Urgent: Rip Dfw

David Foster Wallace, the author of my favorite book of all time Infinite Jest committed suicide Friday night, hanging himself at his home in Claremont, California.

David Foster Wallace wasn’t a childhood hero of mine.

Photo by Steve Rhodes via Flickr David Foster Wallace, formidable literary talent and sharp-eyed cultural critic, was found dead in his Claremont home at 9:30pm on Friday night.

I read Infinite Jest in four days, a feat I’m still no sure how I accomplished.

I’ve actually never heard of the guy, so when I saw “RIP, DFW” pop up in the feed, I thought the shoe chain had gone out of business.

He would have loved it … RIP DFW.

David Foster Wallace was my favorite living author, and Infinite Jest my favorite contemporary novel.

I have to admit I could never read more than 20 pages of Infinite Jest without falling asleep.

First reported by an anonymous tip to a blog, the Los Angeles Times has confirmed that David Foster Wallace has hung himself.

The thing seems to me a performative index of every weakness I have as a writer and as a person.

I mention the thing about the McCain book because I have a copy of it, bought by my dad who didn’t know who DFW was and just wanted to read a book about McCain.

I always liked his fiction but was even more enamored of his non-fiction, especially his famous essays for Harper’s recounting his adventures on a cruise ship and at the Illinois State Fair-essays that, like so much of his writing, managed to be both wickedly funny and achingly humane.

Like many aspiring professional typists, I was curious about David Foster Wallace and admired him for his prodigious writing talent, even though I found a huge portion of his writing indecipherable.

No American writer that I can think of, certainly no American of DFW’s generation that I can think of, could swing so acrobatically among registers of diction, feeling, tone, or, even, consciousness.

I have a lot of personal stories about what his writing personally means to me, about the times I have met him and interacted with him, why I named my son after him, what I owe him writingwise, etc., but I don’t even have the wherewithal to summon them right now.

My experiments with footnotes and endnotes have been modest , but he made me feel ambitious.

There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches.

It’s heartbreaking, but it also has the funniest sustained bit of writing that I’ve ever read , a piece that made me laugh for roughly 15 minutes of reading.

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head.

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” and his account of a trip to the Illinois State Fair are not only some of the funniest pieces ever written, but the most perceptive.

David Foster Wallace was found dead tonight.

And a video of DFW reading some bits from the aforementioned essays on the cruise ship and the state fair.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again was brilliant though.

I think what’s choking me up about this more than the death of any other beloved writer is both the suddenness, and that it was self-inflicted.

And while devastating is not the proper word for how his apparent suicide has left me, distraught, confused, depressed, and angry all are.

I loved and got so much out of his writing, especially all of his brilliant essays his 2000 piece on John McCain, which was recently published as a book with the great title McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope, was one of the great pieces of political writing of the last ten or twenty years.

Consider the Lobster, released in 2005, didn’t have an essay written after 2001; his last book, McCain’s Promise, was an expanded version of his McCain essay from 2000.

All my childhood heroes could die without devastating me.

Surprisingly non of the obituaries I’ve read so far even mention the literary icon’s facility with math.

Hunter S. Thompson, Vonnegut, even if Harlan Ellison were to die now, I’d be okay with it.