Getting to Know David Foster Wallace

How hard was this piece to report?
It was very sad and it was very hard. I mean, the people were great, he picked his friends incredibly well and the people he grew up with were these incredibly smart, warm, literary people. So it was a pleasure talking with his parents — aside from how awful it was talking to be talking to his parents — and they helped me understand him. You know, someone called last night after reading this piece, and just said, "Gosh that mom, she's just incredible, you know just so funny and sharp, the same way that he was." But it was just incredibly sad. His close friend, Jonathan Franzen, said it was like having someone sucked out of the air-lock in a science fiction movie — this guy was there and now suddenly he was gone.

What do you think his legacy is?
There's no way of knowing what his legacy is but I know he changed prose. And prose gets changed not that often in a century. Hemingway changed prose, so did Salinger and Nabokov. David changed it too. He did an amazing thing. One the things that writing and speech can do is express what we're thinking one thought at a time. But we think a thousand things at a time, and David found a way to get all that across in a way that's incredibly true and incredibly entertaining at the same time. He found that junction. I would have liked to have read many more things by him, because he was the one voice I absolutely trusted to make sense of the outside world for me. Anyone that picks up his work for the next 50 years will have their antenna polished and sharpened, and they'll be receiving many more channels than they were aware of. And that's great. I think that will probably be his legacy, but what I think we'll miss is that he won't be sending out those signals himself. In a sense, he taught you to look at the world the way he did, and then stopped seeing the world that way at all. Evan Wright asked if everybody knew how great a teacher he'd been — he'd helped Wright how to think of himself as a writer — and of course when you invent a prose style, you invent a world and a way of seeing, and it's one big master class, one giant lesson in seeing the world better and clearer, and I think beyond the books and stories and piecs that career-long lesson is a big part of his legacy. He ended a piece for our magazine with the words "Try to stay awake." That open-eyeness is the giant thing he leaves behind.

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