David Foster Wallace

I haven't written about the recent hanging suicide of David Foster Wallace because others have written about it better and with more passion¹. I felt connected to Wallace as a person for a couple of reasons. The first, is that I lived in Champaign, Illinois for over six years and recognized his common Central Illinois reference points; from playing on some of the same tennis courts in Champaign-Urbana, to an intellectual attitude and openness that is common to many of the people I still know and love in the area. The second reason I felt connected to him is that when my brother Jake was taking classes at Parkland Community College, his English professor was Wallace's mother. When I saw Jake this past weekend, he was shocked as I was about David Foster Wallace's suicide.

Besides loving Infinite Jest as one of my favorite books, (My first attempt at reading the novel failed, with everything I had going on in my life right after my divorce). My second attempt was in 2002 after a term off in library school , I started reading Infinite Jest and was able to immerse myself during a slow summer in Champaign. I read for days at a time, not moving too fast as the heavy damp heat settled in the apartment despite the AC. I need to go back and purchase the rest of his books that I don't own but now will with a sad heart.

¹ Mimi Smartypant's reactions and links followed by Sam Anderson's piece and these articles from the Arts and Letters Daily from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I'll miss his footnotes and explanatory thoroughness they provided in enriching the main text. He showed these techniques worked for both his fiction and non-fiction.