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Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Close Reads
126
Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library
Maria Bustillos | April 5, 2011

"Humility—the acceptance that being human is good enough—is the embrace of ordinariness." —underlined by David Foster Wallace in his copy of Ernest Kurtz's The Spirituality of Imperfection.

"True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world." —David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong.

Wallace committed suicide in 2008. There has been a natural reluctance to broach questions surrounding the tragedy with his family and friends, just as there was reluctance to ask him directly about his personal history when he was alive. But there are indications—particularly in the markings of his books—of Wallace's own ideas about the sources of his depression, some of which seem as though they ought to be the privileged communications of a priest or a psychiatrist. But these things are in a public archive and are therefore going to be discussed and so I will tell you about them.

One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

Much of Wallace's work has to do with cutting himself back down to size, and in a larger sense, with the idea that cutting oneself back down to size is a good one, for anyone (q.v., the Kenyon College commencement speech, later published as This is Water). I left the Ransom Center wondering whether one of the most valuable parts of Wallace's legacy might not be in persuading us to put John Bradshaw on the same level with Wittgenstein. And why not; both authors are human beings who set out to be of some use to their fellows. It can be argued, in fact, that getting rid of the whole idea of special gifts, of the exceptional, and of genius, is the most powerful current running through all of Wallace's work.

All his life, he'd been the smartest boy in class, the gifted athlete, the super brain, the best writer. He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst, writing two senior theses, one in philosophy and one in English, both praised to the skies; the latter was published as a novel, The Broom of the System, when he was just 24. When Infinite Jest appeared, in 1996, acclaim came in like a tidal wave from nearly every critic of stature. "A work of genius." "The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow." "Exhilarating." "Truly remarkable." "Taking the next step in fiction." The New York Times was relatively restrained in its praise, but still called Wallace "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything."

But Wallace had already learned to mistrust such praise. There are many, many places where he talks about that mistrust, but here's just one: David Lipsky spoke with him in 1996 in an interview that later grew into Lipsky's book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Here, Wallace explained that he was proud of Infinite Jest in a way that he was not proud of The Broom of the System: "Which I think shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily, sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that was really a not-very-interesting way... really a way for me to avoid doing hard work. [...] I was arrogant, and missed a chance to make that book better."

A bit later, he expanded on what he'd since learned: "I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person. [...] It's true that I want very much—I treasure my regular-guyness. I've started to think it's my biggest asset as a writer. Is that I'm pretty much just like everybody else."

Wallace's self-image was fragile and complex, but he was consistent on these points, from then onward. His later work enters into many, many kinds of minds, many points of view, with unvarying respect and an uncanny degree of understanding. Every kind of person was of interest to him.

The love his admirers bear this author has a peculiarly intimate and personal character. This is because Wallace gave voice to the inner workings of ordinary human beings in a manner so winning and so truthful and forgiving as to make him seem a friend.

Wallace seemed always to be trying to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better, and trying visibly to make himself understood—always asking questions, demanding to know more details. He owned his own weaknesses willingly and in the gentlest, most inclusive manner. Also he talked a lot about the role of good fiction, which, he opined more than once, is about making us feel less alone. He offered a lot of himself to his readers, in all his writing; this generosity seemed like his whole project, in a way. This was the outward, public Wallace.

But those who followed his career at all closely always knew that there was another, darker part to his nature. A secret part. Wallace was fairly well known to have been very ill, to have been hospitalized more than once for depression, to have attempted suicide, and to have been in recovery for addiction to alcohol and drugs. The paradox of Wallace's humor and good-natured candor, the qualities so many of his readers enjoyed most, set against the many secrets there have always been around his private life, is laid bare in the Ransom Center documents.

From a postcard sent by Wallace to Maria Bustillos, in response to the question, "Were you as scared of The Blair Witch Project as I was?"

* * *

When people asked Wallace personal questions about recovery or addiction, he used to slide out of answering them quite neatly. Indeed I asked him myself, once, at a reading in January of '06 at the Hammer Museum, about the AA-related aspect of the James Frey affair; basically I said, you wrote about AA and about recovery in Infinite Jest, so how did the idea that someone would lie about the circumstances of his own recovery strike you, given what you know and have written. And he replied:

    Have any national twelve-step programs to your knowledge commented publicly on this?

    [I felt quite scolded, there! Whatever, I shook my head a little hangdoggedly, but I still wanted to know.]

    Why do you suppose that is?

    [Eek! So scolded! My response is inaudible, who knows what the hell I stammered out.]

    It seems as if hmmm [hums a little tune, frustratedly].... It seems as if, with some of these organizations, you've got what is a weird kind of microcosm of the problem of "freedoms" in this country and a kind of Bill of Rights. Um is that, um, when organizations are anonymous and, as far as I understand it, regulations are more or less by suggestion, and there's no coercion, and you can't be kicked out, people get to do more or less whatever they want to do. From my vaaaaague understanding!, there—besides the steps, there are also traditions, one of which involves not talking about people's personal experiences with this stuff on a public level, I mean this is all right there in books, it's printed, it's published; another of which involves not getting, you know, not getting involved in outside issues or pretending to speak for the experience of everybody sort of in the fellowship. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people who shit on those traditions do not come to happy ends. That is, in many cases those people who play around with stuff, they don't have to be punished, they punish themselves.

I felt a little guilty for prying, but on the other hand I was like, look, you write a book that is basically a paean to 12-step programs, people are going to ask you.

For the depiction of addiction in Infinite Jest was, as many readers couldn't help but suspect, based not on research but on experience. This was halfway confirmed in the cagey responses he gave regarding his personal knowledge of Alcoholics Anonymous in the wake of the success of Infinite Jest, and confirmed more clearly when "An Ex-Resident's Story" first emerged on the wallace-l listserv in February of 2004.

This anonymous testimonial had been discovered on the website of Granada House, a long-term recovery facility in Boston:

    I was referred to Granada House in November 1989. "Referred" is a very polite way to put it. I was a patient in a rehab attached to a well-known mental hospital in Boston, and a psychiatrist in this rehab had established some credibility with me, and he opined that (1) unless I signed up for long-term treatment someplace, I wasn't going to be able to stay off drugs and alcohol; and that (2) if I couldn't find a way to stay off drugs and alcohol, I was going to be dead by 30. I was 27. This was not my first in-patient rehab, nor was it my first mental hospital.

    Because certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die hard, I'll give you a little bio. I was raised in a solid, loving, two-parent family. None of my close relatives have substance problems. I have never been in jail or arrested—I've never even had a speeding ticket. In 1989, I already had a BA and one graduate degree and was in Boston to get another. And I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict. I had been in detoxes and rehabs; I had been in locked wards in psych facilities; I had had at least one serious suicide attempt, a course of ECT, and so on. The diagnosis of my family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented but had "emotional problems." I alone knew how deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs, which I'd been using heavily since age fifteen.

l had already learned some months before that Granada House appears as the model for Ennet House in an early draft of Infinite Jest. Some nervous detective work followed the appearance of "An Ex-Resident's Story"; everything fit datewise, plus there was the unmistakable style of the writing, and the fact that of the various testimonials for Granada House that appeared on the website at the time, only this one was unsigned. Few (really zero, to my knowledge) who looked into the matter doubted that Wallace had written "An Ex-Resident's Story."

Here, seemingly, was confirmation of all that had been suspected regarding the author's own history of addiction and treatment and, maybe most significantly, an acknowledgement that he had felt himself required to throw the whole concept of his own "genius" overboard in order to survive.

    Six months in Granada House helped me immeasurably. I still wince at some of the hyperbole and melodrama that are used in recovery-speak, but the fact of the matter is that my experience at Granada House helped me, starting with the fact that the staff admitted me despite the obnoxious condescension with which I spoke of them, the House, and the l2-Step programs of recovery they tried to enable. They were patient, but they were not pushovers. They enforced a structure and discipline about recovery that I was not capable of on my own: mandatory counseling, mandatory AA or NA meetings, mandatory employment, curfew, chores, etc. Not to mention required reading of AA/NA literature whether I found it literarily distinguished or not. [...]

    People at Granada House listened to me for hours, and did so with neither the clinical disinterest of doctors nor the hand-wringing credulity of relatives. They listened because, in the last analysis, they really understood me: they had been on the fence of both wanting to get sober and not, of loving the very thing that was killing you, of being able to imagine life neither with drugs and alcohol nor without them. They also recognized bullshit, and manipulation, and meaningless intellectualization as a way of evading terrible truths—and on many days the most helpful thing they did was to laugh at me and make fun of my dodges (which were, I realize now, pathetically easy for a fellow addict to spot), and to advise me just not to use chemicals today because tomorrow might very well look different.

This message went pretty much intact into Infinite Jest, in which the wildly disparate group of inmates at a halfway house struggle to arrive at exactly this condition of humility, endure exactly this kind of mockery for their "meaningless intellectualizations," and sometimes gain exactly this kind of freedom from the prison of substance abuse. Also, the genius of Hal Incandenza, the "lexical prodigy" (who has been dosed by his mother with "esoteric mnemonic steroids") alienates him so profoundly that he is lost forever. A huge amount of Hal's trouble is the burden of his genius, even though he has worked hard to be not just good but great, the best, willingly—and yet unwillingly—flying close to the sun. A reluctant Icarus, full of contradictions.

To sum up: all his life Wallace was praised and admired for being exceptional, but in order to accept treatment he had to first accept and then embrace the idea that he was a regular person who could be helped by "ordinary" means. Then he went to rehab and learned a ton of valuable things from "ordinary" people whom he would never have imagined would be in a position to teach him anything. Furthermore, these people obviously had inner lives and problems and ideas that were every bit as complex and vital as those of the most "sophisticated" and "exceptional."

Even so there was still a lot of the "prodigy" in Wallace, something he hated in himself, not just something he mistrusted and had "gotten over." Like the guy in "Good Old Neon" he felt that he was performing a character rather than being a person; he felt sundered from himself. But he could joke about that, too. His old friend JT Jackson, whom I met at a Wallace event at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, told me about a joke they used to have when they were in grad school together:

"Say, Dave, how'd y'get t'be so dang smart?"

