Remembering David Foster Wallace

You’ve probably already heard that David Foster Wallace committed suicide at his home in California on Friday, Sept. 12. A brilliant writer and thinker, he was 46.

His father said Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years, had gone off the medication in June 2007 and, when the depression returned, no other treatment was successful. “Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Remembrances have been piling up through the week. I’ve spent a leisurely afternoon reading them:

The NYTimes says Wallace’s “prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos…a titanically gifted writer with an equally troubled soul.”

The New Yorker says he “spawned whole schools of fiction writers eager to emulate his dense, footnote-and-endnote-riddled, riffing, colloquial style… He took on the absurdities of modern life in an attempt to understand or to parse them, not to mock them.”

Slate collects comments on the “preternaturally talented writer…regarded by many critics, novelists, and readers as the foremost novelist of his generation” from editors and authors on the qualities that made his work indelible.

The WSJ Online says, “No one wrote better on the culture of knowingness found in the self-deflating humor of, say, David Letterman and everywhere on the Internet.”

Andrew Sullivan has video of Wallace describing how the language of images completely changes life. Slate V has video of his appearance on Charlie Rose.

Listen to his piece for This American Life on the moment in the 2000 South Carolina primary when John McCain failed to respond well to an attack by George Bush … which arguably ended up costing him the election. Read his Rolling Stone piece, Seven Days In The Life Of The Late, Great John McCain.

The video above comes via Ezra Klein, who quotes Newsweek that “Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius—Hemingway, for instance.” The title essay of the book, Consider The Lobster, appeared in Gourmet Magazine in August 2004.

That foray into the Maine lobster festival has also become the battle cry of LobsterLib.com: Turns out, duh, Being boiled hurts!

I know depression. I wish him peace in his eternal rest.