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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?
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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."
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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.
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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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