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Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

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David Lipsky has done a laudable service for both David Foster Wallace and his readership with this jaunty road-trip/interview/memoir. As Infinite Jest was being launched in 1996 and Wallace was nearing the end of his book tour, Lipsky, a rising name in journalism, followed Wallace through the last week of the tour, the Midwest portion, and recorded almost every word spoken. (The piece was supposed to run in Rolling Stone , but never did. Bad timing due to the untimely death of a rock star and other foibles of the industry.) Lipsky interviewed Wallace without ever being obtrusive or intrusive. He allowed their relationship to form organically, gradually, and avoided a forced fellowship. Rather than a stilted outcome of an interview, this cohered with warmth, wit, warts, a wink here and there, and a wily charm. A salty, chatty Wallace emerges as a captivating and unreliable narrator of his own life.

Lipsky precedes the interview with a mighty potent "afterword," a several page editorial that is also filled with specific facts about Wallace's depression and suicide. I sprung a leak; it was like he died all over again and I had to mourn him once more. It was tender, frank, and genuine. This is also the only section where it is revealed that Wallace had been on MAO inhibiters (an old-school anti-depressant) since 1989, a fact that Wallace chose not to reveal in the interviews. On the contrary, Wallace fairly denied being (currently) on any medication for depression. But, throughout the text of the interview, Lipsky tells the reader each time the author's watch beeped an alarm. It took me a while to put it together--it seemed extraneous to tell us that. But, I think that Lipsky was allowing the reader to connect the dots and draw the arguable conclusion without making any personal statements. Wallace was forthcoming about his depression, and even about his ECT treatments (electroconvulsive therapy). But he was opaque about his current medication regimen. He chewed tobacco almost ceaselessly, drank Coca-Cola like water, and enjoyed the occasional draught beer. And he ate like a lumberjack. (He was 6'2" and robust, athletic.)

Throughout the three hundred pages of this protracted interview, I engaged with the momentum of Wallace-speak. Because his verbiage is unedited, it is sometimes necessary to read his sentences more than once. They are often choked with articles, prepositions and conjunctives that, idiomatically, are natural, but difficult on the page initially. However, I got into the zone and flow. Wallace is an enthusiastic interviewee if erratic at times. He vacillates from agile, amiable, and arch to repetitive and awkward. There are also words that hold a lot of charge for him, such as "continuum." In fact, Lipsky relates looking up that word after he went back to his hotel room, because it was so fundamental to Wallace's formal conception of the psyche.

For the most part, I was illuminated by the book-sized interview. Wallace shares in-depth insights on growing up, his scholarly pursuits, tennis, depression, love, and of course, the process of writing. He discusses (not all at once, but at episodic intervals) the themes of Infinite Jest and the fear that we are in a culture of entertainment addiction. Additionally, Lipsky and Wallace deconstruct movies--from Lynch to Tarantino and several stops in-between. I was delighted that he waxed about my my favorite movie scene of all time--the scene in True Romance between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper. They argue and examine literature and gossip a little about other writers and celebrities. Wallace had an almost childlike crush on Alanis Morissette, permeated with a fetching adoration and wonder.

There are about fifty pages in the middle that lost steam. They were repetitive and grinding at intervals and seemed to be placed there in order to add to the "road-trip" ambiance. I got antsy and wanted to move ahead to more luminous discussions.

By the end of the book, I felt closer to understanding Wallace, who yet remains an enigma and a haunting cautionary tale. Unintentionally, I felt a pull toward Lipsky, too. His observations are quick, inconspicuous, and often sublime. I was impressed by his tasteful treatment of Wallace's memory, of his regard for integrity, and his ability to capture the essence of this beautiful and tormented man and phenomenal author.