"I did the reading."

Exceptional people often come to believe that the ordinary rules don't apply to them. But because Wallace swam against that current all his adult life, he came to make use of some very standard-issue sources of inspiration. He underlined the following paragraph in his copy of John Bradshaw's Bradshaw On: The Family, in which Bradshaw describes his own reluctance to seek help:

    In my previous go round I felt the 12-step program was too simple for me. I had degrees in theology and philosophy and had taught both of these at the University level. I felt that my problems were more complex than with most of the people I met at the meetings. My drinking was a symptom of a deep and profound sensitive soul. I was one of William James' twice-born super-sensitive ones. This, of course, was all hogwash! Intellectuals create the most grandiose denials!

That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise to me, as I mentioned earlier. But later I talked with my very old friend, S., who went into recovery almost exactly when Wallace did. S. explained that John Bradshaw was all the rage in AA circles at that time. (Bradshaw is the guy who popularized the idea of the "inner child" in the '90s, and he had a TV show on PBS that was hugely popular.)

"You're just alive, is the thing, as well as being in recovery, and these things are moving through the culture," said S., adding that if you were to begin recovery now, as opposed to twenty years ago, you would hear a lot about Eckhart Tolle and "being in the moment" kinds of things, and not much at all about John Bradshaw.

People often seemed a little flummoxed by Wallace's self-effacing discomfort with "genius." The issue came up again and again with David Lipsky:

    There's still something basically false about your approach here. To some degree. Which is this: that I think you still feel you're smarter than other people. And you're acting like someone—you're acting like someone who's about thirty-one or thirty-two, who's playing in the kid's softball game, and is trying to hold back his power hitting, to check his swing at the plate, more or less.

    You mean in the book?

    No, I mean in your social persona. And you're someone who's really trying—

    You're a tough room.

    You make a point of holding back—there's a point, there's something obvious about you somehow in a gentle way holding back what you're aware of as your intelligence to be with people who are somehow younger or...

    Boy, that would make me a real asshole, wouldn't it?

    No it wouldn't: It would make you a reformed person...

    The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

    I understand that.

    And I think it's also like, I think one of the true ways that I've gotten smarter is, I've realized that I'm not that much smarter than other people.

The Eleventh Tradition of AA requires members to refrain from speaking publicly about their affiliation with that organization. You can tell your friends about your recovery, but you are encouraged to not seek public attention for it, or for the organization. The condition of a recovering addict who happens also to be famous, therefore, is a precarious one. It must have required a Herculean effort to maintain the anonymity of his recovery in the face of questioning as probing and perceptive as David Lipsky's, but Wallace never failed in this. He told Lipsky and many other reporters a lot of self-preserving fibs, and it is painful to think of what that must have cost him. More contradictions: he was terribly fragile, but also had nerves of steel, an extraordinarily strong will.

* * *

But Wallace wasn't only about his illness and recovery. At the same time that there is a lot of pain and total horror and fear in Wallace's work, there is also a giddy, life-affirming fizz, and that fizz came undiluted and complete from his mother, Sally Foster Wallace. The writing of these two has a strangely compelling, idiosyncratic beauty and charm: sparklingly sensitive and intelligent, but never too good to stoop to an egregious pun; self-deprecating and friendly and loopy as anything. They are hyperbolists who can evoke a terrible pathos and then vertiginous humor in almost the same breath, one throwaway line after another. In this way, Sally Foster Wallace and her son shared a sensibility so exactly alike that it seems to vibrate between them like a tuning fork.

Mrs. Wallace has written just one book, an English grammar textbook called Practically Painless English. It is the only book of English grammar I know of that can hold a candle to the works of the Fowler brothers. Like them, Mrs. Wallace is delicate, fastidious, crystal-clear and tons of fun, but she has a lovely carefreedom and wild imagination all her own (except for bequeathing 100% of it to her son). Her book is full of snakes and gorillas, monsters, Superman, Cinderella, disasters of every description, ketchup on ice cream, kissing and parachutes and romance. It reveals a dizzying, intoxicating and dangerous world.

The calamities that befall recurring character Fedonia Krump in Practically Painless English, for example, keep the reader in a state of constant anxiety:

    Fedonia completely drained the tea cup and then shakily climbed over the counter. She tried hard to sing "I Love You Truly," but her voice was extremely gravelly. She was fading fast, but she felt too merry to go home. At closing time, she fell asleep on the dirty floor, and Bernie, the waiter, slowly scooped her into his arms, tenderly brushed the dirt from her cheek, and reluctantly threw her out into the snow.

Many David Wallace fans enjoy his frequent deployment of the phrase "the howling fantods" in Infinite Jest. It is a delight to come across this phrase in his mom's book (2nd ed.), long before Infinite Jest was a gleam in its author's eye. ("17. Snakes give me the howling fantods.")

I can't even hazard a guess as to which of the two of them wrote the dozens of "Selected Student Swifties" that appear in the Ransom Center's collection of the teaching materials of Wallace fils:

    "Remember that two plus two equals four," Tom added.

    "This is a petrified tree," the guide said hollowly.

    "Those are bees," Tom buzzed.

    "There are bodies buried here," Tom said gravely.

    "Some dog has destroyed my flower garden," Tom said lackadaisically.

There is such pleasure in reading the two Wallaces, so distinctively funny and gentle, scintillating with "the rich glint of lunacy." Which is something he never talked about much, either humor per se (though there is one really good YouTube excerpt from the interview he gave German public TV station ZDF) or the beautiful part of himself, because nobody is ever aware of his own real beauty or worth. Nor did he talk about Mrs. Wallace very much in public, though he must have identified with her quite a lot. His regard for her was clearly enormous, though; he told Lipsky, "My mother's the best proofreader in the world, Amy's second and I'm third, as far as I've seen." (Amy being Amy Wallace Havens, his sister.) You can see how much Wallace loved and valued skill in English by reading his 2001 Harper's essay, "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage."

David Wallace was a person who dwelt in darkness either by nature or compulsion, or maybe even by mere habit, or maybe just because he'd been given the wrong medication. Depression is a very inward-turned and self-loathing thing; he trapped himself in this sort of interior abattoir. But like all depressed persons, Wallace loathed himself in error. He had a real value that others could see, but he could not.

And another bad thing: he identified so closely with his mom, it's as if she got caught in the crosshairs of his self-loathing.

I have known intimately and looked after depressed people, and have no illusions about my ability to understand the real nature of that illness. The sort of blues I occasionally suffer through compares to real depression like a broken fingernail compares to being shot in the head and then set on fire and drowned. But it seems to me that the victims of that terrible disorder are often trying all their lives in vain to figure out why this must be so. Why them. And maybe there really is just no reason, or the reason is completely random, a cluster of neurons misfiring one day by accident, a bad thing that happens and could not be helped.

A highlighted passage in Bradshaw On: The Family:

Thought Disorders:
You are always reading about your problems, learning why you are the way you are.
You are numb
You control your emotions and feel shame when you can't
You gauge your behavior by how it looks–by the image you believe you're making.

Wallace's notes in Bradshaw On: The Family and especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and revealed to himself by the latter book, one in which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering.

To say that Wallace took The Drama of the Gifted Child to heart is to put it very mildly indeed. He returned to it over and over again; his notes were made at many different times, in wildly differing sizes and styles of penmanship, states of mind. Here are the markers I could more or less identify:

Red sharpie, thin
Pink, thinner, like a faded red Rolling Writer?
Blue thinner Rolling Writer-type
Pencil
Dark blue felt-tip, thin
Black fine felt-tip
Furious blue Sharpie, a thick one
Black ball-point

This is another book that made a big splash when it appeared; Wallace's copy is an eighteenth printing, from 1993. The thesis of The Drama of the Gifted Child is that particularly high-achieving children are damaged because their mothers did not allow them to be themselves, but instead through their own insecurities gave their children the impression that only achievement could win them love. That any deviation from right behavior was unlovable, that they would be rejected unless they performed well.

So Alice Miller says the gifted child has to perform all the time, perform even to himself, and is thereby sundered from himself profoundly. "Narcissistically disturbed" is her phrase of choice for this condition. Because the child doesn't feel free to own his feelings candidly, but instead must censor and control himself ceaselessly and let only the good things about himself become manifest, all the bad feelings like jealousy, rage, envy, are driven underground and fester there and make the child secretly, existentially miserable, and in a special way, "divided" in rather the way R.D. Laing describes in The Divided Self. Miller's gifted child splits into two: one is the grandiose child, who is a super-achieving, obedient, reliable and "good" child, and the other a depressed child who never was loved, never was allowed to be a child, who was forced to perform and excel from such an early age that he has become irrecoverably lost to himself.

Pink highlighter indicates underlining or brackets in the text of his books; in green are the notes written in his own hand.

Amherst 80-85 Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him.

So Wallace, the A+ student whose profs at Amherst had written things like, "un plaisir, mon vieux" at the end of his tests, during which part of his life he'd been very ill from dependence on drugs and alcohol, wanted most of all to escape from that genius. To be an ordinary person who could own his own faults. Not just in a philosophical way, as I used to imagine, and not only because he'd found relief from his troubles for a time through "ordinary" means, but in a manner connected very intimately to what he saw as the genesis of his illness, as if he blamed his illness on the genius itself.

Grandiosity- The constant need to be, and be seen as, a superstar He has especially severe standards that apply only to himself. In other people he accepts without question thoughts and actions that, in himself, he would consider mean or bad when measured against his high ego ideal. Others are allowed to be [circled] "ordinary" but that he can never be.

It will not come as news to any reader of Infinite Jest that Wallace had some complicated and deep-seated issues with regard to the subject of motherhood generally. The relationship between Hal and Avril Incandenza is to some degree a replay, one could not help but think, of the author's relationship to his own mother. Hal is so obviously a projection of Wallace himself: a tennis player, a prodigy, a gifted writer, a brilliant intellect. Thoughtful and kind, but fake, empty inside. Mute. Unable to feel. A secret drug addict, too, who before the end (or at the beginning, if you like) will be destroyed (in my reading of the novel, at any rate). Avril Incandenza, "militant grammarian," is a mysterious but also a monstrous figure, whose love is suffocating, all-encompassing, intrusive, terrible.

