Getting to Know David Foster Wallace

When you were reporting this piece, were there things that didn't jibe with your original reporting, that just came out of the blue for you?
That he was very ashamed of being on medication, which is so sad. I know people who are medicated and it's their favorite subject. And he'd never want to talk about it. He told me that he had been on antidepressants for a while when he was at Amherst, and hated it, that he wasn't anymore and didn't allude to being on Nardil. So that was the biggest surprise. And I felt sad that he didn't talk about that, I was sad that he hadn't shared that with readers.

It may be all right there in his writing, if you look really carefully.
Yeah, but never in his non-fiction, right? I mean, he would talk about feeling sad at times on the cruise ship — this kind of comic, sharp despair — but it was things that would make anybody sad if they looked at it properly. I wondered, could it have changed the way you read him, if it he'd said, if it came out that he had been on medication for the whole time he was a writer?

But that wouldn't change the way you thought of him as a writer.
There's a very funny remark that Elizabeth Wurtzel made: she said that the flipside of depression is curiosity. I don't know if she's right, but I could see what she meant: I think depression is examination you can't turn off: Once you start the examination you can't stop it, and it kind of settles on you. But if you can somehow change the spigot you get incredible curiosity. Because if you're examining things all the time, when you're depressed, the hard thing is you're examining yourself and your life and how many things can fail. The Nardil let him turn that outward. The one thing I think is reductive about that thought is I don't think Wallace's talent had anything to do with being medicated.

Often with suicide there's a far amount of anger that friends and family feel. It seemed absent in your piece. Why?
I think that anyone who had seen him in the last year saw a human being in incredible pain. So I think that they just understood — I think they thought it was terrible that the new drugs hadn't worked, and the Nardil didn't work when he returned to it. But there was no anger at all. His sister Amy said that she knew David wouldn't have done this to them if he could have found any way not to. I thought that was great and moving, you know. People just felt for him. They felt horrible knowing someone they loved was in that situation, that amount of pain.