a road trip with david foster wallace

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Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Paperback – Deckle Edge, April 13, 2010

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date April 13, 2010
• Dimensions 6.17 x 0.92 x 9.26 inches
• ISBN-10 030759243X
• ISBN-13 978-0307592439
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Lipsky’s transcript of their brilliant conversations reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play or a four-handed duet scored for typewriter.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine    “For readers unfamiliar with the sometimes intimidating Wallace oeuvre, Lipsky has provided a conversational entry point into the writer’s thought process. It’s odd to think that a book about Wallace could serve both the newbies and the hard-cores, but here it is…You get the feeling that Wallace himself might have given Lipsky an award for being a conversationalist…we have the pleasure of reading two sharp writers who can spar good-naturedly with one another… What we have here is Wallace’s voice.” —Seth Colter Wallis, Newsweek   “Insightful… Lipsky seems at ease with Foster Wallace, despite being awed by his fame and talent. More importantly, Foster Wallace seems relatively at ease with Lipsky. The two men drive through the raw and icy Midwest, all the while trying to make sense of art, politics, writing, and what it means to be alive.” —Lee Ellis, The New Yorker Book Bench   “The reader goes inside the cars, airports, and big-portioned Midwestern restaurants with the two men and, ultimately, inside Wallace’s head.” — Stephen Kurtz, The Wall Street Journal   “Crushingly poignant… It’s impossible for anyone who ever fell in love with Wallace’s prose not to read Lipsky’s account looking for clues… The rapport that he and Wallace built during the course of the road trip is both endearing and fascinating. At the end, it feels like you’ve listened to two good friends talk about life, about literature, about all of their mutual loves…his fans and his readers at least have this: a startlingly sad yet deeply funny postscript to the career of one of the most interesting American writers of all time.”  —Michael Schaub, National Public Radio   “Required reading… Lipsky not only got the local color of a book tour. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, let loose with his life story in the week-long conversation.” —Billy Heller, New York Post   “Compelling…The conversations are far-reaching, insightful, silly, very funny, profound, surprising, and awfully human…a profoundly curious and alive personality…Ultimately, the only person who can talk about David Foster Wallace is, apparently, David Foster Wallace.”   —Menachem Kaiser, The Atlantic   “One thing that the book makes clear is that Wallace’s vigor and awe-inspiring writing was, in some ways, part of a deeply intricate personal effort to beat death…The book has some elements of good fiction: blind spots, character development, and a powerful narrative arc. By the end, no amount of sadness can stand in the way of this author’s personality, humor, and awe-inspiring linguistic command. His commentary reveals how much he lived the themes of his writing; all of his ideas about addiction, entertainment, and loneliness were bouncing around in his head relentlessly. Most of all, this book captures  Wallace’s mental energy, what his ex-girlfriend Mary Karr calls ‘wattage,’ which remains undimmed.” —Michael Miller, Time Out  “Exhilarating…All that’s left now are the words on the page—and on the pages of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , too, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night.” —Laura Miller, Salon “Lipsky is not telling us about Wallace’s life: He is showing Wallace living his life…One thing is certain: If you didn’t already love Wallace, this book will make you love him…Wallace’s humor, his pathos, his brilliant delivery—his tendency to explore the experience of living even as he’s living it—make this book sing. If art is a way of caring for others, Wallace cares for us through the novels, short stories, and essays he left behind. And Lipsky, in the wake of Wallace’s death, gives us a narrative that does the same.” —Alicia Rouverol, The Christian Science Monitor   “It’s a road picture, a love story, a contest: two talented, brilliant young men with literary ambitions, and their struggle to understand one another …You wish yourself into the back seat as you read, come up with your own contributions and quarrels…the wry commentary of the now-mature and very gifted Lipsky, is original, and intoxicatingly intimate.” —Maria Bustillos, The Awl   “A gift… The reader, hanging out with Wallace vicariously, gets the sense of jogging along with a world-class sprinter…Wallace’s writing illuminates the painful truth that life can be unbearable. But we owe it to him not to let those passages eclipse the vitality that made his prose, and his readers, come alive.” —Michael O’Donnell, Washington Monthly   “A remarkable book…A heartbreaking and surprisingly intimate visit with a giant talent…Lipsky is a skilled interviewer and a terrific writer and so what we end up with is far, far beyond what might be expected. One of the great literary minds of his generation speaking frankly and at length with an award winning journalist who, himself, has