Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Description:
“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”
– David Foster Wallace
An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour
In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”
Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.
A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.
David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR’s All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the author of the novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #706 in Books
- Published on: 2010-04-13
- Released on: 2010-04-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780307592439
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Customer Reviews:
The boyish wonder
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.
Alas, poor Yorick!
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.
A 300+ Page Interview
David Lipsky followed David Foster Wallace around the midwest for five days in 1996, his tape recorder running for nearly the entire time. Alas, the ROLLING STONE article that Lipsky was interviewing Wallace for never ran…but Lipsky held onto the tapes. Now, 14 years later, the tapes have been transcribed verbatim (including many “off the record” comments) and published as this 300+ page book. It’s a true feast for the David Foster Wallace fan.
Lipsky and Wallace talk about writers as varied as Stephen King, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and John Updike. They sit in the front of a theater to catch the action flick BROKEN ARROW. Wallace gives a reading at a bookstore for INFINITE JEST, his recently released masterpiece, and he’s ambushed with an excruciating question and answer session (his least favorite part of readings). Lipsky and Wallace talk about Wallace’s rumored drug abuse (just rumors, for the most part) and depression. Of course, every word takes on new, haunting meaning through the lens of Wallace’s suicide, which Lipsky addresses in the afterward.
To be a fly-on-the-wall for their five-day conversation is an amazing experience. Lipsky makes minimal contributions to the text–fragmentary questions and explanations–that only give the reader the barest sense of the settings. Could the book have worked a little better as a proper biography of Wallace, with the interview cut up? That was my first thought when I started reading it. But I think that Lipsky and his editor made the right choice: ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF is an intimate portrait told mostly in Wallace’s own words. It’s as close to an autobiography as we’ll ever get, and that’s where its power comes from. It deserves a place on the bookshelf of every Wallace fan.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In early 1996, journalist and author Lipsky (Absolutely American) joined then-34-year-old David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his tour for Infinite Jest (Wallace’s breakout novel) for a Rolling Stone interview that would never be published. Here, he presents the transcript of that interview, a rollicking dialogue that Lipsky sets up with a few brief but revealing essays, one of which touches upon Wallace’s 2008 suicide and the reaction of those close to him (including his sister and his good friend Jonathan Franzen). Over the course of their five day road trip, Wallace discusses everything from teaching to his stay in a mental hospital to television to modern poetry to love and, of course, writing. Ironically, given Wallace’s repeated concern that Lipsky would end up with an incomplete or misleading portrait, the format produces the kind of tangible, immediate, honest sense of its subject that a formal biography might labor for. Even as they capture a very earthbound encounter, full of common road-trip detours, Wallace’s voice and insight have an eerie impact not entirely related to his tragic death; as Lipsky notes, Wallace “was such a natural writer he could talk in prose.” Among the repetitions, ellipses, and fumbling that make Wallace’s patter so compellingly real are observations as elegant and insightful as his essays. Prescient, funny, earnest, and honest, this lost conversation is far from an opportunistic piece of literary ephemera, but a candid and fascinating glimpse into a uniquely brilliant and very troubled writer.
Review
It’s a road picture, a love story, a contest: two talented, brilliant young men with literary ambitions, and their struggle to understand one another. I can’t tell you how much fun this book is; amazingly fun…You wish yourself into the back seat as you read, come up with your own contributions and quarrels. The form of the narrative, much of which is a straight transcription of the interview tapes, together with the wry commentary of the now-mature and very gifted Lipsky, is original, and intoxicatingly intimate. –Maria Bustillos, The Awl
On assignment for Rolling Stone, Lipsky hung out with David Foster Wallace and his two dogs in
Wallace’s Illinois home, then accompanied the newly minted celebrity writer on a Midwest stretch of his
1996 book tour for his meganovel Infinite Jest. Lipsky’s article was canceled, and now, in the wake of
Wallace’s 2008 suicide, Lipsky’s recordings of five days’ worth of the writer’s brainy and passionate
riffing on the nature of mind, the purpose of literature, and the pitfalls of both academia and entertainment
are incredibly poignant. Lipsky (Absolutely American, 2003) vividly and incisively sets the before-andafter
scenes for this revelatory oral history, in which Wallace is at once candid and cautious, funny and
flinty, spellbinding and erudite as he articulates remarkably complex insights into depression, fiction that
captures the “cognitive texture” of our time, and fame’s double edge. Wild about movies, prescient about
the impact of the Internet, and happiest writing, Wallace is radiantly present in this intimate portrait, a
generous and refined work that will sustain Wallace’s masterful and innovative books long into the future.
