"Did you see that David Foster Wallace committed suicide? I wasn't all that familiar with his work, but I know he was considered a very gifted writer. They didn't come out and say so in the obits, but he certainly sounded bipolar."
I did minimal research, as I'd never read him either:
"I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.” - DFW
Needless to say, I want to.
But I won't. At least not for awhile. It's so tacky to discover an author this way, you know?
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2 comments:
There's been a phone call since the email and my father thinks that my grace period idea is pretty silly.
Wallace is an absolute atom bomb of good things. Patton Oswalt posted this speech on his blog as something that changed his life forever, and I have to agree. I think about it all the time.
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
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