Well, all of that emptiness, muteness and monstrosity is suggested in the markings that appear in his copy of Miller's book. And Avril Incandenza's super-loving but emotionally barren character—that, too, is indicated here. And her ambition, the way she souped up Hal's brains by putting "esoteric mnemonic steroids" in his cereal. The mother that appears in these notes is responsible. Created the son's inability to feel, to speak.

On the contrary, she loves the child, as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his "false self."

Others are there to admire him, and he himself is constantly occupied, body and soul, with gaining that admiration. This is how his torturing dependence shows itself. The childhood trauma is repeated: he is always the child whom his mother admires, but at the same time he senses that so long as it is his qualities that are being admired, he is not loved for the person he really is at any given time.

admiration is not the same thing as love

Basically he is envious of healthy people because they do not have to make a constant effort to earn admiration, and because they do not have to do something in order to impress, one way or the other, but are free to be "average".

The Lost World of Feelings

Becoming what narcissistically-deprived Mom wants you to be – performer

But how can you love something you do not know, something that has never been loved? So it is that many a gifted person lives without any true notion of his or her true self. Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its loss or psychosis confronts them harshly with that true self, whom they now have to face and to whom they are delivered up, helplessly, as to a threatening stranger.

Several sorts of mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In addition to simple denial there is reversal ("I am breaking down under the constant responsibility because the others need me ceaselessly"), changing passive suffering into active behavior ("I must quit women as soon as I feel that I am essential to them") projection onto other objects, and introjection of the threat of the loss of love ("I must always been good and measure up to the norm, then there is no risk; I constantly feel that the demands are too great, but I cannot change that, I must always achieve more than others.") Intellectualization is very commonly met, since it is a defense mechanism of great reliability.

It is worse if the parent is smart—she knows what it looks like to be a good, healthy parent. [Tiny, pink writing.]

It is one of the turning points in analysis when the narcissistically disturbed patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love he has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for him as he really was, that the admiration for his beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements, and not at the child himself. In analysis, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind his achievements wakes up and asks: "What would have happened if I had appeared before you, bad, ugly, angry, jealous, lazy, dirty, smelly? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me whom you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-behaved, reliable, empathic, understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all? What became of my childhood? Have I not been cheated out of it? I can never return to it. I can never make up for it. From the beginning I have been a little adult. My abilities—were they simply misused"?

These questions are accompanied by much grief and pain, but the result always is a new authority that is being established in the analysand (like a heritage of the mother who never existed)—a new empathy with his own fate, born out of mourning.
distinguish from mere self-pity

At the center of these fantasies there is always a wish that the patient could never have accepted before. For example: I am in the center, my parents are taking notice of me and are ignoring their own wishes (fantasy: I am the princess attended by my servants)
Mom fostered this illusion

An adult can only be fully aware of his feelings if he has internalized an affectionate and empathic self-object. People with narcissistic disturbances are missing out on this. Therefore they are never overtaken by unexpected emotions, and will only admit those feelings that are accepted and approved by their inner censor, which is their parents' heir. Depression and a sense of inner emptiness is the price they must pay for this control.

You can drive the devil out of your garden but you will find him again in the garden of your son.

ulp

Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her. This is beautifully illustrated in one of Winnicott's images; the mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and baby gazes at the mothers face and finds himself therein … provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own introjects onto the child, nor her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would not find himself in his mother's face but rather the mother's own predicaments. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.

She needed me to do 'bad' things—lie, be cruel to Amy, etc.—that would anchor me, threaten her love. Why? Dad was too steady, dependable

(re: the depressed and the grandiose, two sides of the same disturbed person) because the grandiose and the depressive individuals are compelled to fulfill the introjected mother's expectations: whereas the grandiose person is her successful child, the depressive sees himself as a failure.

These elements of his childhood, Wallace felt, were responsible for his troubles with women generally.

Writing Success
Fame
Sex
Spiritual Bankruptcy You live totally oriented to the outside believing that your worth and happiness lies outside of you (BO:TF)

Wallace was scared of a lot of things. Not just the bugs and roller-coasters that he told us about being scared of, but of losing his ability to write.

Paradox: You will not get back enthusiasm for X until it's not the most important thing. The key to '92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were.) How to make G more important than X. Will? No. Luck/Grace/Awareness(Spirituality of Imperfection)

Wallace is known to have had many lovers, and also to have wanted a family one day. He expressed regret to David Lipsky at having reached the age of 34 without having married. But his relationships ended badly, it seems, most of the time.

DW's inability to be with a girl permanently is a way to perpetuate fantasy bond w/Mom
DW internalized seduction, dishonesty, perfectionism
Intimacy problems: You find "nice" men/women boring. When you start getting too close, you leave a relationship
Love Confused with Sex (BO:TF)

the individual suddenly discovers that he has acquired a mannerism, a gesture, a turn of speech, an inflection in his voice that is not 'his' but belongs to someone else. Often it is a mannerism that he consciously particularly dislikes.
Dave with girlfriend's accent (The Divided Self)

CAN'T BE WHOLE Telos

Gulp note next to the following list of bullet points in furious blue and all but three checked off with check marks (question marks following the three as indicated)

A "false self" that has led to the loss of the potential "true self"
A fragility of self-esteem that is based on the possibility of realizing the "false self" because of lack of confidence in one's own feelings and wishes
Perfectionism, a very high ego ideal
Denial of the rejected feelings (the missing of a shadow in the reflected image of Narcissus)
A preponderance of narcissistic cathexes of objects?
An enormous fear of the loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform?
Envy of the healthy
Strong aggression that is split off and therefore not neutralized?
Oversensitivity
A readiness to feel shame and guilt
Restlessness

There are other ways of seducing the child, apart from the sexual, for instance, with the aid of indoctrination, which underlies both the "antiauthoritarian" [circled] and the "strict" upbringing. Neither form of rearing takes account of the child's needs at his particular stage of development. As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his vital growth will be violently interrupted.

Later, about addicts, suggesting that addiction is a way to try to regain lost, repressed feelings, a license to feel and experience.
Too simple? Or just that simple?

At the end: tiny and in a new pen
Freak: aware of his own pulse at all times

There's no way to date the marks made in this book, but Wallace was at least four years into his recovery when it was published. When I was reading this I felt very bad. Like my hair was standing on end, thinking how this literary sleuthing is also just prying. But I am also glad I read what I did, because I can argue with these views. This man spent a lot of his life in terrible pain, desperate for an explanation and a way out. It's not surprising that in the derangement of his mind he would reach out to those closest to him to blame.

However, I read Miller's book myself at some stage, years ago—it made a terrific noise when the English translation came out—and I can tell you that it is a book that will make anyone detest his own mother for a week at least because that is what it is designed to do: to blame mothers.

But the truth is that, while The Drama of the Gifted Child was highly regarded at that time, there is something essential missing from it. Miller believes that it is so harmful for mothers to want their kids to "perform" and whatnot, that they're stealing their childhoods from them, not letting them feel their feelings; okay, yes, at one extreme there's the controlling mother, the Vinegar Mother, the Tiger Mother, who really literally won't let the kid feel his feelings ever. But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-worshipping monster who believes that her child's every Feeling is somehow Sacred—to which you're all, hoy, lady, your kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to be happy or well-adjusted adults, either. (They fuck you up, your mum and dad.)

It's crazy hard, too, because when you're a parent every single minute of childrearing practically requires compromise of some kind, in order to manage the requirements for a child's being socially adept and well-mannered, but not repressed or bullied or overly controlled. If you indulge a child too much, "respect his feelings" too much, then you become one of those doormats who lives in a nightmare where the child is a tyrant over the house, and if you discipline him too much, he will feel sad, lonely and unloved.

Shame begets shame to compulsive/addictive behavior
DFW comes home broken in '82- not a 'perfect family.' Mom's lie here breaks down.

DFW the "troubled" one in family-angry, anxious, depressed-acting out, instantiating family's sickness (Why I see myself as 'fucked up'?) (BO:TF)

The whole thing is a balancing act that nobody really understands the trickiness of until he has a kid himself. When you can only really see yourself qua child, it is impossible to get a good sense of the other side, and maybe especially not when you have spent enormous amounts of time in therapy and worrying about how fucked up you are, and trying to "find answers" to questions for which answers may never be forthcoming, not ever.

I'm not saying that I know how these things should be managed, because I do not. What I am saying is that these books seem to present a lopsided view.

* * *

It must have been incredibly frustrating to be paralyzed with self-criticism and self-loathing, and have people telling you that you're a genius all the livelong day and forking over Genius Grants and things. Even Wallace's old college roommate Mark Costello told him so, just after he'd won the MacArthur grant.

    Costello says, "He was talking about how hard the writing was. And I said, lightheartedly, 'Dave, you're a genius.' Meaning, people aren't going to forget about you. You're not going to wind up in a Wendy's. He said, 'All that makes me think is that I've fooled you, too.'"

Wallace's harrowing depictions of self-loathing in "Good Old Neon" and "The Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation to The Bad Thing" remind me every time of the things I have wanted to say (but can never actually say) to the depressed people I've known. Namely: fine, if you are such a worm, so false and worthless, unfit to live, then why are you even listening to yourself? You are the very last person anybody ought to be listening to, apparently? Just please back away from the mirror now, because it is all bullshit in there, nothing but illusions, illusions all the way down. Sometimes I think that the principal difference between those who are in general cheerfully-inclined and those who are not is that the former know better than to even countenance their own bullshit for one instant.

Maybe someone should have kept telling him that he may have been a genius, but he was also a big idiot, the way everyone seems to have done at Granada House. He knew it, too, is another crazymaking thing. By 2007 he seemed to be thriving, married now and working on the new book, and everyone who loved his work figured that the worst was behind him, and was just waiting for the new book and enjoying the various articles and readings and different little things that he did.

