Getting to Know David Foster Wallace

Did you keep in touch with him over the years?
In fact, I was a little embarrassed the piece didn't run. I called his agent and said, you know, David has mixed feelings about his work being publicized and you know his wishes have been granted — we're not doing the piece, pass along the good news. But it was a really embarrassing, because in the second half of our time together, he decided to be very straight. He would sit and try to come up with the clearest possible answer, and I could hear his answers were more complete and honest in the second part than in the first part. It was like he was downloading his memoirs. He knew he had given me this really clear look of what his life had been like, and that it wasn't going to be published anywhere.

Did you ever hear from him after these interviews?
I had left a shoe there. So he sent me this gigantic loafer back in a box with in a Chicago Bears post-it note, saying, "I presume this is yours, yours, Dave Wallace," with a little smiley face he drew on the bottom. I felt like a barefoot idiot.

Can you talk about his rare ability to toggle between high and low brow, philosophy to athletics, journalism and fiction?
I think he changed journalism. I felt like it was the first time I accurately heard the brain-voice of people his age and a little bit younger, and that was an amazing experience. When I read the cruise ship piece in Harper's I thought, here's the first person to speak this language, to actually catch and write this language, which everybody's hearing all the time. And I thought it was amazing. He could talk about Joyce, he could also talk about some fitness-world guy, or he could just curse; somehow, not keeping those things on separate planes in your brain, but having them all come out in the same sentences, was great — it's how it's feels on the inside. He's never precious — he told me he hated the kind of "beret-wearing English majors, sensitive and politically correct." He came from a sports background and the double-album, bong background. That gives his work a power, because it has to do with the way most people live; most people don't live like the people who spend their teens reading and having their glasses stolen by bigger kids. He was one of the big kids — not a glasses-stealing kid, but that background allowed him to write about everybody's life, as opposed to just the way writers experience life. And that's a huge, huge advantage.

You think he spent some time sitting in 7-Eleven parking lot drinking tall boys?
Yeah. We were talking about TV, because my mom was pretty anti-TV, and I said that my friends' houses was where I went to watch extra TV in the afternoon, and he said, "Really? My friends' houses was where I went to burn bones. That's what my friends' houses were for."