a great deal to say... I doubt, however, we’ll see another portrait that cuts quite this close to the bone…You hear Foster Wallace’s amazing voice on every page. And your heart breaks all over again.” —Linda Richards, January Magazine   “Wallace was the next great voice of a young generation. But he wasn’t a dweeb-child shut-in hiding with books. He was a big handsome dude who played football and tennis, chewed tobacco, cussed, watching action movies and ticking off references to Hobbes and Dostoyevsky while mixing in Stephen King and Alanis Morisette… A trip into the mind of a writer who owned a dazzling style and a prescient view of modern culture.” —Mike Kilen, The Des Moines Register   “A hauntingly beautiful portrait of Wallace as a young artist, a raw and honest account of a writer struggling with what it means to have all of his dearest dreams come true…As readers, we’re given unfettered access to Wallace’s incredible wit… Although haunted by it, this is not a book about his death; it’s a book about his life. Lipsky has given us a true gem: Wallace in his own words, in a voice that remains vibrant, hopeful, and frank even after its speaker has been silenced. We all may know how it ends, but Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself takes us back to where it all began.” —Stephanie Hlywak, Flavorwire   “By mostly ignoring Wallace’s death, Lipsky offers an affecting and meaningful picture of his life: a showcase for the writer in rough cut, for his voice, his interests and his foibles. The book stands as a valuable companion to Wallace’s own work, but it’s also an enjoyable read on its own, something to tide Wallace fans over until his last, unfinished, novel is released next year.” — National Post   “A portrait of the artist as newly famous. It’s part biography, part road trip; we hear him at his most conceptual, expounding on his theories on writing, but also get a glimpse of him as a self-described ‘normal guy,’… He answers Lipsky’s questions in an infectious mixture of academically precise terms and peppery slang. The gravitational pull of Wallace’s charm is on full display, as is his hyper-intelligence, electric sense of humor, and staggering self-awareness…almost unbearably heart-wrenching… Although of Course offers a glimpse of Wallace in his prime for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to know him outside of his books.” —Margaret Eby, The Brooklyn Rail    “David Foster Wallace was, to many, the writer of his generation… An in-depth rendering of a writer whose effect on his generation was matched by few others…It is candid, intimate, personal, exploding with culture—pop and otherwise.” —Jeff Simon, Buffalo News   “[Wallace] is lucid, entertaining, self-critical, constantly self-reflective—and to read this book is to meet this personality… these talks changed [Lipsky’s] life, gave him phrases that have stayed with him forever. This poignant book will do the same thing for many readers.” —Edmundo Paz Soldàn, El Mostrador (Chile)   “If you’re a writer, or even if you just believe that art can nourish us somehow, you will read this book and feel changed. The odd thing is, you feel hopeful, too.” — Bookslut   “Full of everyman details about a writer who often seemed larger than life… Throughout the book, astonishingly profound things are said in airport parking lots and rental-car cockpits… As Lipsky writes, the author’s singular achievement, especially in his non-fiction, was capturing ‘everybody’s brain voice’; Wallace’s writing sounds the way we think, or at least the way we like to think we think…We may never have a better record of what it sounded like to hear Wallace talk... Rolling Stone sent the right guy.” —Zach Baron, Bookforum   “Lipsky’s recordings of five days’ worth of the writer’s brainy and passionate riffing on the nature of mind, the purpose of literature, and the pitfalls of both academia and entertainment are incredibly poignant. Lipsky vividly and incisively sets the before-and-after scenes for this revelatory oral history, in which Wallace is at once candid and cautious, funny and flinty, spellbinding and erudite as he articulates remarkably complex insights into depression, fiction that captures the ‘cognitive texture’ of our time, and fame’s double edge. Wild about movies, prescient about the impact of the Internet, and happiest writing, Wallace is radiantly present in this intimate portrait, a generous and refined work that will sustain Wallace’s masterful and innovative books long into the future.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist   “Among the repetitions, ellipses, and fumbling that make Wallace’s patter so compellingly real are observations as elegant and insightful as his essays. Prescient, funny, earnest, and honest, this lost conversation is far from an opportunistic piece of literary ephemera, but a candid and fascinating glimpse into a uniquely brilliant and very troubled writer.”  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)   “A glimpse into the mind of one of the great literary masters of the end of the 20th century…What shines through even more is his deep passion for writing and ideas and his kind, gentle nature…Many fans of Wallace’s writing come to think of him as a friend—by the time they have finished Lipsky’s moving book, they will undoubtedly feel that even more strongly.” — Library Journal

