David Foster Wallace, Three Years On

Three years ago today, David Foster Wallace’s body was found in his home in Claremont, California. He finally hanged himself after over twenty years of holding back from that edge.

Recently, some other guy killed himself. I say this because he was evidently famous on Twitter as a “social media expert”, but I can’t say I’d ever heard of him before then, and I can’t for life of me remember his name now without googling phrases like “social media”, “standoff with police”, and “church parking lot”. What’s notable about him, to me, is the way that my own Twitter feed lit up with retweeted expressions of shock and condolence, and vague pleas for nameless people to “reach out” and assurances that “someone cares for you”.

To which I say, “bullshit”. The moment you use a qualifier like “someone” when speaking to a stranger, you’re full of it. These glurgey platitudes are more the product of shock than any actual concern. They take no effort to mouth, and they require no further action on the part of the speaker. They are calculated, if subconsciously, to make the speaker look like a Good and Caring person, without committing them to any actual caring for any particular person. They only come out when people are reminded that for some it’s already too late, and as they relate to those unhappy people they work to shift the blame comfortably onto the deceased — “oh, if only he’d reached out; surely some unspecified someone (not me) would have cared and that would make all the difference.”

These clichés fit into a larger category of ways people trivialize depression and depressed people. There’s a whole range of greatest hits like “it’s all in your head” and “I was really sad once, too, after [unfortunate event]” and “these things won’t seem as important eventually”, as if it has anything to do with events, or as if everyone’s hindsight worked the same. Some of the worst come from other depressed people, like the whole medication-makes-it-better family. Pharmaceuticals can, indeed, have some beneficial effects, but even for those for whom they work they are definitely not an unalloyed good.

David Foster Wallace reached out. For over twenty years he was up-front about his depression. He tried everything from traditional counseling to medication to electroconvulsive therapy — funny how you never see any glurgey blog posts saying “maybe you just need to electrocute your brain” — and none of it worked forever. But more than just reaching out, he spoke out as a writer, and as a far more honest one than most. He described his own depression from the inside — the experience of the disease and the experience of dealing with people on the outside — and he did it with no ulterior motives beyond giving it a voice.

His first published piece was The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands In Relation to the Bad Thing. Harpers magazine published “The Depressed Person”, which appears in a fuller form in his anthology Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, along with “Suicide as a Sort of Present”. He won the O. Henry prize for “Good Old Neon”, which can be found in his anthology Oblivion: Stories.

If you really want to understand what it’s like on the inside without all the feel-good lies getting in the way, read Wallace. If you really care about someone, reach out yourself instead of shifting responsibility and absolving yourself by saying what they should have done. And for God’s sake be sincere about it; they will smell it all over you if you’re more concerned with your appearance or your convenience than their troubles, and they’ll push you away — hard — because they know what you’re really there for. And if you must share your own experience of what you think they feel like, do not, under any circumstances, talk about how you’re past it; all you’re doing is telling them how awful they are for not getting better.

David Foster Wallace reached out, and he had people around him who did a lot more than tell him some abstract someone cares. He tried and tried, but in the end nothing was enough. I dearly wish he’d found some other way — something at all that worked for him — but I won’t insult him with mealy-mouthed “if only”s. He knows — knew — what it was like in his head better than I or anyone else ever will. I mourn his decision and the loss of everything that left with him, but I respect it at the same time.

Wherever he is, if anywhere, I wish him way more than luck this time.