[...] at certain moments in our lives in fact, it seems that the most fundamental choice each of us has is between fighting ourselves and laughing at ourselves. Kurtz, The Spirituality of Imperfection

* * *

Wallace had a penchant for extrapolating the troubles of American individuals into a broader indictment of U.S. culture and politics, as Infinite Jest depicts a society enslaved to its own insatiable need for entertainment. His own history provides a similar parallel. Wallace spent over twenty years fighting addiction and depression, and though he privately seems to have credited AA and related therapies with saving his life, these methods were not enough to prevent him from committing suicide at age 46. What the available details of Wallace's life and ideas suggest is that we in the U.S. are maybe not doing a very good job of taking care of recovering addicts, or of those suffering from depression.

The new Me Generation of the aughts is like a steroids version of the innocent '70s one, which really amounted to little more than plain hedonism. There wasn't as much guilt and self-recrimination in those days. Today this focus on "Me" is something more like an obsession with our faults, a sick perfectionism, coupled with an insatiable need for attention; the idea of the 'star' as something we want to be.

A case can be made that U.S. society is very much obsessed with "self-help," which involves thinking a whole lot (too much, even) about yourself and your own problems, seeing everything only as it relates to the self, rather than seeing oneself as a valuable part of a larger valuable whole; this is one of the themes of The Pale King.

    We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries–we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?

The book Wallace was too stuck in himself to complete is one in which he was observing how we all ought to become unstuck, sadly. The realization that you have something of value to contribute to the greater world necessarily involves prying your mind off yourself for a minute.

I am making an informed guess that these things that we dwell on with our therapists—they may or may not be false, but almost necessarily, they're only the tiniest part of a picture that is so very much larger. To dwell on the terrible things is to miss the point. To fail ourselves, in a sense. But when you are that sick that is just what is happening, it's you missing the point, never being able to see the beauty or good in things because you are ill. It is the illness talking, and talking, and talking.

And yet our culture is obsessed with finding the causes, with talking things through, and with getting to the bottom of our problems by thinking and talking about them a lot. With solving the problem of depression. The book The Drama of the Gifted Child, suffers very much from that "self-help", inward-turned weakness. It is a good but flawed book that tells just a small part of the story of how to do family life. There is no blame to pin anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve.

* * *

"... the deeper alchemy by which Kafka's comedy is always also tragedy, and this tragedy always also an immense and reverent joy." —David Foster Wallace, "A Series of Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Not Enough Has Been Removed"

I have a friend, C., who has suffered from depression for many years; she is a fellow-admirer of Wallace. C. used to have a photograph of him on the wall of her very pretty, comforting red-walled Midtown office, and she would tell people that he was either her son or her boyfriend, depending on her mood.

I chanced to be in New York some weeks after Wallace's death, a catastrophe that had hit the both of us like a couple of bricks to the head. We had a good late lunch and afterward on that cold, blowy, fast-darkening late afternoon we sat on freezing stone steps on a quiet corner and snuggled together and talked about Wallace for a while. I mentioned that I could not understand how anyone would want to commit suicide, not right then, not with this historic presidential election right around the corner; how could you not want to stick around and find out what happens? And C. looked at me with pity and sadness, as if from a great distance, and said, "Oh, honey. You don't care. You don't care; that's the whole point."

That's just the thing about recognizing our common humanity, our common burden. We're suspended for a moment on this spinning blue pearl, here together and alive right now, conscious, though no one knows why. It is a question of caring. When one of us considers the experiences of another, all the failings and the achievements in someone else's life, we are seeing from this common place, knowing that it's all taking place in doubt and the absolute solitude and terror of being human, and knowing that it's all temporary. All those who are unsure of themselves and suspect themselves of the worst falseness and wrong, bad things are to be not only pitied but loved, identified with and known. Wallace taught that, and suffered for it, and in a way he died of it, too.

One last crown of laurels that is left from the war he waged in himself is the beautiful, McCarthyesque passage that was first published as "Peoria (4)" in TriQuarterly in the fall of 2002, and later turned up as the first chapter of The Pale King, the first part of which ends:

Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.


Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman.

Use of archived materials courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Photo by Steve Rhodes. Used with permission.

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David Foster Wallace, Columnists, Maria Bustillos, Longreads, DFW, The Pale King, Infinite Jest, Sally Foster Wallace
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David Roth
David Roth (#4,429)

You know how sometimes you see a headline and a topic and an author all together up there atop a piece of writing and you just kind of know that what comes after is going to be really, really good?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 12:49 pm
Reply » 5
boyofdestiny
boyofdestiny (#1,243)

I saw a little "1" in the comment bubble, and thought "How the hell did someone read this so fast!"
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 12:50 pm
Reply » 0
brent_cox
brent_cox (#40)

I thought the same. But David is right. Week made.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Reply » 0
David Roth
David Roth (#4,429)

Sadly, I am going to have to save this one for a quieter moment. But man am I ever looking forward to it. Best + Best = Best.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Reply » 0
skybarn
skybarn (#304)

Well, that is one fine piece of writing right there. Jesus.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Reply » 0
Paige
Paige (#21)

Seriously. This was excellent.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Reply » 0
Bittersweet
Bittersweet (#765)

So good.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:03 pm
Reply » 0
max bread
max bread (#5,970)

Oof. I think I might go have a cry somewhere.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:06 pm
Reply » 0
KarenUhOh
KarenUhOh (#19)

Well. That requires a plusone run-through, and perhaps another.

I am looking at a picture of David's parents. It's from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, 12.19.10, and it was taken at a luncheon in 2009 in CU. I am fascinated by his parents, and his upbringing, and I'm sure it's because (yeah, I've said it oft before) I grew up in the same town five years in front of him.

I always wondered about what in that upbrigning, in that place, turned the tumblers. The obsession with math, that translated to tennis. The rigid yet exquisitely playful, mazelike deployment of language: mathematical in itself, a lob shot to set you up for the dink or tke kill.

Here's another picture, of Dave at age 12. He looks like a dork.

Anyway. What a beautiful piece, Maria. I will read it again, alone.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Reply » 1
MichelleDean
MichelleDean (#7,041)

Maria, I burst into tears in a coffee shop reading this, and I have a conflicted relationship with DFW's work, particularly his fiction. So what I'm saying is that this is great. I have feelings about literary sleuthage, and about literary sleuthage re DFW in particular, but I like writing that gets me out of my comfortable, skull-sized, tiny kingdom, and this definitely qualifies as that. Thank you.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:15 pm
Reply » 1
caw_caw
caw_caw (#5,641)

Exactly my feeling as well
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:48 am
Reply » 0
Smitros
Smitros (#5,315)

This provides additional poignancy to his portrait of a tennis prodigy collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Reply » 0
Lockheed Ventura
Lockheed Ventura (#5,536)

Interesting that the current embodiment of American addictive narcissism, yes, Charlie Sheen, has come out so strongly against AA and the concept that he is an normal human being. Instead he goes around calling himself a "genius" Torpedo of Truth with Tiger Blood with absolutely no humility whatsoever. It is a sad state of affairs that Mr. Two and Half Men is selling out arenas to declare his specialness, but DFW wrestled his entire adult life with the concept of his specialness.

Incredible writing as always.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Reply » 1
boyofdestiny
boyofdestiny (#1,243)

"Next time she or he is shopping for a motorcycle tell him or her that."

A nine-year-old Dave W., deftly navigating the perilous terrain of gendered pronouns.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:46 pm
Reply » 3
katherine
katherine (#10,025)

I feel sick.

This has nothing to do with the writing quality -- which is consistently excellent -- nor with the article's existence -- it's in a museum, it was public to begin with.

It's the story itself. Which is why it's worth reading.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Reply » 2
CleverUserName
CleverUserName (#1,910)

Superb.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Reply » 0
Parleyview
Parleyview (#7,337)

"...giddy, life-affirming fizz, and that fizz came undiluted and complete from his mother, Sally Foster Wallace."
Thankful for this delicious writing to be savored to this evening.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Reply » 0
MichelleDean
MichelleDean (#7,041)

MMK is Mary (Marlene) Karr, I think.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Reply » 1
KeithTalent
KeithTalent (#2,014)

I was super gung ho to make this comment but you beat me to it.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Reply » 0
Mork el Pork
Mork el Pork (#8,293)

Yup. And '92 was the year that the bulk of IJ- Infinite Jest- was written.
PS, I met MMK just tonight!

Also, as a bipolar-er and under-read DFW-er, this is going to make my reading of his work quite a bit richer, so thank you MB.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 3:49 am
Reply » 0
HiredGoons
HiredGoons (#603)

This was exactly what I needed today Maria, well done.

I wish I had taken you up on your invitation to come poke around in Austin, but I may have proved a distraction and then we wouldn't have gotten this little gem - everybody wins.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Reply » 0
katalist
katalist (#973)

Un plaisir, ma vieille.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Reply » 2
Marco Carbone@twitter
Marco Carbone@twitter (#10,916)

Re: the list of words at the end. They are all words that precisely do not describe themselves.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:27 pm
Reply » 3
radeblunner@twitter
radeblunner@twitter (#10,976)

My tribute to DFW is to be a bit of a nerd here and point out that I think this is close but not quite on the mark. These words do not describe themselves but neither do words like inflamed, vertiginous, smelly, gaseous, blinding, or any word for any color (unless, I guess, you write the word in ink that matches the word itself; green written in green ink, for example). I think the list is more about words whose meaning is in direct opposition to some aspect of the word's DNA (be it length, sound, or spelling). Foreign is an English word. Not foreign at all. The word obscene is fairly proper as is vulgar. Et cetera. DFW talks about this quality of certain words in one of his works -- maybe it's in the Lipsky book. It's a great reminder of how much he loved language.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 9:22 am
Reply » 0
katalist
katalist (#973)

What about "pulchritude"?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Reply » 0
Marco Carbone@twitter
Marco Carbone@twitter (#10,916)

It's an ugly word.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Reply » 0
katalist
katalist (#973)

Well--duh. I was just wondering if you have any thoughts as to why it's "pulchritude" rather than the no-less-ugly "pulchritudinous." All the others are adjectives!
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Reply » 0
Tulletilsynet
Tulletilsynet (#333)

It ain't a beauty, but hey, it's all right.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Reply » 4
propertius
propertius (#361)

Every word in Latin is ugly.