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (April 13, 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 030759243X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307592439
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.17 x 0.92 x 9.26 inches
• #358 in Journalist Biographies
• #1,068 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
• #1,186 in Author Biographies

About the author

David lipsky.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

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By Ken Kalfus

• May 28, 2010

A few weeks after “Infinite Jest” was published in February 1996, Rolling Stone magazine sent a reporter to accompany its author, David Foster Wallace, on the final leg of his triumphant book tour. For a dense, challenging, wildly satiric, at times profoundly sad and gruesome 1,079-page novel, which concluded with nearly a hundred pages of “notes and errata,” “Infinite Jest” had garnered enormous attention. Esquire called it a work of genius. Time and Newsweek ran photos of the author.

Wallace was gradually absorbing the extent of his literary success. The fellow from Rolling Stone, David Lipsky, asked him: “Do you know how many times Rolling Stone has done a young writer, a profile, in the last 10 years?”

Lipsky confirmed: “I checked, zero.”

But after Lipsky spent five days with Wallace, staying as a guest in his house, driving and flying with him across the Midwest and interrogating him on increasingly personal subjects, the count remained at zero. Rolling Stone killed the assignment, apparently concluding that its readers would not be interested in the author of a dense, challenging, wildly satiric, at times profoundly sad and gruesome 1,079-page novel after all.

Wallace took his own life in 2008, at the age of 46, devastating his loved ones and confounding a generation of readers and writers. The reputation of “Infinite Jest” still grows. Set in a near-future America fixated by its tools for chemical and electronic self-gratification, the novel seems more prescient with the rollout of every new compulsively entertaining digital device. The rising interest in Wallace’s life and work has persuaded Lipsky to excavate his notes for the article that never ran.

“Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” is a transcription of the reporter’s recorded interviews with Wallace, including a notation of every break during which he changes the tape. (He eventually runs out of cassettes, and they have to appropriate an aerobics mix tape belonging to Wallace’s ex-girlfriend.) The book has not been formatted for the reader’s convenience, any more than “Infinite Jest” was with its cursed endnotes. Wallace’s remarks appear in roman type, alternating with Lipsky’s in italics. Brief, often cryptic notes by the reporter are enclosed in brackets. For the purposes of this review, I’ve put the dialogue into conventional quotation typography.

Some of Lipsky’s material is trivial and incoherent, yet the two writers speak profitably enough to give us a vivid snapshot of Wallace at the golden moment when he realizes that his words have struck a public nerve. I met Wallace just once, but the genuine, funny and compassionate figure who emerges here comports with the guy I encountered. Lipsky is kind of interesting too.

Lipsky attends Wallace’s class at the Illinois State University campus in the town of Normal, and after a storm closes the local airport, they dash up to Chicago to catch a flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, for the final stop on his tour, at the Hungry Mind bookstore. Along the way they speak of “Infinite Jest” and how the 1,700-page manuscript was edited, as well as of Wallace’s friends and family, other writers, television and movies. The discussion occasionally becomes involved and passionate enough that the two writers finish each other’s thoughts. This isn’t always so great for the reader. Sometimes it feels as if we’re literally in the back seat of the car, auditing a fascinating conversation but unable to distinguish — over the noise of the traffic, the defogger, the wipers and R.E.M. on the radio — exactly what’s being said.

Talking about his novel, Wallace accepts the criticism that it’s difficult, but he considers difficulty valuable, an integral component of contemporary fiction. “If the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is,” he says. Wallace contrasts literature with the electronic media, especially television, an amusement that is his own personal weakness, an actual addiction. “One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy.” He takes this idea to the outer limits in “Infinite Jest,” a novel in which terrorists seek to acquire a peculiar weapon of mass destruction: an underground film with the capacity to mesmerize and kill its viewers.

Wallace’s two-sided attitude toward mass culture makes him determined, as Lipsky puts it, “not to enjoy the process of being celebritified.” He’s concerned about the effects of fame on his work. “To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how very many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now. But what if, you know, what if I become this grotesque parody of just what the book is about? And of course, this stuff drives me nuts.”

Lipsky’s aware that he’s an avatar of the star-making pop culture about which Wallace is so ambivalent. He’s ambivalent too, sincere in his regard for Wallace, yet also a compliant chip in the mass media’s vacuous, reductionist, gossip-mongering, nonliterary, anti-literary machine. A novelist himself, he loves literature yet appears to believe that a writer’s dominant response to a great book can be only envy. Self-conscious about his contradictions, suspicious of his subject while wanting his approval, Lipsky is a character nearly worthy of Wallace’s fiction. While the author is in the shower, Lipsky surreptitiously phones Rolling Stone from the guest room. His notes, unfortunately, are too sketchy to provide real drama, but the conversation centers on how to chase down rumors that Wallace once had an alcohol or drug problem. Lipsky and his colleagues discuss how to pump Wallace’s former editor, Gerry Howard, who “would be more than forthcoming with a little bit of massaging to give you whatever you needed. Bury it in other questions. . . . For example, ‘How was editing him; what do you think of his success; hey, what about the dope?’ ”

Lipsky returns to drugs time and again, perhaps unavoidably since so much of “Infinite Jest” is about addiction. Wallace denies ever having been a heroin addict, but he does cop to a frightening amount of occasional drug use: acid, cocaine and black tar heroin, plus heavy drinking and marijuana consumption. He emphatically disconnects his drug use from any sort of glamour or creative imperative. “I wasn’t an interesting or Falstaffian or larger-than-life type of addictive figure,” he says.

