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    Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
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    Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
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    Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
    Audiobook12 hours

    Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

    Written by D.T. Max

    Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace's tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

    Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, Wallace has become more than the representative writer of his time-he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age. His reputation and reach grow by the day. Max takes us from Wallace's early years as a child of the 1970s in the Midwest to his hothouse success in his twenties and subsequent collapse into depression and drugs, and from there through his painful reemergence as an apostle of recovery, ending with his triumphant novel of addiction and redemption, the book of the decade, published when he was just thirty-three. But Infinite Jest itself left as an open question what should come next, as Wallace sought hopefully-and then, increasingly, helplessly-for a way forward, stymied even in the midst of the happiest personal time he had ever known.

    Max guides us on this remarkable literary and spiritual journey, this prolonged exploration of what it means to be human. Wallace was coy with the press and very private, yet the concerns of his writing and the struggles of his life were always closely intertwined. In illuminating the life, Max enriches our understanding of the work. And in his skillful, active investigations into Wallace's prose, he reveals the author in unexpected ways.

    In the end, as Max argues, what is most important about Wallace is not just the words he left behind but what he taught us about life, showing that whatever the price, the fight to live meaningfully is always worth the struggle. Written with the cooperation of Wallace family members and friends and with access to hundreds of his unpublished letters, manuscripts, journals, and audio tapes, this deeply researched portrait of an extraordinarily gifted author is as fresh as news, as intimate as a letter from a friend, as painful as a goodbye.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateAug 30, 2012
    ISBN9781469214863
    Unavailable
    Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
    Author

    D.T. Max

    D.T. Max is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He is the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery, and the bestselling Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. He lives outside of New York City.

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    Reviews for Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

    4/5

    184 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Excellently researched and highly informative - but it just left me wanting to reread DFW. Does that mean it’s a literary dud, or a successful biography?
    • 3/5
      Sort of disturbingly utilitarian, Every Love Story is the tale of how David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, how he felt about Infinite Jest, how he dealt with the fame created by Infinite Jest, with a little bit about how he killed himself afterward but at least he finished Infinite Jest. Max loses points for copying Wallace stylistically, also – nobody else can ever use the word 'complexly', and even DFW should not have.
    • 4/5
      I found that this book was well written, interesting and struck a good balance relative to Wallace's life. Well worth the time.
    • 4/5
      Concise, informed, non-judgmental, summarizes the reviews/reception of Wallace's work and touches on the issues it raises. Very well done.
    • 4/5
      An insightful look at the life and work of one of the greatest writers in history; time will tell how well this book fares in the future, if new revelations about Wallace's life ever come to light.
    • 4/5
      An exceptionally readable and interesting biography. Nothing earth-shattering here, but the personal truly illuminates the professional. A must-read for DFW groupies (a club to which I belong.)
    • 4/5
      While the writing and depth of the biography will disappoint some readers, there's enough here to find joy and inspiration. I assume most readers of this bio are fans of DFW. Speaking as one of those fans, I'll take anything I can get and probably enjoy it.
    • 4/5
      This is a really engaging book on David Foster Wallace. Sure, people might say that Wallace's life is what makes this book good, but it's not. There would be too much of it to make sense of it all without a good deal of sifting, editing and moulding, which D. T. Max has done here.

      It's a chronological book that undoubtedly puts Wallace up front, even though I get the feeling that's what Wallace would least of all have wanted, during his lifetime.

      Having read "Infinite Jest" and "The Pale King" before I read this biography, I must say it was completely eye-opening at times, when it comes to his works.

      Starting off with Wallace's childhood, we learn of his connection with language and play:

      No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: “greebles” meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; “twanger” was the word for something whose name you didn’t know or couldn’t remember. She loved the word “fantods,” meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of “the howling fantods,” this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace’s work. To outside eyes, Sally’s enthusiasm for correct usage might seem extreme. When someone made a grammatical mistake at the Wallace dinner table, she would cough into her napkin repeatedly until the speaker saw the error. She protested to supermarkets whenever she saw the sign “Ten items or less” posted above their express checkout lines.

      Yeah, his mother was a language nazi, which he also turned into. Although Wallace seems to have been very gentle about that, except when admonishing his own work and correcting his students (and his editors and proof readers).

      He was great at learning stuff that seemed finite, but in other cases he faced problems:

      His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: “How do you know when you can ask a girl out?” “How do you know when you can kiss her?” His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.

      While discovering life and earning top marks in school, he started writing.

      One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called “The Clang Birds,” about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass.

