Essays About David Foster Wallace

Eventually, my love of DFW destroyed my idolization of him.

Eventually, my love of DFW destroyed my idolization of him.

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Sample quote: "It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."A lengthy and wonderfully written paen to the horrors of a week-long luxury cruise.

Many people's idea of heaven swiftly becomes Wallace's personal hell as he drifts aimlessly around the Caribbean aboard the vast cruise ship MV Zenith, which Wallace naturally rechristens the Nadir.

This is notably unlike how many people in the literary world responded to other, past accusations of abuse, including very well verified ones like those against David Foster Wallace.

That Díaz is a man of color and Wallace was a white, wealthy son of academics is obviously relevant.

After all, it has Foster Wallace's signature stamp all over it with long rambling sentences and lashings of footnotes.

But the real fascination lies between the lines, as the narrative underpins the emotional, landscape of self-hate that ultimately led to the writer's suicide in 2008.After learning all these things about DFW back in 2012 or so, I revisited a lot of his work and found it lacking in the genius and sensitivity that I had remembered.Here are some things I noticed in particular (often with the help of discerning readers on the Wallace-L listerv):— — — —Learning and observing these things about Wallace radically changed my reading habits.And to highlight this, Wallace’s most outspoken and best-known accuser, the fantastic writer Mary Karr, has come forward again to remind us of her deceased ex’s their behavior are men of color.The more an abuser’s existence challenges stereotypical narratives of brown and black men as predators and white women as prey, the less likely the abuser is to be fully punished for their actions.His words climbed down into the pit with me and kept me company when I most wanted to die. I read everything he had ever created, tracked down obscure, old interviews and radio segments on him from the early days of the internet.When I ran out of his own work, I read books that were tangentially about him — including Mary Karr’s by Jeffrey Eugenides.We’re gonna have to get good at accepting that, and learning to deal with it.It is the discomfort with that nuance that pushes people to ignore accusers and exalt creators into impunity.He has " magazine; the resulting essay wasn't exactly what the editor had in mind.You get a lot of lobster: the biology of the lobster, the history of the lobster, even the etymology of the word "lobster".