Some of the most accomplished, emotional and hair-raising passages in “Infinite Jest,” and in American fiction of the past 20 years, are set in a Boston-area halfway house for recovering addicts. Wallace insists that his close familiarity with halfway houses, as well as with 12-step programs, is the product of journalistic research. In the course of writing “Infinite Jest,” he dropped in on several local facilities, finding himself warmly welcomed by their residents: “Nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs.” He tells Lipsky, “I did what you’re doing now,” and then, annoyed with the line of questioning, adds, “except over a much longer period of time and much more subtly.”

In a New Yorker article about Wallace after his death , D. T. Max asserted that Wallace did suffer an addiction and did spend time in a halfway house, though Max doesn’t specify Wallace’s dependency. What is certain is that, living in the closing years of the American century, struggling with his own impulses and appetites, Wallace developed a vision of a society whose pursuit of pleasure was shutting itself off from true feeling and experience. In “Infinite Jest,” he tells Lipsky, “drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.”

A striking feature of Lipsky’s book is the delicate dance between the earnest celebrity reporter and the savvy celebrity-­shy subject, each aware that their encounter serves an exterior purpose, yet each also sensitive to the possibility of a real human connection, even friendship. “It’s kind of intense, ” Wallace observes. But on the last leg of the journey, after the two seem to have become close, Lipsky ventures that there’s something false in Wallace’s persona. The reporter suggests that Wallace believes he’s really smarter than other people, and that his amiability is a species of condescension. Disappointed, Wallace shoots back: “You’re a tough room.” Lipsky is hurt in turn after they reach the house, when Wallace tells someone calling on the phone that he’s still with “this guy.” Lipsky wishes that he would have referred to him at least as the “Rolling Stone reporter.” Then, four pages later, Wallace says, shyly, “It’ll be very interesting before you leave, I really would like, if we could trade address data.” Yet the writers never meet again, nor even correspond to commiserate about the killed article.

The life of David Foster Wallace and the writing that came out of it deserve vigorous scholarship, to which Lipsky’s book makes a useful contribution. Readers will soon have further opportunities to get inside Wallace’s creative mind. Max is preparing a comprehensive biography of the writer. Wallace’s unfinished last novel, “The Pale King,” is to be published in April of next year. Meanwhile, those who were put off by the heft, complexities and gruesomeness of “Infinite Jest,” not to mention the endnotes, should at least give it another shot.

ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF

A road trip with david foster wallace.

By David Lipsky

320 pp. Broadway Books. Paper, $16.99

Ken Kalfus’s most recent novel is “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country.”

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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

David lipsky.

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If writing had a logo, it’d be the anchor, the quicksand easy chair, but from the minute I shook David’s hand we didn’t stop. We hit his class, then rolled into the car keys, sodas, strangers, and hotel rooms of a road-trip movie. Airports and taxis and the eerie sensation of knowing your feet have stood in different cities in the morning and afternoon.

This introduction is the Commentary track—which nobody goes in for until they’ve loved the DVD—so I’d recommend a quick select back to Main Menu and Play Movie. The road trip was the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour, when, as a reporter, I asked and he told me the story of his life. David had a caffeine social gift: He was charmingly, vividly, overwhelmingly awake—he acted on other people like a slug of coffee—so they’re the five most sleepless days I ever spent with anyone. (The last day, we crossed three states by air, shot down another 140 miles of highway, and I thought it was still midnight. “That’s what your watch says?” David snorted. “It’s two twenty, dickbrain.”) Then it was over, and we were standing still again, and it was hard and sad to leave. And you’ll see me trying to cook up reporting jobs in order to hang around.

It has the feel of a highway conversation. Late at night, the only car in the world, on icy morning roads, yelling at the other drivers. It has the rhythms of the road: grouchiness, indefensible meals, and the sudden, front-seat connections—reciting high points from mo ies, the right song and a good view sending the radio into soundtrack, a statement that gives you the bright, runway lift of knowing that another person has experienced life the way you do—that are the stuff you go on trips for.

