David Foster Wallace: Defining voice of depression?

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:15:00 +0000

I PRINTED OUT Michiko Kakutani’s review of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, and I took it with me to my therapist’s office. I’m not seeing her all that much these days, once a month, and I plan to stop altogether at the end of the year. These days, we talk leisurely about what it means to live a worthwhile life. I am holding on to her a little longer than I need to, after slowly emerging in June from three months of what Wallace calls “The Bad Thing.”

“The Bad Thing.” I like this phrase because the state it describes doesn’t deserve a more nuanced name. The Bad Thing is not nuanced. The Bad Thing is a compassless darkness; it is the bottom of a foul deep well whose view of sunlight exists only to taunt. But even as I say this I know it’s too poetic. There’s nothing poetic about depression. This is why, most of the time, it’s no fun to read about. No matter how gifted the writer, nothingness — not the philosophical kind, but the experiential — is not much of a subject..

Salon.com > Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

David Foster Wallace: Defining voice of depression?