Less than six months after David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, D. T. Max published a long article in The New Yorker about Wallace, his depression and his attempts to write a new novel. That essay spurred Mr. Max’s new book, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” the first biography of Wallace. Michiko Kakutani called it a “revealing” book that “gives us a sympathetic appraisal of Wallace’s life and work, tracing the connections between the two, while mapping the wellsprings of his philosophical vision.” In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Max discussed Wallace’s literary influences, his sometimes tumultuous relationships with women, the role of God in his life and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
You write in your acknowledgments that it’s a challenge to write “the first biography of someone as complex as David.” What was toughest and easiest about being first?
It’s a huge privilege to be first as a biographer. Honor is not too strong a word. And to sink into something so fresh, so untouched is the writing equivalent of helicopter skiing. But you know to be first is also to run the risk of missing the point, of putting enormous energy into aspects of a life that may become irrelevant. That’s O.K. for me, though. As a writer I long to be absorbed and I found Wallace entirely absorbing. He consumed me.
What advantages will his future biographers have?
I asked my questions to people who were often in deep grief, understandably. David committed suicide just four years ago. Twenty years from now the conversations may be easier, some grief eased, including that of the biographer. Easier conversations can lead to new revelations. On the other hand, memories fade.
Your book is weighted fairly heavily to Wallace’s career up through “Infinite Jest.” Do you see his work after that novel as less important, or what other reasons drove the book’s structure?
I’m a fetishizer of the new: the first novel, the first day of school, the first kiss. I’m interested in beginnings. I have a prejudice that we establish who we are very early in our lives. By his mid-30s, Wallace knew who he was. He may not have been happy with it, but he knew his self.
The novelist Robert Boswell said he found Wallace’s politeness “both affected and genuine in some way.” It seems like many of Wallace’s attributes fit that description. What’s the balance you see in him between earnestness and performance?
I don’t think even Wallace knew when he was performing and when he wasn’t, the two were so intertwined. Here’s what he said in an early 1990s interview that I love: “I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.” My favorite part of it is he cut the line before publication. Even he couldn’t have devised a more meta moment.
Several of Wallace’s influences are obvious from reading his work — Barthelme, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc. Was there an influence you found particularly surprising?
For me the biggest surprise was his debt to Cynthia Ozick. He once wrote to Don DeLillo, “I defer to no U.S. Gentile in my admiration for Cynthia Ozick.” He even borrowed seven lines of her story “Usurpation” for his novella “Westward the Course of Empire.” Ozick herself doesn’t understand his infatuation. She told me that Wallace’s crush was “a mystery I haven’t been able to unriddle.” But I think at least part of what attracted him to her writing was that her characters have a feeling that the infinite beats down on them, that being human is hard. He wanted that for his fiction, too.
In his relationship with the author Mary Karr, Wallace exhibited a good deal of anger. You write that he once considered killing her husband and that he once tried to push her from a moving car. On Twitter, Karr wrote: “As for my ‘sinking’ him, DFW had two major suicide attempts before I met him. He came crazy, I didn’t make him that way.” What was it about his feelings for her that created such trouble for Wallace?
Until he met his wife, Karen Green, in 2002, David preferred what he called, in a letter to a friend, “serial high-romance and low-intimacy” relationships. He cared more about the hunt than the capture. Mary, who was married when they met, was not smitten by him and gave as good as she got. I always think of the line in “The Great Gatsby” about how a bad driver is safe until he meets another bad driver. Mary was that driver. And they were both newly sober. I don’t think a lot of clear thinking went on between them. But she opened him up to the kind of heartfelt and direct writing he was afraid of. I’m convinced her rejection made him teachable; it touched his core of self-doubt.
Flash Rosenberg D. T. MaxWallace said he felt a “comparative ease and pleasure” in writing nonfiction. Yet he said fiction was “What I’m Supposed to Do.” Do you agree with him that fiction was his most important form? I know several serious readers who prefer the nonfiction, even though (or maybe because) Wallace called his nonfiction persona “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.”
I think it is the fiction we need to go to. The nonfiction is charming and funny and smart, but my test of great literature is you can’t exhaust what it has to teach you no matter how many times you read it — “Infinite Jest” meets that criterion for me better than the essays of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” But the nonfiction is a good place for readers to start who are new to Wallace.
You write that Wallace “never lost his hope that he could find faith,” but religion isn’t a big part of this biography. You say some of his writing about fellow churchgoers was actually code for AA members, but did he consistently attend church? How much of his thinking (and searching) about religion do you see reflected in his work?
Oh, I think religion is a huge part of the story I tell. One big reason I wanted to spend all these years with Wallace was to help me with my own questions of faith by examining his. But faith is different from worship in houses with pointy roofs. David did go to church sometimes, but as a sipper. He liked one’s pageantry, the other’s earnestness, the Danishes at a third. Yet God was central to his thoughts. He had no natural predisposition for belief in a divine being, but I think he forced himself to overcome it mostly to remind himself he wasn’t He. It helped him to relax to know not everything was under his control. You can see how comforting the idea of the divine is in the excerpted story “Good People,” from “The Pale King.” That novel on the whole is almost an ecclesiastical text.
There’s been a lot of chatter about Wallace’s voting for Ronald Reagan. During George W. Bush’s presidency, he was expressing liberal views. How much attention did he pay to politics and how strong were his feelings about it?
I think he actually voted for Reagan twice. And I think his attraction to Reagan probably came at least as much out of a wish to tee off his parents, who were liberals, as from real commitment. And David was, as a young man (as many young men are), a contrarian and an egoist. The political movement he belonged to was the movement of his own competence and mastery. But I think Bush enraged him for two reasons: he saw in Bush all the little-man-lost-in-a-big-man’s-shirt qualities he disliked in himself. And as a 12-step adherent he cast a careful eye on Bush’s personality as a former drinker and did not like what he saw. He and his wife considered leaving the country because of Bush.
What was the biggest reason that Wallace stopped taking Nardil, the drug that had helped contain the worst effects of his depression?
When I wrote the New Yorker article in late 2008, I would have said that 60 percent of the reason Wallace stopped the Nardil was that he was upset that he couldn’t seem to get “The Pale King” to move forward. The other 40 percent was health worries — Nardil is hard on the system. But now, after four years of research, I’d put the percentage more at 90-10. The health crisis that precipitated his decision in 2007 was likely nothing more than an anxiety attack, and the novel had been even longer in the making than I knew. He started it around 1997. It had been with him for a decade, eating at him. As his wife told me, “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.” But he did. Which makes his end even sadder, I think. He was a martyr for literature. That’s not all there was to him, but it’s part of it.
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