When you skip ahead, you should know it’s early afternoon, March 5, 1996. The air has the gray, erased-blackboard quality of weather tightening itself for a storm. David has just stepped out of his little brick one-story house. He has his hands in his jean pockets, his two black dogs are running thrilled tours of greet and patrol. He’s wearing round glasses. The look beneath them says two more or less clear words: now this. I’ve got some treasured beliefs about my own emotional tone. I’d like to think it’s grittily complex, penetrating, understanding, and deeply individual. It’s pretty obviously: please be impressed by me. At our first big conversation—our first stunning meal: Chicago-style pizza, the cheese mound and topping landslide—he’ll tell me he wants to do a profile of the reporters who’ve come stamping through, doing profiles about him. “It’d be a way for me to get some of the control back,” he’ll say. “Because if you wanted—I mean, you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing.” It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices. The comedy of a brain so big, careful, and kind it keeps tripping over its own lumps. That’s what this book would like to be. It’s the one way of writing about him I don’t think David would have hated.

So it’s two in the afternoon. I’ve just dropped my bag on his living room carpet, which is a mess, but the mess feels hospital cornered, curated. (Whatever reassurance and encouragement the decorations give him is going to be tagged and sifted, for what it might explain publicly.) We’ve addressed the two women’s magazines on his counter. (David is a Cosmopolitan subscriber; he says reading “I’ve Cheated—Should I Tell?” a bunch of times a year is “fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.”) I’ve also been surprised to find the towel of Barney, the purple dinosaur and befriender of children, subbing as a curtain in his bedroom, and the big poster of complaint singer Alanis Morissette on his wall. I’ve just unpeeled and loaded a Maxell cassette into my recorder. Always a pleasant, blameless moment to the journalist; a round in the chamber, boots polished, reporting for duty. I got up at five this morning, hailed a cab at the New York hour when the city is still drifting through sleep, the streets rolling over and steam drizzling upward out of the manholes. Then I flew two hours to Chicago, signed and initialed for the rental car, drove another two here: If you were putting us in a comic book panel, you’d draw motion lines coming off my body. And there’d be black scrunches over David’s head. He’s been touring for two weeks, reading, signing, promoting. He’s walking toward me over the clumps and vines of unsorted travel memories, signaling from behind the hurricane fence of someone who’s become bewilderingly famous.

I’m thirty years old, he’s thirty-four. We both have long hair. I’ve just placed the tape recorder on top of his magazines. He’s made a request. What with all the travel, he’d like the right to retract anything that might come off awkward or nasty. (He’s about to say a hundred unbelievably honest, personal things. The one place he’ll get cold feet is where he feels he’s been a little uncharitable to poetry. The form will touch readers again once it focuses on nine-to-five and couples who spend a marriage in the same bed. The verb he used was meatier.) Otherwise, this book runs from the minute I turn on the recorder, through five days of diners, arguments, on-ramps, friends, a reading, a faraway mall, his dogs, up to the last word David said to me. It’s a word that meant a great, complicated amount to him. After he died, I read through this week again. I was surprised and moved—it seemed very much like him—to see that he used it in the context of a dance.

[Doesn’t want a tape. Is comfortable with note-taking.]

Fluorescents, desks, steel wastepaper cans, boot smell, sweater smell, clock on wall, big table that David doesn’t sit much behind. Fifteen students. Women sit, as at an old-line synagogue, slightly apart from men. David wearing Fryes, blue bandanna. Carrying Diet Pepsi.

Dave has noticed some surprising student errors this week.

Dave : Before we start, let’s do a moment of Grammar Rock.

They laugh. He’s the ideal, the professor you hope for: lightning writer, modern references, charming and funny and firm.

The students know another thing: he’s become, their bandanna-wearing teacher, during these past three weeks a suddenly celebrated man. And they want somehow to acknowledge it.

Student 1 : Done being famous yet?

Dave : (Blush smile) Two more minutes.

Kid from back, suddenly : I knew him well, Horatio—a man of Infinite Jest . . .

Dave : OK, you’re allowed one reference.

Quick chatter about his media appearances. It’s exciting; a piece of their private life—this room and class—has gone suddenly public.

Student 2, female : I love the way the Trib described your office.

Student 3, female : Did you wind up, like, next to Dick Vitale and Hillary Clinton?

Dave says he got real nervous on the flights, kept picturing grave etc., from tour.

Student 4 : Just put pepperoni and mushrooms on my Tombstone. (A take-out, grocery pizza sort of joke.)

Dave : The words “pop quiz” is what’s good about that.

They talk about his magazine photos. Dave blushes more.

Dave : I didn’t think, I didn’t think—you can see my smiling maw. I thought, “Really? Is that me?”

Dave fishes out a Styrofoam cup after pawing through two wastebaskets, for someplace to put his chewing tobacco. Is also drinking a Diet Pepsi.

Class begins with a jump from celebrity into the supernormal, the administrative.

Dave : Office hours next week. Bring light reading material, if you have to wait in the hallway.

Begins work on student stories.

