Julian Gough

I've spent the last few days writing a piece on David Foster Wallace for Prospect magazine. It should be out next week, in their October issue. I'm happy with the piece. "Happy" has a fairly specialised meaning in this case, one writers will understand: I was depressed and anxious writing it, as I tried to understand, empathise with, and explain, a depressed and anxious writer who'd just killed himself. But I was also exhilarated and, yeah, happy, because the piece turned out the way I'd hoped it would: it expressed crisply and well some things I'd been vaguely thinking, loosely feeling. So I felt much better after it. Well, writing is weird. It fixes broken things. And the process is not sentimental.

The credit for that last photo of David Foster Wallace, by the way (and the two I'm using to illustrate this post): It was taken by Steve Rhodes, at a reading organised by the San Franciso independent bookshop, Booksmith, held at All Saints Church in 2006.

Out of interest, I googled, and found a couple of accounts of that reading on literary blogs. One of them is by a blogger trying to interview David Foster Wallace after the reading, even though Wallace has clearly and repeatedly said to the guy, before and after the reading, through his agent, his publicist, and face to face, that he is uncomfortable with that and would prefer not to. The guy keeps asking... it's just excruciating.

The other is by a blogger who fancies David Foster Wallace something rotten, though she has never met him. She dresses up for the reading (slit skirt, best bra, because "you never know"). And then she slags him off in her blog after the reading, ostensibly because she asked him a question and found his answer tedious. (Though she's really slagging him, you get the feeling, because he didn't look up from the lectern half way through the reading, recognise how special she was, throw his book aside, rush up to her, kneel, and propose).

Both bloggers can see the world very intensely from their own point of view, but they can't see how they must be coming across to Wallace at all. They don't seem aware that, though this moment is new and unique and important to them, for him it is yet another in a long series of almost identically unpleasant encounters with needy strangers. It's totally understandable (God, I have done worse), but the lack of empathy, on both sides, is also totally heartbreaking. They know his soul, because they've read his book (which is just his soul in code), and so they feel he is their soulmate. But he doesn't know their soul, because he hasn't read their book, and so he feels assaulted.

And both these people are obviously very nice, otherwise sensitive people, trying to make a real connection to someone they admire enormously, and the harder they try the more they fail, and now he’s dead and they never connected and it’s all intensely sad.