Except - maybe - "carmen".

The grammar is unsightly as well.

The miracle is that they pulled Italian and Spanish out of it. Let's not go into French.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Reply » 1
Tulletilsynet
Tulletilsynet (#333)

Just how many different people are you trying to pick fights with?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:08 pm
Reply » 2
DoctorDisaster
DoctorDisaster (#1,970)

Marco's right. I was so proud of myself for figuring this out, too -- but I guess that's what I get for waiting a day. And honestly? "Pulchritude" is probably a noun specifically so that the answer won't be "they're all adjectives."
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:12 pm
Reply » 2
roboloki
roboloki (#1,724)

this was great. thank you.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Reply » 0
vespavirgin
vespavirgin (#1,422)

Dear god, and on the 17 anniversary of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I'm filled with grateful sadness. Thank you, Ms. B.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:48 pm
Reply » 0
Philo Hagen
Philo Hagen (#3,619)

Kurt Cobain's suicide anniversary isn't today. It's not until the 8th. Just sayin'.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Reply » 0
Bettytron
Bettytron (#575)

That's actually not true, but the "Just sayin'" flagged you as kind of a dick anyway, so it cancels out!
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Reply » 2
Tulletilsynet
Tulletilsynet (#333)

Fantastic work & writing. This should be a foreword to something. Someone tell Little, Brown.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Reply » 0
stefan michael@twitter
stefan michael@twitter (#10,917)

A trenchant piece that almost gets to the heart of the paradox - one that is not unique to those of us who have been diagnosed as "clinically depressed" or accused of being "smart" - inherent in our consciousness ("alive right now, conscious, though no one knows why"), one that is expressed in this quote that has always nagged me:

“The mountains, rivers, forest and the elements that gird them round about would be only blank conditions of matter if the mind did not fling its own divinity around them.”

–from an article entitled Imagination and Fact (writer unknown) in Graham’s Magazine (not dated, but referenced by Walt Whitman in his Notes and Fragments and ascribed to approximately “the fifties” - that would be the eighteen fifties)

Your essay is a wonderfully written and researched piece about someone who has touched so many of his fellow humans simply because he wrote about being human in ways that were funny, painful, perspicacious, frightening, occasionally very wrong, and always challenging.

At times reading this, thinking of you alone with these materials researching, I could not help thinking of Nietzsche's quote: "...when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." Thanks for taking the risk.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Reply » 1
Debussy Fields
Debussy Fields (#9,962)

Too many of us strive to impress rather than to touch. But what's scary is that the cleverness of this distinction is impressive, so it's like you're smarting your way out of being too damn smart. And it seems like you have to drink a lot of beer before you can realize that it won't fix things. But a mind as developed and refined as Dave Wallace's knows exactly how to keep goading anything worth believing into the ether. You glean wisdom from Bradshaw or Alice Miller, and then you figure out how to outwit it, so the real, life-saving wisdom is ever Sisyphian.
Incidentally, I saw David Wallace read on my 29th birthday. He signed my copy of Infinite Jest "To XXXX, who is one year from having to think about mortality."
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Reply » 3
hockeymom
hockeymom (#143)

I'm pretty sure that Mrs. Taylor knew 4th grade David was something special.
Thank you, Maria.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Reply » 0
bestestuary
bestestuary (#8,955)

Great, great piece.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Reply » 0
bluesuedeshoes
bluesuedeshoes (#8,610)

This is a very well-written piece. Thanks for writing and sharing it. But, am I really the only one who refuses to romanticize people who commit suicide? To me, much more ingeneous is figuring out how to live (and keep living) well.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 3:58 pm
Reply » 0
Apel Mjausson@twitter
Apel Mjausson@twitter (#10,928)

One of the goals of many in AA (and the plethora of other 12-step fellowships) is to live life on life's terms.

It's so easy to romanticize people who aren't actually present. Those of us who are still around may be a little too solicitous to any cute young thing, get into weird spiritualities or have that permanent quizzical expression that is the result of a not-expensive-enough face lift. Like bluesuedeshoes, I'd much rather be criticized for normal human follies than dead.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Reply » 0
erikonymous
erikonymous (#3,231)

I can't speak for anyone else here, but I was kinda romanticizing the man well before he killed himself, purely on the basis of his incredible writing and career. Tragedy, though, always feels capital-r Romantic, doesn't it? And tragedy certainly befell the guy.
I've known enough people with serious clinical depression to know that just deciding to live well and be happy is not always a possibility, and being smart not only doesn't protect anyone from serious depression, but often exacerbates it.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 6:38 pm
Reply » 3
HiredGoons
HiredGoons (#603)

can we talk about that haircut?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Reply » 2
Keith Kisser
Keith Kisser (#9,714)

Am I the only one who saw the picture and thought to himself, "That's the guy from Leverage!" No? Just me then. OK. It opens up his back story on the show though. World famous novelist turned hitter and retrieval specialist, steeling from the rich and speaking in a gravelly voice, occasionally singing country songs.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Reply » 0
Lauri
Lauri (#10,588)

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Reply » 0
Talix
Talix (#10,922)

Thank you for this. Especially "...like all depressed persons, Wallace loathed himself in error."
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 4:58 pm
Reply » 1
The Defeatery
The Defeatery (#925)

This was difficult but lovely. Thank you so much, Maria.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:05 pm
Reply » 0
davidwatts
davidwatts (#72)

What's most touching to me about all this is DFW's belief, which he shared with a lot of people, that there is something like an "answer." Some thing you can do or think or be that will fix everything, and that you can figure it out with enough work. I just don't know that that exists. But I try not to be depressed about it.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:09 pm
Reply » 1
Philo Hagen
Philo Hagen (#3,619)

Brilliant piece Maria. Having worked in addiction, Bradshaw was in fact a pretty significant signpost on the road back from hell twenty years ago. Miller, however, was not required reading at all. Your highlighting of DFW's notes regarding it is incredibly revealing, so much so that I fear calling it lopsided in this case is to dismiss what your flashlight has unearthed as a pretty significant self diagnostic in eight different kinds of ink. DFW was 46 when he took his life. He never had kids. Perhaps this is testament to just how crippling this truly was for him.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:18 pm
Reply » 1
o0o
o0o (#10,923)

The quiz is easy gaiz, they are all words that do not describe themselves. They are analogues of Russell's paradox, one of DFW's hobbyhorses. Each word describes a set of words that does not include the word itself.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Reply » 2
Mork el Pork
Mork el Pork (#8,293)

That may be, but I dont know who High-class thinks she is with that hyphen around her waist, the bitch
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 3:58 am
Reply » 0
DorothyMantooth
DorothyMantooth (#69)

This was remarkable, Maria. And thank you. (Am I the only one who's perplexed by -- and insanely jealous of! -- the number of people that seem to already possess The Pale King?)

Re: the words, I wish I knew what o0o was on about (I really do!), but my guess was that they were all things that were the object of derision to some.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Reply » 1
Uaxuctum
Uaxuctum (#10,973)

For whatever reason Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a few other retailers started shipping online orders last week. I just got my copy on Monday.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Reply » 0
RickVigorous
RickVigorous (#214)

Beautiful Maria, thank you. This is going to need another pass or two.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 5:55 pm
Reply » 0
hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

Fantastic piece! Whenever I see a discussion of DFW's depression and suicide, I always want to point out this Rolling Stone piece on his last days by David Lipsky (that link is to a pdf, but there's also an html version on someone's blog here) which makes the case that his suicide wasn't a matter of finally succumbing to something he'd been struggling with all his life, that in fact he had his depression pretty much under control with antidepressants for most of his adult life, but then shortly before his suicide he was convinced to switch antidepressants, and found that the new meds didn't work, and his old meds had also stopped working when he tried to go back to them. If this account is true I think it sort of suggests the danger of interpreting his entire life's work through the filter of his depression and suicide (not that Maria's piece does this, just that it's a tendency that I think we all have whenever we consider the work of an artist who eventually killed themselves).

Also, on the subject of "they fuck you up, your mom and dad", I've always found interesting the work of psychologist Judith Rich Harris (Malcolm Gladwell article on her here, and a Scientific American interview here), who looked at large collections of studies of adopted children and twins raised in different families to come to the conclusion that psychological similarities between children and parents are due almost entirely to genetics, that in fact how your parents raise you has no measurable effect on your adult personality whatsoever. Her research seemed to show that adopted children are no more similar to their adoptive parents than they are to any other random adult from the same community, and they're just as similar to their genetic parents as are children who are actually raised by their genetic parents. Something to think about to counter the common pop-psychology idea that parenting style is all-important in determining how kids come out (and maybe take some of the pressure off new parents!)
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 6:13 pm
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margarets
margarets (#11,021)

Re: the idea that genetics rather than child-rearing account for personality differences, did this research account for abuse? Was it based solely on more-or-less functional emotionally healthy families? With adequate economic resources? What aspects of personality were studied, exactly?

People who grew up in poor or abusive or dysfunctional families will rarely say that it made no difference to how they turned out as adults.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 4:53 pm
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hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

Harris does briefly discuss abuse in her first book The Nurture Assumption (the section of the book can be seen on google books, see pages 296-298 here), she says that "severe abuse can produce physical injury--including brain damage--with long-lasting or permanent effects. Another possible long-term consequence is post-traumatic stress disorder." But as for abuse not severe enough to cause long-term physical injuries or PTSD, she says that at present there isn't enough evidence to say either way whether, for example, the increased aggressiveness of abuse victims is due to the abuse itself or due to the fact that abusive parents are more likely to have passed on genes for aggressiveness. She also mentions that abused children may be more likely to have been moved around more in childhood which could mess with peer relations, which she thinks do shape personality more than parenting. And as for your question about economic resources, I think her answer would basically be that economics influences development insofar as kids from different socioeconomic groups are likely to have different peer cultures. She discusses this in a section on p. 303 of The Nurture Assumption where she talks about why children of single-parent families tend to be worse off:

"The loss of income impacts the kids in several ways. For one thing, it can affect their status in the peer group. Being deprived of luxuries such as expensive clothing and sporting equipment, dermatologists and orthodontics, can lower kids' standing among their peers. Money is also going to play a role in whether the kids can think about going to college. If it's out of the question, then they may be less motivated to graduate from high school and to avoid getting pregnant.