— Booklist
“Exhilarating…All that’s left now are the words on the page — and on the pages of “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” too, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night.” — Laura Miller, Salon
“In early 1996, journalist and author Lipsky (Absolutely American) joined then-34-year-old David Foster Wallace on the last leg of his tour for Infinite Jest (Wallace’s breakout novel) for a Rolling Stone interview that would never be published. Here, he presents the transcript of that interview, a rollicking dialogue that Lipsky sets up with a few brief but revealing essays, one of which touches upon Wallace’s 2008 suicide and the reaction of those close to him (including his sister and his good friend Jonathan Franzen). Over the course of their five day road trip, Wallace discusses everything from teaching to his stay in a mental hospital to television to modern poetry to love and, of course, writing. Ironically, given Wallace’s repeated concern that Lipsky would end up with an incomplete or misleading portrait, the format produces the kind of tangible, immediate, honest sense of its subject that a formal biography might labor for. Even as they capture a very earthbound encounter, full of common road-trip detours, Wallace’s voice and insight have an eerie impact not entirely related to his tragic death; as Lipsky notes, Wallace “was such a natural writer he could talk in prose.” Among the repetitions, ellipses, and fumbling that make Wallace’s patter so compellingly real are observations as elegant and insightful as his essays. Prescient, funny, earnest, and honest, this lost conversation is far from an opportunistic piece of literary ephemera, but a candid and fascinating glimpse into a uniquely brilliant and very troubled writer. -Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“He was really uneasy about people having control of his image,” says David Lipsky about the late author. “So I
thought the fairest thing was to put forth exactly how it was. Here’s everything that happened for five days while we
were in cars and hotel rooms and bookstores.” In 1996, Lipsky had the opportunity to join David Foster Wallace, then
34, during his book-signing tour for his latest novel, Infinite Jest. The occasion was a profile that was to appear in
Rolling Stone, which incidentally got killed for a major spread about heroin and rock ’n’ roll. Over a decade later, and
fresh in the shadow of Wallace’s 2008 suicide, comes the manuscript of the five-day “road trip” Lipsky shared with
what many consider America’s most important turn-of-the-century author. In Lipsky’s view, Wallace had as much
impact on American prose as “Hemingway did in the ’20s or Salinger did in the ’50s.” Bursting with candor, humor
and presence, Lipsky’s manuscript is a testament to the abbreviated life of a genius, while paying tribute to the
time-honored tradition of the writer’s life. “What’s nice about the conversation that we had for those five days is that
he takes me from when he was a kid, when he was born in Ithaca, N.Y.,” says Lipsky, “to where the books ends, where he is right now. So the book is about how one becomes oneself.” – Kirkus
“Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning,” David Lipsky writes in an introductory note to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, the 310-page transcript of his 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace. That’s well-put, but it won’t prepare you for the experience of reading the conversation that follows… One thing that the book makes clear is that Wallace’s vigor and awe-inspiring writing was, in some ways, part of a deeply intricate personal effort to beat death… The book has some elements of good fiction: blind spots, character development and a powerful narrative arc. By the end, no amount of sadness can stand in the way of this author’s personality, humor and awe-inspiring linguistic command. His commentary reveals how much he lived the themes of his writing; all of his ideas about addiction, entertainment and loneliness were bouncing around in his head relentlessly. Most of all, this book captures Wallace’s mental energy, what his ex-girlfriend Mary Karr calls “wattage,” which remains undimmed. —Michael Miller, Time Out
“Full of everyman details about a writer who often seemed larger than life. . . Wallace emerges as a human being…. As Lipsky writes, the author’s singular achievement, especially in his non-fiction, was capturing ‘everybody’s brain voice’; Wallace’s writing sounds the way we think, or at least the way we like to think we think. The goal of fiction, Wallace tells Lipsky, involves ‘leaping over that wall of self, and portraying inner experience.’ Part of becoming a better person has to do with learning how ‘to treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend.’ Throughout the book, astonishingly profound things are said in airport parking lots and rental-car cockpits. We may never have a better record of what it sounded like to hear Wallace talk… Rolling Stone sent the right guy.” —Zach Baron, Bookforum
“It’s 1996. Cuba Gooding, Jr., has just won an Oscar and David Foster Wallace, thanks to the recent publication of “Infinite Jest,” is a literary superstar. David Lipsky, the author of “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace“, is not a literary superstar but is very curious to know what such fame feels like. So Lipsky goes on a five-day road trip with Foster Wallace as he finishes the last leg of his “Infinite Jest” book tour and asks questions. Lots of questions. “Lipsky is dogged in his efforts to get Wallace to talk about how great it feels to be so widely celebrated and well-reviewed,” says Laura Miller in her Salon review. He is, but he’s also deeply interested in the literary climate which, in 1996, is still capable of sustaining and promoting a 1,079-page work of fiction like “Jest.”
Lipsky’s book is an insightful and sometimes frustrating five-day conversation with Foster Wallace. A conversation that likely wouldn’t be in print were it not for Foster Wallace’s death, by suicide, in 2008. It’s hard not to read the book as a series of clues or portents of that event. Discussing his reasons for turning from philosophy (Foster Wallace once applied for graduate studies in the field) and toward writing, he says, ” ‘Cause see, by this time, my ego’s all invested in the writing, right? It’s the only thing that I’ve gotten, you know, food pellets from the universe for, to the extent that I wanted.
“So i feel really trapped: Like, ‘Uh-oh, my five years is up. I’ve gotta move on, but I don’t want to move on.’ And I was really stuck. And drinking was a part of that. And it’s true that I don’t drink anymore. But it wasn’t that I was stuck because I drank. I mean, it was more that—and it wasn’t, it wasn’t like social drinking going out of control. It was like, I really sort of felt like my life was over at twenty-seven or twenty-eight. And I didn’t wanna, and that really felt bad, and I didn’t wanna feel it.”
The book is filled with such moments. Lipsky seems at ease with Foster Wallace, despite being awed by his fame and talent. More importantly, Foster Wallace seems relatively at ease with Lipsky. The two men eat at Denny’s and at Denny’s-like establishments, they share pizza, and they drive through the raw and icy Midwest, all the while trying to make sense of art, politics, writing, and what it means to be alive.” -The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog
“The only thing that strikes me as more daunting than being inside the thought process of David Foster Wallace might be the experience of being inside the head of the person writing his biography.
If experimental and avant-garde writing …
About the Author
DAVID LIPSKY is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, the New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He contributes as an essayist to NPR’s All Things Considered and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He’s the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.