Probably the biggest question that you, someone who at least must have a passing interest in David Foster Wallace to be visiting this page, would like answered about this book is: does it deliver the goods? The book is billed as a conversation between the late David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone journalist and novelist. Is it worth reading? I would enthusiastically say yes, even if you haven't cracked Infinite Jest, or finished Consider The Lobster. It's pretty true that you can get a good sense of the sort of person Wallace is by reading his work, but the book gets across a lot of new detail and stuff I wasn't aware of. The conversation is frequently engrossing, and it covers incredibly diverse terrain, including Wallace's very complicated relationship with fame, his interesting thoughts about pop culture and the future of entertainment and books (which are actually pretty optimistic, considering the sheer tonnage of writerly sentiment about the end of civilization), as well as a lot of stuff about Infinite Jest, then brand new, and what he thought the main points of the book were, with some argumentation and elaboration with the author about them. There's a lot about Wallace's drug problems and depression in here, which cannot help but be more than a little sad. Wallace sincerely believed that people just can't ever be completely happy, that there's a restless part of us that can never be satisfied, and while that is a debatable notion I do think it turned out to be true in his case. Lipsky tactfully points out some hints of Wallace's future trajectory along the way, but one can kind of sense that despite the zeal that Wallace had for his work and for quite a bit of life, that the guy had a lot of issues and that writing never completely purged them.

Still, the point of the book isn't to pity Wallace. Through the conversation, Wallace comes across as the person one would expect him to: exuberant, highly intelligent, open, introspective, incredibly silly at times, but all in all a good guy and a real iconoclast. Lipsky makes the incredibly accurate observation that he had never lost touch childhood, and that definitely comes across in the book, as he is capable both of wild-eyed wonder and great anxiety. Just a great person to hang out with for a few hours. Lipsky keeps things moving briskly, and the book is a highly addictive read. I would seriously recommend the book if you're interested in DFW, or, you know, good books.

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is essentially a transcript, set into 310 pages of text with minimal editorial work. Nothing appears to have been left out, and little has been added aside from the frequent interviewer's notes, which resemble stage directions in a screenplay. Lipsky also adds a short introduction, a preface, and a sensitively written afterword, all placed at the front of the book. A list of cultural references (movies, television shows, songs, and books) appears at the end of the volume.

The conversations are varied, mostly undirected, and sometimes repetitive, with abrupt transitions between topics and as the time and place suddenly change. The young Lipsky (30 at the time of the interviews, to Wallace's 34) quickly becomes a personality to the reader: what he doesn't reveal about himself in his questions, he reveals in the interviewer's notes. His envy of Wallace's success with Infinite Jest is front and center, as is his mistrust of his subject's generosity and openness. (Wallace, in a mixture of Midwestern hospitality, genuine niceness, and strategy, accepted Lipsky as a house guest and driving partner during the last stages of his book tour.) Whenever Wallace says something complimentary to Lipsky, the interviewer makes a note: Flattery. Trying to win me to his side. Cagily implying that we're equals. Flirting. But it's Lipsky who is infatuated with Wallace, astonished by every flash of humor, each revelation of familiarity with cultural ephemera (the movie True Romance; Alanis Morissette). Lipsky, a New Yorker, is particularly fascinated by Wallace's Midwestern way of speaking. Intermittently, he transcribes in dialect, recording Wallace's "something" as "sumpin'" and "doesn't" as "dudn't." There are passages where Lipsky dutifully removes all the g's from the end of the -ing words. This is tiring and distracts from what Wallace is saying. One wonders how Lipsky would react if someone were always to record his pronunciation of his home town as "New Yawk," assuming he speaks that way.

