suicide

The real story in David Lipsky's "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace)" turns out to be the budding/ultimately unrequited love story between the two writers. Throughout the text, which is almost entirely an edited version of Lipsky's interviews with DFW in the course of a days-long roadtrip through the midwest, the author is careful to note the evidence of their growing friendship. DFW's compliments; the many hours they spend smoking, eating, smoking, talking, musing together and smoking some more. "I can't win an argument with you," Lipsky reports DFW telling him. DFW frets that every person who sees them traveling together will assume they're gay. DFW says he's particularly eager to follow Lipsky's career now that he knows the extent of everything his interlocutor knows about literature and life.

It's not like Lipsky doesn't know what's going on. DFW is flirting with him, subject-to-journalist. DFW is extremely flattered by the attention -- despite all of his better intentions -- and is extremely, almost dysfunctionally, eager to see himself look cool in the pages of Rolling Stone. Lipsky offers these observations in brackets, along with his own self-lacerating notes about his own behavior and motivations. He's got a tremendous writer crush on this guy, who is almost exactly his age, has almost all of the same experiences but is just. . . better, in nearly every way.

I ploughed through the book over the weekend, reveling in the scattering of DFW gems among the pages. For instance, here, on p. 198, is DFW on lovelorn country music: 

 "What if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor? And what they're really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? 'Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning.' That in a weird way, I mean they're incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. . .(but) they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something."

That's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about DFW, isn't it? And God love Lipsky for dusting it off and putting it out there where we can find it and realize again how close cultural revelation is, if you know where to look. I look at crappy country music and see a bunch of suburban cowboys in acid washed jeans. DWF looks and sees. . . magic.