David Foster Wallace

I don't really know where to begin, but I guess I should say that David Foster Wallace was a writer that I greatly admired and looked forward to at all times. Hearing about his suicide was a shock. It is not as if I knew him or met him or even saw him ever in person, but there was definitely a personal connection that I had with him because of his writing. I cannot think of another contemporary writer who is as personal as he was. His fiction and non-fiction have such a unique authorial voice that I feel as if I knew him personally. That is definitely a trap that readers shouldn't fall into -- but I would say that I read a lot and I don't fall into that trap with every author I come across.

Maybe it is the fact that he was a wunderkind author with talent to burn, maybe it was his wide-ranging interests from advanced math to politics to life-after-death, maybe it is just knowing how incredible his grasp of the English language is, maybe it was the fact that he grew up playing tennis like I did. I do know that there were times that I was reading him when my heart started to beat a little faster, my breaths took in more air, my eyes got a little misty -- and I could imagine an author on the other side of this story that was typing away about as fast as my eyes were reading the words. The reading verged on the physical. Reading him was a different process for me. I was truly invested in what he had to say. And it saddens me to have to think that someone who gave me such great joy would have been in a place that was so devoid of it.