David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)

2017 has been one of the most difficult years for me as a therapist, so difficult that I strongly considered giving up my practice and going into a different line of work altogether. It is the first time I had ever experienced burn out on the level of questioning why I am in this line of work at all, and whether or not I am effective at it. Why was this year so difficult? To start things off, one client I worked intensively with for almost a year became so frustrated in session that she yelled at me to go fuck myself, stormed out of my office, and was never heard from again. Two other clients tried to commit suicide and were thankfully discovered in time prior to completion. But the one incident which has impacted me more than anything in my 20-year career in social work was having my first client complete suicide. He had two other serious attempts in the 4 years that we worked together.

         My client was a passionate book reader and was proud of the collection he had amassed over the years. Sometimes he would come into a session so beaten down by depression that talking about books or his favorite authors were the most comforting and least triggering thing he could discuss.  Once he brought in an old and fragile 1^st edition book from early last century to show off to me, amazed with his luck at finding it for $1 at a Goodwill store. It wasn’t unusual for him to read several novels in one week; books were his escape from the mental and physical torment he felt almost daily. I think about him every day, especially when I walk into my office and look up at the clock (ask me in person if you want to hear more about this). I am grateful for my amazing husband, colleagues and friends who helped me process the hard stuff over the past year. This post is dedicated to him, and I’m pretty sure he’d approve of the author!

He may not have been in a band or played music, but David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) is still a rock star to me in the world of writing. DFW was born in Ithaca, NY to parents who were both educators; his father was a professor of philosophy and his mother was an English teacher. At the age of 6 his family relocated to Champaign, Illinois. This became the start of his tennis career, eventually launching him to become a regionally ranked junior tennis player. During his senior year of high school, DFW used to sweat so profusely due to anxiety that he would carry around a towel with him to wipe the sweat off his face and carried his tennis racket around with him whether he had just played a game or not, so others would think he was sweaty from playing a game. He started smoking marijuana and drinking excessively to self-medicate against his increasing depression and anxiety.

In 1987, he published his first novel, The Broom of the System, which was his senior English thesis at Amherst College.  While at Amherst, his depression became so debilitating that he had to take multiples leaves of absence from school to address it and get treatment. DFW was an actively engaged student, joining the glee and debate clubs in college and had made a lot of friends while there. During his sophomore year his roommate found him sitting alone in his dorm room with a suitcase, saying that he had to go home because something was wrong with him. It was surprising for his family to see him return home as he had excelled at school since he was a child and was considered gifted by several different educators.

After attending Amherst College, he left to attend the University of Arizona, where he would receive his MFA in creative writing. This is also where he wrote his first collection of short stories, Girl with Curious Hair. That same year he accepted into Harvard’s graduate program for philosophy, but eventually had to drop out after only being in the program for several weeks.  He was admitted to McLean Hospital (a psychiatric hospital) for four weeks to address his worsening addiction to alcohol, which was replaced by his pot addiction. A year prior to that he had attempted suicide in his parent’s house, oftentimes drinking alone and feeling that he had failed as a writer. After his stint at McLean, he lived in a sober house and hoped that, since he was unable to write effectively as an alcoholic, that he would experience a rebirth of sorts and find a new voice as a sober person. It was his hope to return to Harvard after going through the programs he was attending to address his substance abuse and depression, yet this was strongly advised against by the staff to do so, fearing it would become too stressful once again for him and would possibly reverse the progress he had made.

DFW moved from Boston to Syracuse in 1992, which is where he would write his groundbreaking novel Infinite Jest, the novel that is considered a postmodern encyclopedic novel due to its detail, length (over 1000 pages), and liberal use of endnotes. Infinite Jest made Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005. DFW pulled from his own experiences with depression, tennis, addiction, and recovery, just to name a few. In 1993, he moved to Illinois for a teaching position and published Infinite Jest in 1996.

By 2007 DFW had been taking Nardil, an old school antidepressant and anxiolytic from the 1950’s, for the past 20 years. DFW was concerned that the medication was blocking his creativity and muting his emotions, thus making it more and more challenging for him to write. Nardil is also a MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor), which can cause unpleasant side effects if one is not careful with what they are consuming in their diet. He had such a bad reaction after eating at a restaurant once that he questioned if it was time to taper off of it and try a more modern medication.  In the spring of 2007 he tapered off Nardil and quickly spiraled down, becoming increasingly unstable. Other medications were tried but nothing seemed to work. In an interview in the Guardian with his wife Karen Green, she stated that, "He was scared out of his mind…There was a healthy person in there who wanted to come off the meds. There was a perfectionist who wanted to be a good husband. And there was a sick person that wanted to see how much he could rock the boat." He eventually tried taking Nardil again but it no longer had the same effect on him, so he turned to electroconvulsive shock treatment as a last-ditch effort. He endured twelve ECT sessions, and appeared to be spiraling further down. On September 12, 2008, DFW wrote a 2-page suicide note to his wife, and hanged himself in their house. Wallace carefully organized the computer files and manuscript to The Pale King, his third novel, and left them on his desk for his wife and agent to find. It was published in its incomplete form, albeit still rather long at over 500 pages and 50 chapters. In 2007, Wallace guessed he had only completed writing one third of the novel. The Pale King, which was started in 2000, was supposed to be the anticipated follow-up to his groundbreaking novel, Infinite Jest.