      His literary turn to honesty as a main driving force is clearly visible throughout his growing up, partly because he was an alcoholic, but also because lying seemed to permeate society:

      A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.

      He answered letters from fellow authors - notably writing with Don Delillo and Jonathan Franzen - and was often apologising:

      He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess. He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8% real,” then crossed that out and wrote in “98.8%,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”

      When writing about boredom in "The Pale King":

      As he wrote in a notebook: 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. The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating—the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System.

      It didn't seem like Wallace would ever fall victim to hubris:

      In time these early Internet users took up Wallace for their fan communities too, a transition that particularly discomfited him (though to be fair anything that reinforced the masonry of the statue did). When in March 2003 a member of Wallace-l told Wallace about their email list at a taping of a reading for The Next American Essay, a compilation of creative nonfiction edited by John D’Agata that Wallace had contributed to, his response was, “You know, for emotional reasons and sanity I have to pretend this doesn’t exist.”

      And, in the very end:

      They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.

      It's a lovely book, it really is. It's easy to draw parallels between the lives of DFW and Bill Hicks, both persons being gentle, humble, passionate, thinking and self critical.
    • 4/5
      I'm not a great reader of biographies. I focus mainly on fiction. However, over the past year I've had a chance to read three biographies, and Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story was middle of the road among them. Of course I read this because of my love for David Foster Wallace, the man who with every written sentence simultaneously makes me want to strive to be a better writer, myself, and give up altogether. Confession: I still, to this day, have not finished Infinite Jest. The furthest (deepest?) I've ever gotten through is a couple hundred pages. But I've read just about everything else he's written. (Okay, haven't read The Pale King, but I'm not sure I want to read his unfinished final opus. Time will tell.)So what can I say about D.T. Max's attempt to chronicle DFW's life? It was fair, I think. He seemed to try to emulate some of DFW's stylistic choices (starting the book with a self-referential post-modern sentence, frequent [and vigorous] use of end notes, etc.) while not emulating his actual style at all. The prose was simple, inelegant, efficient, standard. The complete opposite of DFW's prose. Yet, I wasn't looking for a DFW knock-off. I just wanted to read about the man's life. Max provided that.I think he balanced inner struggles well with outward struggles. He moved through chapters at an even pace, mostly. (If there was one area where he lingered too long it was around DFW's agonizing "Westward" story, but in context, seeing as it was the precursor to IJ, I can see why Max choose to do that.) I appreciated that he didn't dwell too long on the depression. I certainly appreciated that the suicide (and surrounding medication lapses) occupied only the last 5 pages. Was there more to that episode? Bloody hell, I sure there was. But I didn't need any more than Max gave me. Heartbreaking as it was, I will be forever grateful to Max for keeping that concise.Yes, I'm glad I read this, and I would recommend it to any DFW fan. If nothing else, you will come away knowing the difference between nauseous and nauseated.P.S. I highlighted some of DFW's favorite reading that he said either influenced him or he really appreciated, listed below in roughly the order they appear in the book:Donald Barthelme's "The Balloon"Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49Frank Norris - McTeagueT.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"Jacques Derrida's essays: "The Double Session" and "Plato's Pharmacy"Don Delillo - Ratner's StarWilliam Gass - Omensetter's LuckJohn Barth - Lost in the FunhouseJonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh CityWilliam Gaddis - The RecognitionsWilliam Vollmann - The Rainbow StoriesMark Leyner - My Cousin, My GastroenterologistJerzy Kosinski - Steps
    • 3/5
      Nothing great here, but it was interesting to learn things I did not know. Three stars here means I liked it, which I gratefully did. However, I am not the biggest fan of DT Max, but then again it is I who stands firmly in the camp of the reliably loyal Gordon Lish fans and his athletic supporters. (DT has a problem with clearing important matters up and leaving some things wide open for further discussion.) I was disappointed there wasn't more said on the marriage relationship and the awful struggle they had at the end. It felt like DT was soft-stepping on a still too sensitive nerve. I really hadn't realized that DFW had at least a dozen years of sobriety and that he took his zen-like sober discipline quite seriously. Knowing this now, it seems to me that the doctors failed him in the end, even though it was his own rather idiotic choice to get off the drugs that actually worked for him. But DFW should have been forced by the medical authorities to continue with the maintenance program they all know worked. I would think even the AA people he was close to should have been more concerned with his over-stressed self-diagnosis, as anybody with any decent sobriety knows that we types are our own worst enemies when it comes to "figuring things out" on our own. But hindsight is never fair to those who did try their best to protect their friend, so I will stop my criticism here. Too bad we lost such a great talent and kind person such as DFW. But he did leave quite a bit for us all to fuss about.
    • 3/5
      This is a good source of info about David Foster Wallace, if you're into that sort of thing (and I am). But it's not a very good book.