"But by far the most important thing that money can do for kids is to determine the neighborhood they grow up in and the school they attend ... Poverty forces many single mothers to rear their children in neighborhoods where there are many other single mothers and where there are high rates of unemployment, school dropout, teen pregnancy, and crime.

"Why do so many kids in these neighborhoods drop out, get pregnant, and commit crimes? Is it because they don't have fathers? That is a popular explanation, but I considered the question in Chapter 9 and came to other conclusions. Neighborhoods have different cultures and the cultures tend to be self-perpetuating; they are passed down from the parents' peer group to the children's peer group. The medium through which the cultures are passed down cannot be the family, because if you pluck the family out of the neighborhood and plunk it down somewhere else, the children's behavior will change to conform with that of their peers in their new neighborhood.

"It's the neighborhood, not the family. If you look at kids within a given neighborhood, the presence or absence of a father doesn't make much difference ... Within an economically disadvantaged inner-city neighborhood, the kids who live with both parents are no better off than those who live with only one."
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 6:38 pm
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margarets
margarets (#11,021)

Hoo boy. Harris thinks neighbourhood cultures and peer relations influence kids but family cultures don't? Like there are no dysfunctional or abusive families in nice affluent neighbourhoods; no one who grew up with a mom and a dad and enough money was ever negatively influenced by mom and dad's dysfunction. Ask any rich kid: life at home was grand every minute. Jeez.

It sounds like Harris is trying desperately to find a way to let parents off the hook when their kids have problems. She'll accept ANY other explanation except lousy parenting. And of course bad parents will lap it up.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:57 am
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hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

"Hoo boy. Harris thinks neighbourhood cultures and peer relations influence kids but family cultures don't?"

Yes, but she "thinks" that not based on a random personal hunch, but based on what she finds in studies like the adoption studies showing no influence from families, or from a study she discusses in the above section (which I left out to keep the quote short) showing that within a given inner-city neighborhood, children from single-parent families were no different from children from two-parent families in terms of "alcohol and substance use, delinquency, school dropout, or psychological distress".

The thing about science is, it often proves that our "common sense" intuitions are complete nonsense, including a lot of the "folk psychology" we use to explain human behavior. Of course a lot of people think they were influenced by their parents, but the human mind isn't good at separating correlation from causation...just for the sake of argument try to imagine a hypothetical world where Harris' thesis is entirely correct, do you doubt that in this world, when people noticed how various personality traits of theirs resembled their parents (due only to the influence of genes), they would concoct false causal explanations about how their parents had influenced them growing up? This is why if you care about the truth of this matter you have to ignore folk psychology and anecdotal evidence, and just look at statistical studies which try to control for different factors like the influence of genes (controlled for in studies of adopted children) or the influence of neighborhoods (controlled for by looking exclusively at a single neighborhood as in the study above).
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 4:08 pm
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spiralbetty
spiralbetty (#4,035)

Wow. I feel like this is a thing that so needed to be written.

I've always wondered about his relationship with his mother, whom he treats so affectionately ("the SNOOT") in "Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage" v. Avril Incandenza, (the "militant grammarian") in IJ, with her obsession with her "green babies", the substantial hints at her, um, inappropriate relationship with Orin, and her borderline neglect of Mario.

I mean, it's a pretty damning portrait of a mother, especially when Hal is so clearly, as you say, a projection of DFW. What was Thanksgiving 1996 like at the Wallace residence?
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 6:17 pm
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autoclavicle
autoclavicle (#2,871)

I don't think it's so strange, but I grew up under strange circumstances in which I can write both tenderly and affectionately about my father, as well as "pretty damning portrait"-type stuff.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:07 pm
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spiralbetty
spiralbetty (#4,035)

I don't think it's strange, either--probably quite common, to have conflicting feelings about a parent? And one's writing is probably richer for the tension, I think.

Just, interesting. Avril isn't simply a poor parent. She's a monster.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:56 pm
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maddieD
maddieD (#9,798)

I absolutely adore my mother in my waking life but every single time I dream about her, she is doing something that enrages me.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 10:16 pm
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kpants
kpants (#719)

This was lovely, Maria, wonderfully written. After just finishing reading it, I'm already wanting to reread it. Thank you.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 6:19 pm
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philomene
philomene (#355)

This was really great to read. Are there any other parents out there who fear even just a little bit that they might have an effect on/be blamed by their children after reading this? On the one hand, his mother seems lovely and sympatico intellectually; on the other, she gets the lion's share of the blame for a vast mountain of unhappiness. I'm sorry if this is a little bit "My baby is special/I'm scared of my baby" for the childless. It's just that the older children get, the less control you have over the choices they make and yet the blame is still there. Fortunately, I realized when I was a child that being called 'gifted' was a shitty thing (and I was never really that gifted to begin with).
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 6:19 pm
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C_Webb
C_Webb (#855)

Won't send this to my students because I want them so badly to read it that if they didn't, I'll quit. So smart and wise and kind and good. Thank you.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 7:45 pm
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autoclavicle
autoclavicle (#2,871)

Thank you, I really appreciate this.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:20 pm
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Hillary Rettig
Hillary Rettig (#5,883)

As author of a self-help book for progressive activists (The Lifelong Activist), I was really happy to read this article, and particularly your suggestion that people like Bradford, etc., be added to the canon. There is definitely a bias against self-help among self-described intellectuals. (Although now under the rubrics of "positive psychology" and "behavioral technology" it's more accepted.) It never made sense to me - life is complex and difficult, so why not learn from others? Additionally, people on the left tend to think the whole field of self-help ignores issues of societal and institutional oppression, and some of it does, but not all of it. (In my work, I really try to help people identify the oppressive forces in their lives.)

The right, of course, has a different objection to self-help. In books like One Nature Under Therapy, they talk about how there's too much self-help, therapy, etc. - because we're all supposed to just shut up and effortlessly cope, I suppose.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:24 pm
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Hillary Rettig
Hillary Rettig (#5,883)

should be "One Nation Under Therapy" - sorry
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:57 pm
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Joshua Pierson@facebook
Joshua Pierson@facebook (#10,929)

Thank you for this.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:18 pm
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Bettytron
Bettytron (#575)

This piece will be tumbling around in my head for the next few weeks, I can tell. I spent the last year reading all of his fiction and non-fiction, working myself up to IJ (I didn't want to get frustrated partway through and give up, so I wanted to make sure I was up to the task) and just yesterday ordered a copy. Wonderfully written; thank you.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:20 pm
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thawking
thawking (#10,931)

I registered just to say how much I loved this. Wonderful, wonderful article.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 9:59 pm
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Deleted by user
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 10:06 pm

Abe Sauer
Abe Sauer (#148)

Bravo.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Reply » 1
Elmo Keep
Elmo Keep (#3,840)

Ten minutes of staring at this comment box and still only, wow. Just, fuck.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 10:36 pm
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Craig Brownson
Craig Brownson (#4,257)

Thank you for writing this.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 11:30 pm
Reply » 0
Ms.
Ms. (#10,933)

On Monday April 4th I posted DYING AND LIVING LIFE-DAVID FOSTER WALLACE on my blog http://mscomfortzone.blogspot.com/. it was a complicated construction of elements from disparate , but related sources that I hesitated to actually post because a family member has just become a follower (I wondered how they would take the conversation I was having with myself). But after two days, and hours of tweaking, I just went right ahead. After all, I only have 13 followers, no comments, and I am doing the blog because I care about what I care about. Since posting it, I have added a few extra items that seemed to belong. Now that I've read your searching, brave piece here, I am going to edit a reference to it into the post. What a touching exploration of a man who, though recently discovered, has moved me deeply. So thanks for this. Thanks very much!
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 11:47 pm
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Daniel Gumbiner@facebook
Daniel Gumbiner@facebook (#10,936)

holy shit, tremendous job.
Posted on April 5, 2011 at 11:55 pm
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Nathan Huffstutter
Nathan Huffstutter (#10,937)

Re: the class quiz. What's the first word that pops into your head when I say 'language'?
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 12:19 am
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barnhouse
barnhouse (#1,326)

Schmanguage?
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 9:59 am
Reply » 1
Nathan Huffstutter
Nathan Huffstutter (#10,937)

One of the principles of free association is that there are no wrong answers. But schmanguage is the wrong answer. In the question, I was speculating that the words in the quiz were derived from an exercise where DFW had asked a separate group to spit out the first word they thought of when he said 'language'. The individual's jumping off point will say something about the speaker, all the words in combination say something about the subject.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 1:20 pm
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Bittersweet
Bittersweet (#765)

My first thought was "arts" but I like Maria's "schmanguage" much, much better.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 3:46 pm
Reply » 1
Nathan Huffstutter
Nathan Huffstutter (#10,937)

It's not my quiz and I'm grossly unqualified to grade the results. But I doubt language shmanguage wins a free lunch.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 4:38 pm
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Slapdash
Slapdash (#174)

"There is no blame to pin anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve."

Faved and saved. Also, bravo.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 3:21 am
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James M
James M (#10,947)

Top shelf.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 9:21 am
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BakhtinHungerForce
BakhtinHungerForce (#6,839)

Oh man. Dan "Francheese": an Illinois boy's reference to that most terrifying of Chicago delicacies, the francheezie?

Wonderful piece.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 9:47 am
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Brian Abelson@facebook
Brian Abelson@facebook (#10,956)

Okay... this was really enjoyable coming from someone who has always admired DFW's writing, but I have a single and, I think, important issue:

Don't you think this sort of fetishistic approach to DFW's archives only serves to ironically champion him as some great auteur of our time for rejecting auteurism and refusing to consider himself a genius? Don't you think these sort of obsessive speculations about his psyche based on what he read, or his relationship with his mother, or even the types of questions he asked his students only serve to effectively gloss-over the central point of much of his work which, as you so eloquently put it,was "to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better" ?
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:11 am
Reply » 1
theharpoon
theharpoon (#10,705)

I think you have a good point, but I thought it might also be worth mentioning that a "fetishistic" approach to authors' archives is hardly limited to DFW's collection, even among modern writers. The Ransom Center particularly specializes in modern American and British authors, but of course we've been picking writers apart pretty much as long as they've been writing.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 4:58 pm
Reply » 0
hapax
hapax (#6,251)

I kept thinking I knew what this article was about as I was reading it, but with every paragraph you made a flawless hairpin turn into a new, amazing set of observations. Your insights about DFW are trenchant and powerful and utterly heartbreaking, but piggybacking on them are even deeper observations about depression, writing, 'genius', addiction, parenting, and the disturbing prurience of our own fascination with our idols.

