Reminiscences About David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace committed suicide not long ago. A terrible loss under any circumstances, but Wallace additionally, was very clever and talented; what he would have been able to offer is gone with him. His longstanding depression drowned his promise.
Here are reminiscences from people who knew him. This is a PDF download. The English publication Five Dials is making it available for free.
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His sister,
David was not always an easy brother – forget winning an argument or having the last word, ever. But he was loyal and good and protective. It took him some years to get over the disappointment of being stuck with a female sibling, but he did. Although as children we spent a great deal of time simply avoiding each other, it was understood that he was there if I really needed him.
Jonathan Franzen,
So the year was up and down, and he had a crisis in June, and a very hard summer. When I saw him in July he was skinny again, like the late adolescent he’d been during his first big crisis. One of the last times I talked to him after that, in August, on the phone, he asked me to tell him a story of how things would get better. I repeated back to him a lot of what he’d been saying to me in our conversations over the previous year. I said he was in a terrible and dangerous place because he was trying to make real changes as a person and as a writer.