This isn't the best introduction to the mind and thoughts of David Foster Wallace, which express themselves just as honestly and much more forcefully in his essays and in his Kenyon College commencement speech. Reading this book is like listening to a full-length recording of an opera; unless you already know the opera well, you're better off with a highlights disc. As a fan of Wallace, I frequently found myself irritated by the young Lipsky's suspicion and combativeness in the face of his host's generosity. Lipsky was acting as a good journalist, but as Janet Malcolm pointed out in her book about Joe McGinniss, being a journalist means a certain willingness to misrepresent oneself, and possibly to betray. The best part of this book was the afterword, which (for the first time, as far as I know), tells the story of Wallace's struggle against clinical depression and sets it in context with the rest of his life. The older Lipsky is fair, compassionate, and moving, and makes the powerful point that to file David Foster Wallace in the cubbyhole marked "tormented genius" is a mistake. For most of his life, his disease was well-managed. Certainly the Wallace who's revealed in these five days of conversation doesn't seem more troubled than one would expect of a sensitive person suddenly presented with the weirdness that is universal acclaim. That Lipsky remembers Wallace so fondly, and that Wallace, according to his friends, liked Lipsky in return, reflects well on the interviewer.

This is the only book I've ever pre-ordered from Amazon. Its structure and content are no secret - it's right there in the title. The road trip in question took place as David Foster Wallace was winding down the book tour for "Infinite Jest"; David Lipsky had been assigned to interview him for Rolling Stone. That interview never came to fruition - instead, Lipsky brings us this account of their 5-day road trip from March 1996.

I thought I'd devour it in one sitting, but it actually took a while to warm up to it - the first 100 pages meander somewhat and are a little repetitive. But then, as the two men get more comfortable with each other, Lipsky hits his stride - the unwinding, ongoing conversation gets more and more interesting. The final 100 pages are fascinating, moving and bittersweet - as is so often the case with DFW, you come away with the mixture of exhilaration and sense of privilege that comes from experiencing him at his best, and his suicide is all the more heartbreaking. This book may not necessarily win him any new fans, but for someone like me, with a long-standing intellectual crush on DFW, this further chance to experience his wit, smartness and decency seemed like a blessing.

David Lipsky has done a good thing by sharing the story of his time with DFW. He seems a little uncertain about how best to structure the narrative, and I wouldn't say that all of his choices are ideal. I mean him no disrespect, but the parts that worked best were the straight transcripts of their conversation, with minimal interruption. His sporadic efforts to sprinkle in atmospheric details were not particularly helpful. It's a safe bet that the folks reading this book are not doing so for his descriptions of the ambience at Denny's.

But actually, writing this book can't have been easy for Lipsky; to do it well, he had to keep his own presence as muted as possible, emphasizing his role as reporter over that of author. It's to his credit that he does this well. Most of the book is just the transcript of Foster Wallace's words, with occasional commentary, which I didn't find particularly insightful, but was also relatively unobtrusive. Lipsky stumbles occasionally at the beginning of the interview, there is a certain awkwardness, but as the two men establish rapport the problem fixes itself, and he does a great job of drawing DFW out in the later parts of the book. In a very few instances Lipsky was downright obnoxious - badgering the writer repeatedly about some third-hand rumor that Rolling Stone had fed him about a possible heroin addiction in his past. DFW denies it point blank at the outset, but Lipsky keeps gnawing like a jackal; after a while you realize that it takes him the better part of the entire trip to understand - finally - that having an addictive personality (i.e. prone to addiction) is not the same thing as being an addict. But, to be fair, nobody is going to come off looking smart when interviewing David Foster Wallace. Though Lipsky should probably have read "Infinite Jest" more thoroughly beforehand, given he was about to spend several days with the author.

Concretely, what might one expect to learn about DFW from this book? He was clearly hugely ambivalent about the potential price of success, fame and the associated hype - this is a recurrent theme throughout. There's some biographical material about his earlier life that may be unfamiliar, and assorted trivia about his taste in movies and TV shows. But the true pleasure in reading this book lies in the journey, getting to spend more time with DFW, if only figuratively.

Isolated remarks or information that stuck with me:

* (on the literary scene in New York) "the enormous hiss of egos at various stages of inflation and deflation"

* (while confessing his fondness for Alanis Morrissette) "Sheryl Crow made me want to vomit, from the very beginning".