      Wallace was a confusing figure, full of apparent contradictions. You might expect a Wallace biography to open with a set of questions, with some description of how it intends to investigate Wallace's life and what it hopes to get out of that investigation. Instead, Max's book begins with the strangely clunky sentence

      Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace's.

      That sentence exemplifies the book. It's framed not as an investigation but as a story, told in entirely chronological fashion from Wallace's birth on page 1 to his death on page 301. In addition to providing facts, Max gives us his own interpretations of Wallace's work and ideas, but those interpretations are woven into the narrative and stated in declarative fashion, as though they were just as factual as the names-and-dates-and-quotes material that surrounds them. Max never acknowledges his own interpretive leaps and inferences; he simply writes that "Wallace thought this" and "Wallace thought that" rather than explaining how he reconstructed Wallace's mental state from interviews and letters, and what alternative reconstructions might be defensible. (Whenever Max does offer an alternative explanation, it's always confined to an endnote, as if Max thinks that including it in the main text would break the narrative illusion.)

      In short, it's written in the least Wallace-like manner imaginable. Is that a bad thing? If you just treat the book as a delivery mechanism for DFW facts (he voted for Reagan! he tried to convince his mom that Avril Incandenza wasn't based on her! the original draft of Infinite Jest was 750,000 words long!) then no, it's not a problem. And there's plenty of interesting stuff in there, even if you're mostly looking for insight into his work rather than his life. But everything that isn't solely grounded in facts here is pretty much useless. Because Max doesn't tell us how he came up with his interpretations, it's impossible for us to independently evaluate them. And when we're talking about a confusing subject like David Foster Wallace, an interpretation without a backing argument is worthless.

      Here's one big example of what I'm talking about. Max's book spends a lot of time telling us about how difficult it was for Wallace to write, even before his later struggles with The Pale King. After a very productive start (he wrote a 480-page novel as just one of his two senior theses in college), he began to find writing a perpetual struggle. Teaching distracted him from writing, but he needed to teach to make money; his addictions to alcohol and marijuana made it hard to write, but when he quit, the experience of recovery also made it hard to write; and so forth. But after hammering this point into our heads for something like 100 pages, Max suddenly starts telling us about this new, long novel Wallace was writing. In Max's telling, Infinite Jest seems to come out of nowhere -- a long description of writer's block and drug/alcohol recovery is suddenly followed by Wallace having 250 finished pages of his new novel, which are so good that they make his new editor say he wanted to publish the book "more than I wanted to breathe." Whence this astonishing productivity?

      In Max's telling, Infinite Jest was the product of a sort of conversion experience. Recovery made Wallace decide that he didn't like "irony" anymore and that he wanted to write something with a moral purpose, and this newfound sense of direction opened the floodgates of Wallace's creativity. But there's nothing like this sharp "ironic / non-ironic" division in the work itself. Max tells us that Wallace was trying to become more "conventional." But Infinite Jest is just as weird as anything he'd written before, except on a much larger scale. I also have a hard time seeing it as an "unironic" book, though I confess I don't really know what "irony" means, exactly, in this context. (I suspect Max isn't sure, either, but of course he never bothers to define or investigate the term -- that's not his style.) How did the depressed, moralistic recovering addict of Max's story write hundreds of pages of manic, blackly comic prose about increasingly grotesque episodes of familial trauma? Max tells us that Wallace was no longer interested in alienating and confusing the reader, the way he was in his earlier work; the real Wallace composed a book that takes months to read, leaves no reader-expectation unviolated, and actively strains to avoid becoming too entertaining. How do these pieces fit together? It's not that what Max says is wrong, just that it's one part of the apparent contradiction. A good biography would takes steps toward resolving that contradiction. This one doesn't even acknowledge it.