Dave : (Offering Very Sensible advice. Lots of jobs for fiction, you have to keep track of twelve different things—characters, plot, sound, speed.) But the job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

He paces around the classroom. Happy, energetic. At one point, thinking, he even drops into a quick knee bend. Class laughs; they really like him.

Dave : I know—I get real excited, and now I’m squatting.

First story: by pretty student with a Rosanna Arquette mouth. Dave on story, always using TV: “I submit, it’s kinda like a Sam and Diane thing. Or When Harry Met Sally. ”

Classroom fluorescents flicker on and off, quiet flashes. Dave glances up.

Another story he likes: it’s very open, but needs to be controlled. “This is just a head kinda vomiting at us . . .”

Less likable story: “This is just a campus romance story. And to the average civilian, I’ve gotta tell you, this is not that interesting . . .”

Now at desk. Craning up and down when discussion and story get him excited.

The student being workshopped is a punkish guy: mohawk, silver-and-yellow collar.

Dave : It’s really hard to create a narrator who’s alive. Take it from me.

Students : How?

Dave’s advice is a kind of comedy, and makes them laugh.

Dave : To have the narrator be funny and smart, have him say funny, smart things some of the time.

He makes a flub, says quickly, “Brain fart.”
He stops for a second. Holds steady. “Excuse me, I’m about to burp.”

His delivery is darting and graceful: the Astaire quality of good teaching.

On the campus romance story. “The great dread of creative writing professors: ‘Their eyes met over the keg . . . ’”

The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment. One aid is, you’re supposed to get less self-interested as you age. But, “I think I am more self-absorbed at thirty-four than twenty-three. Because if it’s interesting to me, I automatically imagine it’s interesting to you. I could spend a half hour telling you about my trip to the store, but that might not be as interesting to you as it is to me.”

Reminds the class, as it breaks. Notebooks closing, bookbags rising from floor to desktop. Ruckle noises, kids standing. The week’s two lessons.

Dave : Never—don’t go there: “Their eyes met across the keg . . . ” And “What’s interesting to me may not be to you.”

Still in good, buzzed-up mood after. Brings me a water to drink.

Dave : Where would you be without me?

I hope it’s not that same tobacco-Styrofoam cup.

From  ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF . Used with permission from Broadway Books.  Copyright © 2010 by David Lipsky.

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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

David lipsky. broadway books, $16.99 (320pp) isbn 978-0-307-59243-9.

Reviewed on: 04/12/2010

Genre: Nonfiction

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‘Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace’ by David Lipsky

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Although of Course

You End Up Becoming

A Road Trip with

David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky

Broadway: 352 pp., $16.99 paper

David Foster Wallace dispenses exactly three pieces of writing advice in “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s transcript of the five days he spent with the author on his 1996 “Infinite Jest” book tour. The last of these is as follows: “The key to writing is learning to differentiate private interest from public entertainment.”

That’s good advice, and in this book, Lipsky has ignored it at his peril.

On the face of it, “Although of Course” has the makings of fine public entertainment: a media-shy, immensely talented novelist suddenly forced to confront his fears when his Bible-sized masterpiece catapults him to the heights of success; the glossy magazine reporter to whom he’s speaking out of obligation to his publisher; the time they spend together, driving, eating at roadside diners, building trust and having expansive conversations. The problem is that in presenting all this as little more than a lightly edited transcript of his and Wallace’s tape-recorded conversations, Lipsky essentially cedes his right to make it into a coherent narrative. The result is a book frequently compelling for its bracing candor and idiosyncratic quirks that fails to live up to its promise.

To be sure, Wallace fans will devour the quips and behind-the-scenes stories found throughout the book. It’s a rare look at the reclusive author in all his mundanity: berating his dogs for defecating on the rug, telling waiters that he and Lipsky aren’t on a date (because he fears homophobic Midwesterners) and repeatedly spilling his can full of tobacco spittle. Wallace’s folksy-but-erudite run-on sentences will be familiar to anyone who’s read him, and they lend his presence a delightful immediacy and authenticity. He comes across as an Everyman genius, rhapsodizing McDonald’s fries while casually dropping epigrams (“The main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash.”) and lobbing uncensored insults at the likes of Michiko Kakutani and John Updike. It’s almost disturbing to hear someone with a mind of Wallace’s caliber repeatedly tell Lipsky, in all sincerity, that he really isn’t that smart, “but I work really hard.”

“Although of Course” offers much more than just the quotidian charm of a famous man’s private life. Lipsky had the good fortune to win Wallace’s trust when, suddenly famous, he was forced to confront deep misgivings about commercial success and the specter of depression and suicide that had long lingered over him. Lipsky proves an adept interlocutor, and at their best these conversations give Wallace the chance to think out loud and personalize his great themes: addiction and celebrity and the isolation both could bring.

