugubrious to say I'd like to read them--and especially the one that turned out to be true? I'd like to know what the most fabled writer of his generation had to say about why he did it. Was it rambling gibberish? Did the master grammarian have typos in his suicide note? Is it too personal? Yes--but still I'm curious.

DFW himself said that literary biography can be unpleasant for fans of the biographee's writing. That was the case for me. Too much information about who a lot of the people in his fiction "really are."

If you love and appreciate David Foster Wallace's writing and love and appreciate him as a figure in contemporary literature, you will get so much out of this volume. DT Max has clearly done the work to provide as much information as is available on this towering inferno of a man we all consider the personal voice in our head. He's constructed a narrative from letters to old friends, other writers, ex-lovers, he's interviewed his family, his former AA buddies, his colleagues at colleges he taught, his colleagues at colleges he didn't get in to, and the most telling, Karen Green, Wallace's widow. There is so much here, so much to work with, so much to get out of. It immediately made me buy two copies of Wallace books so I could share with friends. It is a shot in the arm for a new appreciation of our generation's Joyce. I cannot advocate for this book enough.

Fans who know him through his writings will find many details that illuminate David Foster Wallace's prose. People who were fortunate enough to know Dave Wallace, even a little bit, will learn some of the distressing details that surfaced below David Foster Wallace's authorial life. Readers with their fingers on the frenetic pulse of the culture of the last two decades will find insight into how one bandana wearing man shaped the Nineties and the Aughties through his words, written and spoken.

D.T. Max is the author of the equally engaging The Family that Couldn't Sleep. He has the keen eye of a terrific science writer, and he turns it to this bildungsroman whose ending is too well known and perhaps sadly predictable. Wallace's life as recounted here starts from the laid back world of the Seventies Midwest and then shifts gears into the ambition charged, self promoting Eighties and its culmination in the highflying, self-gratifying Nineties. The aftermath is a settling into humility and introspection, the grasping at compassion, and the embrace of empathy for the concerns of the down and out, the ordinary, the unanointed. Looming over the competition on the tennis court, in the classroom, in writer's colonies, in sexual conquests, is the inexplicable specter of depression, treated with the chemical salve of pharmaceuticals and fueling the prodigious ruminations on self-consciousness, human mistreatment of other humans, and the need to cope and find inner and outer peace. What D.T. Max has produced is the story not just of an emotionally torn author, but also of a bipolar culture that celebrates great art while often ignoring the person behind it.

There are points I could quibble with, but the best advice is to read the biography and then reread the stories, the novels, the essays, everything, with a fresh understanding of what the hunger artist sacrificed so we could be entertained and touched.

D.T. Max delivers a sensitive, sad account of the life of David Foster Wallace, a gifted writer. This is a powerfully moving story that tugs at the heart page-after-page as Mr. Max describes a compassionate and touching portrait of David Foster Wallace, his works, and the era he lived in. This compelling literary biography is a detailed description made through extensive research of what this writer wanted from life, and how he lived it through his personal beliefs. This haunting story also portrays the true meaning of humanity as seen through the eyes of David Foster Wallace. Although sad and deeply emotional, the story grabs the reader's attention in the very beginning. Intelligent, well-written, and interesting from beginning to end. Highly Recommended to writers and authors!

"But biography has often been allotted to writers, who seem very little acquainted with the nature of their task, or very negligent about the performance. They rarely afford any other account than might be collected from publick papers, but imagine themselves writing a life, when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments; and have so little regard to the manners or behaviour of their heroes, that more knowledge may be gained of a man's real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree, and ended with his funeral." - Samuel Johnson