Getting to Know David Foster Wallace

In 1996, Rolling Stone contributing editor David Lipsky spent a week with David Foster Wallace, conducting a series of interviews with the author of Infinite Jest. Lipsky gradually won the celebrated author's trust, gaining access to a world few but Wallace's closest intimates knew. As is often the case in the magazine business, a series of events took place — a rock star's untimely death, a heated political season — and the profile never saw publication. So Lipsky sat on a massive interview with one of the most important writers of the last 50 years. When we heard Wallace committed suicide on September 12th, we immediately sent Lipsky to report on the author's life and death. The story he came back with, The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, (from RS 1064, on stands now), is one of the most moving pieces RS has published in years. Here Lipsky discusses the process of his reporting, the man he got to know, and the legacy of a writer who changed the game.

When you were sent out to profile David Foster Wallace, how hard was it to gain his trust?
David Lipsky: Well, it was pretty hard, in that he'd try to read what kind of person you were and then try to give you an answer that would suit the publication you were from or what he guessed your values were. So at first he did a lot of joking about how he hoped he'd meet girls through the success of the book — that didn't seem like him at all. The first couple days he kept doing stuff like that and I kept kind of teasing him about not doing stuff like that. But then we were supposed to fly from Bloomington to Minneapolis — the last leg of his tour — and the Bloomington airport got snowed in, we had to drive to Chicago and then fly out of O'Hare, we had a couple days in Minneapolis and then we had to drive back from Chicago. And I think anyone you do a long car trip with, you have to open up to at some point. So I think Henry Ford got us together.

What was your biggest impression of him, just as a guy, as a person?
He was incredibly smart and funny, and really casually sharp — like someone playing tennis who you're just hitting with, and all of a sudden, he would just sizzle it back to the far corner of the service court. I remember that we pulled in to Minneapolis and I was told that my hotel room had two twins, and he said, "Yes, Anita and Consuela," which I thought was very funny. Before readings he would get incredibly nervous, and you thought it was an act — he'd talk about how he suddenly had no saliva — because he had no reason to be nervous, everyone loved him. And then once he started reading, it was like watching some incredibly high-level version of stand-up comedy. He was so nervous beforehand, but his social self was all charm. I think he used that charm, somehow, as a strategy for being left alone: I gave you all this — entertainment, wit, intelligence — what more can you ask?