There’s a beautiful 50-page stretch when, exhausted from days of travel, Lipsky and Wallace decompress with an all-nighter in the author’s apartment. Without warning, Wallace launches into the story of his career to that point, talking to the recorder like it’s a therapist. We hear it all, from publishing his 500-page first novel while still a student to watching his second book tank and ending up on suicide watch, after which he had to take humiliating jobs to make ends meet before finally getting just enough of a cash advance to finish “Infinite Jest.” The story reaches a climax when Wallace says: “I have this thing about takin’ money before it was done. I felt like it was sort of, it was jumping off the bridge. Because once I’d taken money for this thing, I knew I had to finish it.

“And, um, it was, I think after going into McLean’s in ‘89, it was the bravest thing I’d ever done. Because every cell in my body didn’t want me to do it. But I also was just -- I knew I was going to finish the thing. I mean, the thing was alive for me by then.”

It’s a scintillating moment, with Wallace revealing just how close “Infinite Jest” came to never having been written. But rarely does anything else in the book reach this level of narrative urgency. Rather, “Although of Course” is, essentially, a very, very long conversation, one that was never meant to be published in such a form. Lipsky tries to fix this with occasional post hoc interjections, but they’re insufficient and obtrusive.

Compared with his 2008 Rolling Stone piece on Wallace -- a perceptive deconstruction of the author’s suicide in which Lipsky synthesizes quotes from these tapes, original research and interviews with Wallace’s family and friends -- “Although of Course” feels half-baked. Though these interviews will be manna to fans and biographers (and the latter group, especially, can be glad that Lipsky held onto these tapes), there’s not enough here on which to hang a book.

Somewhere in these five days lies a tragic portrait of an author who reached the pinnacle of success, only to find that it was his undoing. “Although of Course” offers a glimpse, but the full story still remains to be told.

Esposito edits the Quarterly Conversation, a Web magazine of book reviews and essays.

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Road trip with David Foster Wallace

A young writer spent five intense days with the author of "infinite jest." here's what they talked about, by laura miller.

  "What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who's doing a profile of me," David Foster Wallace said to David Lipsky in March 1996, when Lipsky was interviewing Wallace for Rolling Stone. It was the tail end of the book tour for Wallace's magnum opus, "Infinite Jest," and Lipsky, a novelist himself, was more than a little dazzled by the acclaim reaped by the 1,079-page novel. "It would be a way," Wallace explained about his idea of profiling Lipsky, "for me to get some of the control back."

The profile never ran (Rolling Stone sent Lipsky off to write about heroin addicts in the Pacific Northwest instead), and the interview went unused until last year, when Lipsky had the mournful task of writing about the last weeks of Wallace's life; the author killed himself in September 2008. Still, that left five days' worth of 1996 material largely untapped at a time when hunger for Wallace's words and thoughts has never been keener. "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is a book-length transcript of those three days, an engaging and occasionally frustrating record of an extended conversation between two young men who had no idea that, 12 years later, the literary world they took for granted would melt away and one of them would be dead by his own hand.

The posthumous transformation of Wallace's reputation has been a disconcerting thing to behold. In 2008, he hadn't published a novel since "Infinite Jest," and his final short story collection, "Oblivion," was filled with riches, but bleak ones, and a strenuous harvest to boot. His nonfiction, always more popular and accessible than his fiction, was no longer sensationally fresh. The moment for fat, formally adventurous novels designed to capture the historical moment seemed past, if for no other reason than that the media institutions required to launch such books -- the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, etc. -- had lost much of their authority. The kind of fiction Wallace wrote had begun to drift toward the cultural margins, and in August 2008 anyone nominating him as the most significant American writer of his time was more likely to have encountered raised eyebrows and sneers about "pomo cleverness" than appreciative nods.

Wallace's death was tragic, but the actual tragedy has been further wrapped in a mantle of hysterical pop tragedy, that process by which virtually any self-destroying celebrity is transubstantiated into the avatar of each fan's personal misery. (Special bonus irony: Who would be perfect to write about this metamorphosis? David Foster Wallace!) He's also been reincarnated in the public's imagination as a dispenser of inspirational wisdom, largely thanks to the circulation of the commencement speech he made at Kenyon College in 2005 (published in gift book format as "This Is Water" ).

The latter role would probably have made Wallace himself cringe, but it's not a bad fit. He was always burrowing down to the moral roots of whatever he wrote about. The best passages in "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" show him doing just that with Lipsky, whether the subject is film (David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" was a turning point) or the likelihood that he'd behaved like a "prick" as experimentalist in the University of Arizona's realism-dominated creative writing program. To read what Wallace has to say about fiction's mission -- that its task is to surmount "loneliness," to illustrate the "toxicity" in the idea that "pleasure and comfort are ... really the ultimate goal and meaning of life" -- is as exhilarating as ever.

