David Foster Wallace, What Would You Do?
An imagined interview

In 2005, author David Foster Wallace gave a commencement address to Kenyon College, titled “This is Water,” in which he thoughtfully and powerfully wove together the annoyance of grocery shopping with mindfulness, compassion and the deeper meaning of life. I was moved to tears listening to it for the first time (and, who am I kidding, for the fifth time). This launched my obsession with David Foster Wallace (or DFW, as I call him in my head), including many imagined conversations with him. [1]

Wallace agreed to sit down with me for an interview for Small Answers. (Well, he’s dead, so I wrote his responses. But a lot of them are quotes from interviews Wallace actually did himself published in “Conversations with David Foster Wallace,” edited by Steven J. Burn.)

Me: You’re primarily a fiction writer, though you started out in math and philosophy. How did you pick your career?

DFW: I just got tired of technical philosophy, and panicked because I was suddenly not getting joy from the one thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty.  So I went back home for a term in college, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature, too. It was real luck that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction.  [3]

Me: That makes it sound like a smooth transition, but I know that you had a hard time; can you tell me more about it?

DFW: It was an identity struggle. There I was at twenty-one and I didn’t know what to do. Do I go into math logic, which I’m good at and pretty much guaranteed an approved career in? Or do I try to keep on with this writing thing, this artiste thing? The idea of trying to be a ”writer” repelled me, mostly because of all of the foppish aesthetes I knew at school. Even today, when people I don’t know ask me what I do for a living, I usually tell them I’m “in English” or I “work free-lance.” I don’t seem to be able to call myself a writer. [4]

Me: We understand how difficult career identity is, perhaps particularly for writers?

DFW: I don’t really know what I am and I don’t think very many writers have any idea what they are. You just try to do stuff that seems alive to you. [5]

Me: What is that for you—that is most alive?

DFW: For me, art that’s alive and urgent is art that’s about what it is to be a human being. And whether one is a human being in times of enormous profundity and depth and challenge, or one is trying to be a human being in times that appear to be shallow and commercial and materialistic, really isn’t all that relevant to the deeper project. The deeper project is: what is it to be human? [6]

Me: How do you describe being human, and being a writer, in times that have both depth and commercial materialism?

DFW: There is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the “inner sap”– the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff– and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people. The fashions, which are so easy to criticize but are so incredibly powerful and authentic-seeming when we’re inside them, tyrannize us. If there’s suffering involved in art, or however you want to say it, right now this is the form of the suffering: to be the battleground for the war between those two kinds of impulses. [7]

Me: Is this battle particularly American?

DFW: There’s something particularly sad about us in America, something that doesn’t have much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.  I wanted to write something sad when I wrote “Infinite Jest.”[8]

Me: Is there a cure for this type of lostness?

DFW: Fiction helps. I don’t know what you are thinking or what its like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction, I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. There’s also the relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and complicated, [9] kind-of ah-ha! I feel unalone-intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t feel with other art. [10]

Me: Where else do you find your small answers?

DFW: I am interested in religion, only because certain churches seem to be a place where things can be talked about. What does your life mean? Do you believe in something bigger than you? Is there something about gratifying every single desire you have that is harmful?  I haven’t been successful in completing initiation in any church, though, and I don’t know that I’d call myself a religious person. One place where I discovered stuff was being talked about was AA meetings. I’m not in AA, but I went to open meetings. There’s a certain amount of goo, and there’s a certain amount of serious stuff. Like the fact that it takes enormous courage to appear weak. I hadn’t heard that anywhere else. [11]