      (Also, Max's book is really badly written on a sentence-by-sentence level, even by pop biography standards. Again, not a problem if you're just looking for info, but a bit disappointing if you're looking for a good, respectable discussion/appreciation of the subject matter.)
    • 4/5
      I am still unsure of what draws me to the book, the fact that it is about David Foster Wallace or the fact that it is well written. Regardless, I devoured it and am more keen on reading Wallace's work than I was before, even with all the chinks and holes that now rest permanently in my view of Wallace and his writing.
    • 4/5
      A solid basic biography, although I agree with other reviewers that there's room for another more sympathetic, complex look at the life of an important writer of his time. I enjoyed DFW's writing and admired his wit and brilliance, but didn't know about his his struggle with severe depression. As a writer myself, I especially appreciated his questioning of literary fashion and his desire to turn away from irony to the courage of emotional connection with the reader. In spite of his awareness of the traps of fame, unfortunately it seems the pressure to produce another great masterpiece played a role in his death. This book gives you a lot to think about beyond Wallace himself. The most obvious lack in this book is the talk of his problematic relationship with his mother (such that his therapist told him not to speak to her for years) without any evidence whatsoever of a reason--perhaps this was the price of the family's cooperation?
    • 3/5
      I have a weakness for Infinite Jest, which became a large rock for me during a very unhappy point in my life, like I could wake up each day and know that at least by the end of the day I would have read a few more pages of Infinite Jest and I had to keep going because I couldn't give that up. Because of that, I feel, probably like many people, that I had some sort of quasi-relationship with David Foster Wallace already, and it felt invasive to be reading, as entertainment, about the life of someone who was so opposed to the fetishization of entertainment as pleasure. But, at the same time, how could I not read a book about David Foster Wallace's life? It's a compulsion.I liked the book, then didn't (Chapter Two - so much philosophy, discussions of Wittgenstein and Derrida are too clever for me), then started to warm to it again. By the end, when he dies, I was sad. The book, happily, didn't delve too deeply into post-mortem-psychoanalysis but felt, in places, trivial. Still, I want to be more genuine after reading it. I don't know. It's sort of mixed. He was a great writer who was often a jerk and sometimes boring and maybe not super worthy of an biography, but then, considering he'll probably be one of the most influential literary writers of the 1990s/2000s, maybe that is enough to merit an biographical treatment.
    • 5/5
      On the most obvious feature of DFW’s writing:{Wallace} disliked how formally and verbally claustrophobic {minimalist} writing was. Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what is was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquility. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life -- indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme that anyone knew -- this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.And on perhaps the second most-obvious feature … because even maximalism wasn’t enough:Wallace would one day say that he loved endnotes because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”I finished this biography two months ago. I can’t do justice to DFW -- D. T. Max hardly can in 300+ pages -- but I absolutely can’t leave this book unmentioned among this year’s reads.David was the son of Jim (a philosophy academic) and Sally (a literature academic) and older brother to Amy in central Illinois ... and that’s about as much as we get of his childhood. He had a few friends and lovers and eventually a wife, and that plus his struggles with severe depression are about as much as we get of his personal life. Because this is more so a biography of his writing -- a deconstruction of who and what influenced and inspired him; his style; and his execution. Drawn from interviews and DFW’s letters and papers, it’s chronological and extremely straightforward. It’s objective, and yet such objectivity doesn’t prevent a gathering sadness at his psychiatric struggles and tremendous loss from his eventual suicide.Takeaways I hadn’t known: he was competitive; he could be mean; he intended every word he wrote; and while his nonfiction was often embellished, his fiction was searing truth. Plus a reading list: Barthelme’s “The Balloon”; Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bret Eason Ellis’s Less Than Zero; John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse; and DFW’s own story, “Little Expressionless Animals.”
    • 3/5
      Not having read many biographies I can't say whether this is a particularly good one. Sure, there were parts of Wallace's life that seemed to receive only brief attention (most notably for me the two periods that bookmark his sadly short life) and other elements that were missing (significant comment from Wallace's family for instance) but I don't know whether any biography can be exhaustive without being titanic in size. Max's book certainly is a pleasant read, even if its style is conventional (a thematic approach might have brought more impressive results). Every Love Story is a Ghost Story won't throw up too many surprises for those who have done their background reading prior to this book but there's still plenty of day to day information that is nice detail to know. Even if the author doesn't illuminate much new critical information he is good when he comments on Wallace's work. Max ties Wallace's work together nicely and offers sharp insights into some of the meaning behind the stories. Crucially, Max avoids writing a hagiography of Wallace and perhaps that is his greatest achievement in a world that has almost uniformly canonised the author since his suicide. Not that Max is especially vocal in judging Wallace (I think Bustillos was much more forthright in her lengthy online article), he simply reports the facts that he knows and lets the reader judge. Anyone expecting a work that spectacularly praises or damns Wallace will be disappointed.This is a good book though and a worthy first attempt at writing the life of David Foster Wallace. It didn't wow me or make me re-think my impressions of Wallace and didn't answer my central question about Wallace either (mainly, why a man who professed so dearly to wanting a new sincerity could be so phoney sometimes) but it was an enjoyable read and hopefully it will lead to further examination of this brilliant author's troubled life.