I am normally the type of person who logs into a website just to tell someone that they are Wrong On The Internet, but Ms. Bustillos, this might be the best thing I've read this year. Thank you. I hope you get a fucking Pulitzer for it.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:16 am
Reply » 2
outwardbound
outwardbound (#10,958)

Had to create an account so I could post. Thank you for very inspiring writing and thanks to all who posted in appreciation, also inspiring. Off to work I go....
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:17 am
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Sam duPont@twitter
Sam duPont@twitter (#10,957)

wonderful piece, thank you. searching for the Amherst Review archives to read "planet trillaphon" now. and my stab at the quiz:

These are words to be avoided for their failure to illustrate their own meaning. Particularly "pulchritude" (has an uglier word ever been uttered?) and "S-less" (which violates itself three times). Untyped, Unwritten, Indefinable, Misspelled, Invisible, Incomprehensible likewise defy their own definitions. Big is a little word; Diminutive is big. High-class is a tacky phrase, while Obscene and Vulgar are rather dainty. And Foreign is such a common, ordinary word, so divorced from its possibility as to almost carry no meaning at all.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 11:18 am
Reply » 3
radeblunner@twitter
radeblunner@twitter (#10,976)

Yes. This. DFW actually refers to this quality of certain words and has a term for them. I can't remember it off-hand. But it wasn't necessarily negative. It was just an interesting quality that these words share -- their meanings are in seeming contrast to their architecture (be it spelling or pronunciation).
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Reply » 1
Sam duPont@twitter
Sam duPont@twitter (#10,957)

i think 'heterological' is the term...
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:37 pm
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Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty (#6,314)

I'm frustrated. There's a few things I don't think you quite have a grasp on--but I wonder if I don't have a firm grasp on the things I believe you don't have a firm grasp on. So, struggling. Blogged a response: http://mkdo.co/post/4393084913
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 1:07 pm
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Chris Stucky@twitter
Chris Stucky@twitter (#10,966)

Amazing. I was in an undergraduate class where he gave us that quiz, and I've wanted to find a copy ever since. Happened to do a search and found you'd posted it yesterday. This was great reading. Thanks!
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 1:19 pm
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Mike Doughty
Mike Doughty (#6,314)

Dude, dude, dude. I misconstrued stuff bigtime. Big errors in my blog. Ugh. Apologies.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 2:05 pm
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Geoff1
Geoff1 (#10,969)

Doesn't anyone have reservations about this piece? Picking apart his depression and history, psychoanalyzing the notes he wrote in his private books and his anonymous posting - doesn't that seem wrong, like literary rubbernecking? His work stands on its own and it's what he wanted to and did express to the world.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Reply » 1
Uaxuctum
Uaxuctum (#10,973)

I think the piece is well-written and carefully approaches what is definitely a delicate subject. Still, I can't help but be reminded of DFW's NY Times review of Borges: A Life, in which he expresses doubts about exercises in which biographers attempt to draw conclusions about an author's interior life from pieces of fiction they've written. And so, perhaps this should be approached with a caveat:
"A biographer wants his story to be not only interesting but literarily valuable. In order to ensure this, the bio has to make the writer's personal life and psychic travails seem vital to his work. The idea is that we can't correctly interpret a piece of verbal art unless we know the personal and/or psychological circumstances surrounding its creation. That this is simply assumed as an axiom by many biographers is one problem; another is that the approach works a lot better on some writers than on others." (The whole review can be read here: http://www.theknowe.net/dfwfiles/pdfs/Wallace-Borges_on_the%20Couch.pdf)
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Reply » 2
Mister Chu
Mister Chu (#11,001)

Yes this is very much so. I am hoping that Mister Borges and Mister Wallace are sharing their own thoughts on some more elevated (or otherwise) social intercourse site available to those no longer available (to us).

Best wishes to you,
Mister Chu
http://misterchu.tumblr.com/
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 11:11 am
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dntsqzthchrmn
dntsqzthchrmn (#2,893)

(hugs)
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 3:13 pm
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Deleted by user
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 4:17 pm

paula
paula (#10,975)

Regarding Geoff1- I understand your point. DFW kills himself and, understandably a University Library inherits his papers. I found his whole obsession with recovery and Alice Miller in particular, sad. The reading and rereading- the different markers! What a collossal waste of emotion. Regardless, what really matters, is his work. And it will endure. Biographies of writers- or biographical articles or what have you- I love to read them. But they often color my view of the work in a bad way and sometimes I regret my desire to know all about a writer. Two writers come to mind right off the bat- Philip Roth (I read his ex wife's book on him, In a Doll's House) and Jean Rhys.
That said, the author of this piece herself states her reservations on all his mother hating and need to "understand" himself in that "pychological" way which really is, let's face it, usually detrimental and eschews personal responsibility. And I also must say I found this piece sort of riveting. Such a bright, successful, loved man- and he sits around underlining crap about his inner child. Just- wow.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 4:56 pm
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theharpoon
theharpoon (#10,705)

More accurately, they probably bought his papers; it's what usually happens these days.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 5:44 pm
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DoctorDisaster
DoctorDisaster (#1,970)

I didn't have time to give this the reading it deserved when it was posted, so I got to it a day late. Now I feel like a fool for not putting off yesterday's responsibilities. The article deals with so many important topics that it's hard to pick a single highlight, but I'll just say that the examination of a depressed person's coping mechanisms was revelatory for me. Thanks.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:31 pm
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Deleted by user
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 5:45 pm

Mark802
Mark802 (#10,983)

Maria Bustillos has written a fascinating and brilliant commentary on David Wallace's inner life and suffering. However, I think she tends to misrepresent somewhat Alice Miller's views. Miller's concern to "respect the feelings" of children had nothing to do with so-called permissive parenting. As Miller argued in her many books, permissive parenting is often just the flip side of authoritarian parenting. In other words, both parenting styles are often more about the parent's emotional agenda (or unmet needs) than what healthy parenting should be: To meet the real needs of the child to feel respected, understood, cared for and protected within the family. This hardly means no rules or anything goes. Nor do I agree that the intention of Alice Miller's work was to foster "mother hating" or to assign blame. That's a superficial reading of what was rather a commitment to help individuals better understand the dynamics of their upbringing for the purpose of moving through their troubled feelings to a healthier emotional life. Obviously, staying stuck in feelings of hatred for parents would be counterproductive to that goal. Then again, so is denial of such feelings. The fact that David Wallace studied Miller as he did is a testament not only to his pain, but to a searching, relentless, and obviously difficult effort on his part to understand himself better.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 7:15 pm
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barnhouse
barnhouse (#1,326)

Hi Mark (Maria here.) Thanks for this insightful comment. I should have been clearer with respect to Miller's position regarding "permissiveness", you're right; her larger theme is that the narcissistically-disturbed parent sees the child not as an individual, his own person, but as a sort of vessel for her own imperatives. This can take the form of excessive "permissiveness" or what she calls "anti-authoritarian" parenting. What I was getting at is something outside the area of Miller's work; it's just something I've observed myself among fellow-parents, and it's not a question of reflecting one's own needs onto the child. There are parents who straight-up believe it's the right thing to do, objectively, to make the child the absolute and only center of their world. That is a distinction worth making, for sure.

As for Miller's intentions, it's very clear that she wanted to help those whom she felt had been harmed, as she had been herself, by a certain kind of parenting. And I think there is an enormous value in this book. But that value might well be undercut by focusing solely on the predicament of the injured child. There seems to be very little sympathy for the narcissistically-deprived mother in The Drama of the Gifted Child.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 11:13 am
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Raymondo
Raymondo (#10,980)

The only person who could have saved David was ALICE MILLER, and he knew it. But even so, it proved too difficult and painful.If only we could have more sympathy for the one who took his own life, we would understand - alas too late - that suicide is ALWAYS the ultimate mean of communication (ie when all else has failed). Bradshaw (to name just one) may have been a stepping stone, a step up on the staircase of "recovery"; but when you get to the top of the stairs, you are warned and admonished by a loud voice, which clamours that "This is NOT a witch-hunt, this is NOT about blaming the parents". This is how Bradshaw introduced his latest, sum-total work(PRSD-2000) and took the wind out of your sails before you could even open your mouth in protestation. Whereas Alice Miller stayed uncompromisingly on your side, right till the end.So why are fans and experts not dwelling more on the contradictions that David's life was?"I was raised in a solid, loving, two-parent family. "But by the age of 15, he is in the grip of depression, addictions and treatment centres. Does that sound NORMAL? Some people say that he loved his mother. "His regard for her was clearly enormous, though, he told Lipsky, "My mother's the best proofreader in the world, Amy's second and I'm third, as far as I've seen." (Amy being Amy Wallace Havens, his sister.) Others see clearly how "Wallace had some complicated and deep-seated issues with regard to the subject of motherhood generally....and Avril Incandenza, "militant grammarian," is a mysterious but also a monstrous figure, whose love is suffocating, all-encompassing, intrusive, terrible.....and how David's writings ARE about himself and his mother who he despises.So why would he choose his mother to be is No1 Proof-reader, if not because he wanted to SHOW her, and her to READ in his own words, what he was TOO AFRAID TO TELL HER? Or was it about seeking approval, or love, or maybe just a whisp of attention...Of course she never acknowledged it and the true message was repeatedly dismissed. And No2 Proof-reader, his sister who was a first class witness. Just as Alice Miller shows about Nietzsche, the audience is more than happy (as here with DFW's audience) to lap up the performance, but ignore the message, rather than hearing the author's pain, and rising against the crime and injustice.Wallace's notes.....especially in Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently. He felt particularly nailed and revealed to himself by the latter book, one in which he blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering.