* I liked that even the omniscient DFW stumbled occasionally, misidentifying Frank O' Connor, author of "My Oedipus Complex", "First Confession" among other stories, as "Frank O' Hara".

* I loved that he infuriated his editor by printing out the first draft of "Infinite Jest" single-spaced in 9-point type, to try to make it seem shorter than its actual length, and that the editor screamed at him and forced him to print him a fresh copy, double-spaced.

Throughout the extended interview, Foster Wallace also gives a pretty cogent explanation for the type of deliberate complication of the reader's experience that is an integral part of "Infinite Jest". For anyone specifically interested in reading what he has to say about his own writing, one of the best bets is still Laura Miller's 1996 interview in Salon.com: [...]

Damn. Writing this review just makes me sad all over again about his suicide. A terrible loss.

David Foster Wallace was the premiere young writer when Infinite Jest debuted in the early 90s. Athletic and alternative, he was the unlikely prototype for a writer, but his genius and humor endeared. David Lipsky had the fortune to escort Wallace on the last leg of his book tour to better know the genius.

Lipsky finds a shy Midwesterner, uncomfortable with his fame, and yet still with some innocence and wonder. Wallace is candid, but careful, about topics from his early years, his writing, fame, and his future. Wallace can speak a little above my head at times, but he is still a very relatable person. This is a fascinating book to get to know a man who was really coming into his own after years of struggle with a very postmodern, complex, triumphant book.

This book makes me want to tackle all of his work, and get to know the work that influenced him as well. Wallace fans will not be let down. Highly recommended.

I remember coming across David Foster Wallace's writing for the first time with "The Broom of the System" in the late 1980s, before "Infinite Jest" or his other works. I was captivated by the experimental fiction, the stories within the story, and the somewhat plotless novel that was still compulsively readable. "Infinite Jest" seemed like it would be awesome, but to be honest, while I could sense its genius, I didn't get more than 200 pages into it.

"Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" is a road trip memoir with Wallace, but to me, it was more like "Infinite Jest" than "Broom of the System," which is to say that I feel like I should have enjoyed it more than I did.

I enjoy Rolling Stone and David Lipsky's writing.

But the magazine does have the annoying trait of asking the most embarrassing question possible and then chipping away at it for a while.

So, after the first hundred pages, asking, "Just what kind of addict ARE you?", and later, "Please admit you are a genius and tell us how it feels", we finally get to the meat: the philosophical literary/cultural discussions.

I found it interesting to learn DFW found the Cosmo advice column relaxing reading. And that he loved Alanis Morissette. Also some details of his treatment for depression, which so sadly killed him.

Whole books have been written to analyze and understand the complex genius of David Foster Wallace. It's been said, to me, that to really understand Wallace's high octained writing, one must "get to know him" first. So, before undertaking the monolithic and labyrinthine work that marked his short career, Infinite Jest, I determined to "get to know" him as best I could. This work by Rolling Stone writer Lipsky, I've discovered, is a contemporary and important piece of the Wallace puzzle and provides, in a clear work of love and admiration, the motivation I was looking for. At times jumbled and misguided, Lipsky undertook an interview with Wallace in 1997 at the end of the Infinite Jest reading tour, recording their sometimes spacey conversations and feelings for use in a proposed article for the magazine. The article never was written as Lipsky was soon reassigned to "finding heroin addicts in Seattle", but he often went back over these tapes while following the slow downfall of this literary icon. After Wallace was found dead in September of 2008, a suicide that shocked the literary world, Lipsky determined then to go back to these heady days for solace. Realizing that a revelatory work was, in fact, in these transcripts, Lipsky shares them here, warts and all, for all Wallace fans, while adding details of Wallace's death that greatly add to the overall melancholy and sadness that Lipsky and others felt.

This work is at times very hard to read and understand as we get the full Wallace effect in an informal and hurried setting. Lipsky basically provides transcripts of these talks that covered 3 or 4 days in 1997, probing Wallace for deeper meaning on the importance and relevance that fiction writing plays in contemporary society. The answers Wallace provides show the mind and thought processes he went through to formulate cohesive observations, but are at times really fractured and incomplete. Lipsky, however, seems to recognize this as he then provides contemporary insights into these conversations which are meant to show the hyper character and uuber-intelligence that made up the Wallace icon.

In the end it's hard not to love Wallace and feel the total loss and affinity most held for him. Also, it's now clear to see how his life ended in such dramatic and tragic form. Showing an abounding care and absorption for seemingly all things in life, Wallace seemed to worry and stress about everything, even worrying about worrying. Couple this with the revelation that Wallace had been diagnosed as clinically depressed in 1989 and that the meds he took for this (Nardil, an older anti-depressant "tugging a boxcar of side effects") added somewhat to his overall demise, it is clear to me that suicide was certainly a possible outcome. What makes this book work is the knowledge of how it ends..."Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning. It has an event gravity: Eventually, every memory and impression gets tugged in its direction."

"...Becoming Yourself" is a magnificent introduction into the world of David Wallace and contemporary literature. I would recommend this book, flaws and all, certainly to all his fans, but moreso, to all who would become fans. Read this and watch some of the revealing videos of Wallace on-line and, I'd challenge, you'll come on board also.

Watching DFW Become the Entertainment:

A Review of "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace" by David Lipsky

Sept 19,2010 6:56am BGKY CMT

by Gerardo Arnaez. with help from friends who ask to remain nameless.

email: garnaez(AT)gmail(DOT)com

link is j.mp/9oXyvl for up to the minute corrections

A friend of mine once wondered why anyone was surprised--not saddened mind you, but surprised--that his depression killed him. Given Infinite Jest and all his other writings on depression, she asked why so many people had been blind to the one thing he repeatedly put right in our faces; something we didn't even see coming until it happened. I normally will read a book, especially by a youngish author, and assume a lot of biographic grist is being milled so why didn't alarm bells go off when reading say, "The Depressed Person"? There is a sense of guilt about reading his stuff and enjoying, but being oblivious (willfully so?) to what you are actually reading. It's possible he encouraged this by not discussing it, by making Depression so damn Entertaining that we swallowed whole without munching on it's meaning, tasting something foul. So now we have the first byproduct of his death on sale.

This is ostensibly a review of "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace." Most reviews about AOYEUBY:ARTwDFW note that the introduction, preface and afterword that relate his suicide are all immediately at the beginning of the book in order to let us get it over and done with and not be reminded that we know how it all turns out. Instead, the book ends with DFW talking about dancing and going to church which leaves you with warm feelings for him but never really tells you anything about him and left me me feeling like I had even less of a handle on this guy than I thought. Like many people, I thought I kind of knew or at least "got" DFW, because his writing voice was so 'on', so there in my head that it felt like he was physically present and you soon developed your own personal relationship with DFW.

This book has a difficult task. The author knows we want DFW alive again, but the transcriptions are totally at odds with the whole book's premise which is to give us DFW again. In this it fails miserably. It fails because speech, when transcribed, doesn't read very much at all like what we think people talk like. Whereas, when something is written with forethought, everything planned and meticulous, it sounds natural and real to our ears. We do our own mental copy-editing when we hear people. But with DWF, as alive a writer on paper as any of us of a certain age will ever know, not only did you not have to copy-edit or filter the stream to your brain, but it was like DFW had a main-line to your nervous system which he could directly access and know exactly how you were going to react to his writing to make you keep reading. Not only would he work hard to make you understand what he was saying but he probably worked even harder on how you understood what he was saying. I wonder now just how much he put out there, yet beguiling us into thinking it couldn't possible be DFW's actual experience.