This article speaks volume for present-day dysfunctions, addictions, suicides and their respective stats and rates (of INCREASE) and how NONE of the cures on offer work. Meds have now overtaken Arms manufacturing, and the business of "RECOVERY" figures right there at the top. Except nobody is getting any better. Just as there's no need for Asthma. Or Diabetes!

All a bit simplistic? Perhaps we should all revisit Alice Miller's books and her website. Therein lie all the answers. Free and available. Now let's make sure New Mexico does away with spanking this week.

Goodbye David. I hear you.....
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 7:38 pm
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DavidHarp
DavidHarp (#10,987)

What a disturbing but fascinating -- in the sense that one may be mesmerized by an object of horror or danger -- article. On the one hand, it's disturbing to look so closely into DFW's mind via his personal notations in self help books. On the other, it certainly lends depth to one's understanding of the man, although for me not particularly of the work of the man which I've read.

To me, if I recall correctly (and I think I do, although not near verbatim level) a particular sequence in the middle of Infinite Jest sums up most of what Ms. Bustillos came up with here. To the effect that Hal (paraphrased) realizes "...that he needs their love, but it's not about love, it's about their need to have someone come up from underdog and win, and to do it again, and again, and again, it's never enough..."
I.E. that "they" love you for what you do, not for who you are. Whereas in AA, they love you, see your humanity, just for being in the room...

Again, for me, this is the point of "The Entertainment," it's the point of all these painful, sad, musings of DFW in the Miller book, and one of the things that most people, especially those designated as "talented" early on, must deal with to be happy or fulfilled.

That all said, Ms. Bustillos, thank you for your work, I think. DFW, wherever you may be, rest in peace.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 8:07 pm
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Marioninnyc
Marioninnyc (#2,702)

This was a harrowing trip, and I'm sure not easy to write. It doesn't surprise me that Wallace owned, read and desperately sought answers in those books. Our way of thinking gets set, some of it may be simply be because we are born with certain tendencies. The truth is for someone like Wallace, probably the only thing that could have kept him alive longer would have been the right combination of a trusted competent psycho-pharmacologist, a good therapist -- possibly of the cognitive school -- and supportive friends and family. Even then there would have been dark and desperate times.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 9:58 pm
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paula
paula (#10,975)

Agreed.
Posted on April 6, 2011 at 10:31 pm
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Carole Mandryk@facebook
Carole Mandryk@facebook (#10,991)

Wow. It's been years since I've read anything this well-written. And not just the writing - the thought behind it, the detective work, the analysis. Though perhaps analysis is the wrong word - too logical and sciency, when the article was an elaborate dance with dips and twirls that made me smile, made me gasp, made me cry. And hits so so close to home. Thank-you.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 12:17 am
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Susan of Texas
Susan of Texas (#11,006)

Ms. Bustillos has written a lovely piece that completely misunderstands depression and therefore is fated to completely misunderstand her subject matter. What she sees as navel-gazing is an attempt to discover the source of great inner pain, and what she sees as mother-blaming (something no mother wants to read) is the need to separate reality from the confused fictions that unhappy parents inflict on their children to ease their own pain. Wallace needed to acknowledge that he was loved for his genius (if that was indeed the case) and not for himself, with all his normal human flaws, and accept that he would never have the unconditional love that children need, and that adults need to have had.

Most revealingly, Ms. Bustillos expresses her own worries about parenting in this article, further confusing her assessment of Wallace. She believes introspection is self-indulgent and paying attention to the feelings, wants and needs of one's child is indulging them. Her own insecurities as a parent come pouring out of this article. She has no idea of Miller's theories, which state that we all all individuals and need to be treated as such, not as extensions of our parents, here to provide them with unconditional love and self-esteem.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 1:24 pm
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hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

Your paraphrases of what Maria said seem to bear little or no resemblance to what I read in her article. Can you give a specific quote where you think she says anything like "introspection is self-indulgent and paying attention to the feelings, wants and needs of one's child is indulging them", for example?
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 7:33 pm
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Susan of Texas
Susan of Texas (#11,006)

If you indulge a child too much, "respect his feelings" too much, then you become one of those doormats who lives in a nightmare where the child is a tyrant over the house, and if you discipline him too much, he will feel sad, lonely and unloved.

and

Just please back away from the mirror now, because it is all bullshit in there, nothing but illusions, illusions all the way down. Sometimes I think that the principal difference between those who are in general cheerfully-inclined and those who are not is that the former know better than to even countenance their own bullshit for one instant.

Plus the general tone of the remainder of the article.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 10:31 am
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hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

The first quote doesn't say that all respect for a child's feelings is indulgence, it says "respect his feelings" too much, the "too much" is important, as is the fact that she put "respect his feelings" in quotes, which suggests to me she was talking more about a posture of respecting feelings by never saying "no" to any behavior, as opposed to actual respect for feelings which includes the possibility of saying "no". That sort of posture of "respect for feelings" can involve not really seeing what the child's feelings actually are (including the fact that letting the child do whatever they want at all times may not actually be making them very happy), it can be an excuse for a kind of lack of engagement with the child. This is also suggested by Maria's comment slightly earlier, "But at the other extreme of the mom-continuum is the crazily indulgent freakish child-worshipping monster who believes that her child's every Feeling is somehow Sacred—to which you're all, hoy, lady, your kid is running around this restaurant literally screaming? Such children do not ordinarily grow up to be happy or well-adjusted adults, either."

The second quote seems to just be arguing for a little humility in considering one's own psychological explanations for why one is the way one is, which I think is reasonable and doesn't mean "introspection is bad". But certainly the introspection of a depressed person can become neurotic, and being too confident about one's own explanations can make one feel trapped in personality patterns that make the person unhappy...if one "explains" a pattern in terms of something set by childhood experience, that may not inspire great hope for changing it as an adult. I also think that there's a lot of evidence from modern science that suggests we are very good at manufacturing false explanations for our own behavior, see for example the evidence discussed in this paper that the left brain (where language is centered) has a marked tendency to come up with false rationalizations for behaviors that actually originated from the right brain (and as mentioned in this paper, even tends to rationalize away paralysis on the side of the body controlled by the right brain), or the evidence from Judith Rich Harris that I mentioned in an earlier comment (scroll up a bit and look for my avatar), which suggests that parenting actually has little to no influence on adult personality and that personality similarities between children and parents are due almost entirely to genetics.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 4:37 pm
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Susan of Texas
Susan of Texas (#11,006)

We are speaking of behavior, the choices we make and the way we interact in the world. Our behaviors are affected by our interactions with other people, most especially those who raise us, when we are most young, vulnerable and impressionable. Miller tells us that children whose parents withhold love grow up to crave unconditional love, that people who were belittled grow up angry, and children who were abused grow up to abuse others. If people do not care to acknowledge those rather simple facts there's not much one can do, but they could have the grace to refrain from slap-happy moralizing.

Miller is speaking of letting a child have his own opinions, not too much sugar. Letting him have his own preference, his own goals and dreams. Not letting him run around a restaurant. Respect his feeling by not using insults, digs, put-downs or arbitrary commands. It has nothing to do with "never saying no to a behavior" and the example is ludicrous.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 5:07 pm
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hypnosifl
hypnosifl (#9,470)

Maria said over-indulging a child and letting him run around a restaurant is bad, but she didn't accuse Miller of advocating this type of over-indulgence as you seem to suggest, she was just making the point that Miller focused entirely on one extreme of bad-parenting (over-controlling) and didn't discuss the fact that the other extreme (no control) could be a problem too. Her main criticism of Miller was just that she thought there was too much blaming-the-mother in her book.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 5:21 pm
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Brian Abelson@facebook
Brian Abelson@facebook (#10,956)

uh. so does this mean that we should think of Infinite Jest as a 1000 page suicide note now?
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 1:34 pm
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marty
marty (#11,011)

Very sad account of a person who couldn't go on, who "wanted to just stop being conscious"...just wanted to stop the hurt. And with the imminent arrival of The Pale King, articles that focus on DFW's nuanced mental and emotional states will hopefully not be the last things considered about him. For, his work is not his life, though refractions of it might appear to be hidden in the text of his writings. Furthermore, his annotations should not be overly scrutinized, as if they were cryptic paths to an inner/divided/multiplied version of a self in the quest of validation and clarification. As for the undergraduate quiz: All the words listed have implied opposites.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 2:02 pm
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dinah101
dinah101 (#11,016)

After reading this, I couldn't help but wonder whether Mr. Wallace ever had a sponsor or worked the steps. It seems as though this was a man who was extremely isolated, despite everything. Very sad.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 3:02 pm
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Brian Roessler@facebook
Brian Roessler@facebook (#11,026)

While there is very much to admire in this piece, and I especially appreciate the insight it shares with us via DFW's notes and thoughts about these books, ultimately I'm left with the same sense as Susan of Texas. Ms. Bustillos fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between family, depression, emotional honesty, and one's ability to have a meaningful connection with others. This is nothing to do with blaming anyone. DFW identifies the central issue on page 85 of The Pale King:

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly... but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.
Posted on April 7, 2011 at 7:59 pm
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Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:43 am

Katherine Tanney@facebook
Katherine Tanney@facebook (#11,032)

What an amazing job, Maria. Thank you for sharing this material and for your beautiful writing about this extraordinary writer and human being. I have to agree with Brian (just above), though, that you might be misguided in your take on "The Drama of the Gifted Child" and how it affected DFW.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 12:53 am
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Michael J. Curtiss@facebook
Michael J. Curtiss@facebook (#11,037)

David Foster Wallace, the James Dean of literature.

His small ouevre has been ludicrously blown out of proportion to its significance by the postmortem exhortations of those who mistakenly assume that by pretending to like or understand his on-the-whole prosaic efforts at being clever somehow gives them more credibility.

Mental illness, coupled with being a pretentious, bloviating writer with barely two books under one's belt does not automatically apotheosize one as the Messiah to the literati.
Posted on April 8, 2011 at 9:34 am
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