Which brings us to the second task. DFW tells the author, right at the preface, that he is extremely uncomfortable that his words are completely in the author's hands. I don't know about you but I get unsettled when I read this in a book that only exists because of his death. But I keep reading it because I really want to read his words and hear his true voice (his written one) and but so, I run up against all sorts of very interesting emotions, because despite wanting all that, he simply isn't here anymore. What sort of literary necrophilia am I engaging in?

But if you are new to DFW, I wouldn't start with this book. I would start with his New York Times tennis essay about Roger Federer and then if you enjoyed that, read his Esquire essay on Micheal Joyce, and if you still want more, pick up his Harper's essay "Shipping Out" on Cruise lines. By then, I will not need to explain to you why so many of us read him and wound up buying this book. If you don't like what you've read, I won't be able to explain a thing about DFW to you.

For the rest of us, this book generates a strange feeling of familiarity. Every now and then, you'll pick up on something familiar and soon this book will feel like his greatest hits before they become well known. But the problem is that we now have DFW being recycled and it feels wrong to me. DFW would not have wanted this book to be published and would have let us know how much damage we are doing (to whom?) by buying this book. Inevitably, the audio cassettes will be released as "Excerpts," then a few years later we will get "The Unexpurgated Tapes," and sometime in YDAU, we'll be trafficking in bootleg DFW and eventually, if this doesn't stop, we will have our own CGI'd DFW speaking to us in HiDef,[1] infinitely looping.

[1] Look at the Computer-Generated image of a young Jeff Bridges in the Tron2 trailer to see how creepy our future is going to be.

This book covers a five day period in 1996 during which author Lipsky tagged along with David Foster Wallace while Wallace did a whistle stop promotional tour in Minnesota to promote his well-received novel THE INFINITE JEST. Lipsky had been assigned by Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner to do a magazine piece about Wallace because so much positive buzz had been generated about the young author. Less a biography, the Rolling Stone piece was planned to be a profile. It was later shelved in favor of another story, but the tape recordings and notes assembled by Lipsky were retained and used as the basis of this book.

While an unconventional collection and one that I can't find another recent book to compare it to, it was a fascinating slice of life in which Foster expounded on his art, his likes and dislikes, his views toward relationships and his problem with women romantically, and his ongoing war with depression and periodic flirtation with suicide. Surprisingly upbeat given the references to depression and suicide, I quickly realized that Wallace spoke in prose. His verbalizations were comparable to his written words. Without missing a beat it all flowed in a straightforward manner. The book captured Wallace's love of big bang movies such as Broken Arrow, his love of movies in general and his uncanny talent as a reviewer, his dislike of fluorescent lighting, the lack of musical diversity in Bloomington-Normal IL (unless you liked country music which Wallace didn't). I particularly liked his take on John Updike. A recent re-read of one of Updike's Rabbit novels made me realize just how astute a reviewer Wallace was. Wallace had a keen and perceptive mind and had wide ranging opinions on many topics from television to dancing to the internet. He had a huge crush on Alannis Morrisette that bordered on worshipful. In the process of doing his promotional tour, we observed Wallace dealing with newfound fame and acclaim and a certain level of reclusiveness and desire to maintain a certain level of anonymity. While youthful drug use was addressed, Wallace never confirmed that he was a long time user of anti-depressants.

One essential part of this book was Lipsky's introduction that brought this story full circle and dealt with the events that lead to his suicide. I don't think this was intentional, but I got almost teary eyed when I realized his suicide might have been avoided. Bridges such as these which were essentially commentaries by Lipsky helped bring this book together.

I met Wallace once in a very casual setting probably around the time of this interview via a friend at Illinois State (where he was living and teaching at the time). Laughingly, we both commented that had he been our instructor when we were students there we would have been mesmerized. After reading this book, I am.

If you are an admirer of David Foster Wallace and his art, I highly recommend this book. It managed to provide a unique perspective that had not been previously explored.