For the most part, Lipsky makes a worthy partner in these wide-ranging discussions, which took place in diners, pizza parlors, airport lounges and bookstores as well as during long drives across the icy Midwestern landscape around Bloomington, Ill., where Wallace lived at the time. They talk about books, movies, music and family.

And Wallace did get his wish in a way; the book winds up being an expression of Lipsky's preoccupations almost as much as Wallace's, an unwitting self-profile of the interlocutor at age 30. He was four years younger than Wallace, had published two novels to good reviews and had spent seven financially catastrophic years trying to live off of his fiction before turning to journalism. Lipsky is dogged in his efforts to get Wallace to talk about how great it feels to be so widely celebrated and well-reviewed, to make the bestseller list and read to packed houses on a multi-city book tour. Isn't he "thrilled"? Isn't it "exciting"? Wasn't it "fun"? And Wallace keeps telling him, over and over, that it's "nice" but he's trying not to think about it too much because "I gotta be very careful about how much of this stuff I take inside."

We now know Wallace wasn't entirely honest with Lipsky. After suffering a suicidal breakdown in 1989, he began taking the antidepressant Nardil. (He led Lipsky to believe that he rejected such drugs and he also claimed not to be "biochemically depressed.") In 2007, during a period of what Wallace's friend Jonathan Franzen called "optimism, happiness and strength," he decided to go off the drug. Unfortunately, Wallace's depression returned in a form that resisted all treatment, including Nardil.

Wallace believed that his earlier despair was in part a hangover from the success of his first novel, "The Broom of the System," and the relative failure of the short story collection that followed it, "Girl With Curious Hair." He'd also reached the end of a creative arc with "Girl," and concluded that "writing was empty and just all a game ... You get all that affirmation from the exterior that, when you're a young person, you think will make everything all right. ... It fucked with my sort of 'metaphysics of living' in an incredibly deep way."

"Infinite Jest" was Wallace's resurrection. "I've finally discovered I really love to write this stuff. I really love to work hard." In his conversations with Lipsky, he couldn't have been more clear about perceiving the accolades and attention that the younger writer coveted as a threat: "I'm so terrified that this [i.e., being profiled by Rolling Stone] is going to somehow twist me. Or turn me into somebody whose hunger for approval keeps it from being fun." Nevertheless, Lipsky kept prodding him to say "something positive" about his fame, and Wallace kept patiently deflecting him, finally announcing, "I'm serious, man -- this would have been over a day ago if you hadn't been somebody who writes novels."

Wallace did lose his temper just once, when Lipsky accused him of pretending to be less "smart" than he actually was, like an adult holding back while playing in a kid's softball game. It's an utterly ambiguous moment -- Wallace gives every sign of being hurt, which temporarily shuts down the conversation, but Lipsky's suspicion that he's been patronized and his courage in saying so can't be summarily dismissed. I don't think it's a coincidence that after this turning point the interview feels more forthright and searching.

In his introduction to "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," Lipsky writes that when he pulled out these transcripts a year after Wallace's death, "one thing kept touching me: We were both so young." The text is studded with contemporary interjections noting that this independent bookstore has since shuttered, that literary publication has folded. The cultural apparatus that made the ascension of "Infinite Jest" possible no longer exists. All that's left now are the words on the page -- and on the pages of "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," too, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night.

Laura Miller is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia."

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Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace(Roughcut) Paperback – Deckle Edge, 24 Jun. 2010

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"If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious." --David Foster Wallace

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Broadway Books
• Publication date 24 Jun. 2010
• Dimensions 15.67 x 2.34 x 23.52 cm
• ISBN-10 030759243X
• ISBN-13 978-0307592439
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"Among the repetitions, ellipses, and fumbling that make Wallace's patter so compellingly real are observations as elegant and insightful as his essays. Prescient, funny, earnest, and honest, this lost conversation is far from an opportunistic piece of literary ephemera, but a candid and fascinating glimpse into a uniquely brilliant and very troubled writer." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A glimpse into the mind of one of the great literary masters of the end of the 20th century...What shines through even more is his deep passion for writing and ideas and his kind, gentle nature...Many fans of Wallace's writing come to think of him as a friend--by the time they have finished Lipsky's moving book, they will undoubtedly feel that even more strongly." -- Library Journal

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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Broadway Books; 1st edition (24 Jun. 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 030759243X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307592439
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.67 x 2.34 x 23.52 cm
• 156 in Tennis Biographies
• 261 in Literary Travel
• 1,049 in Depression & Mental Health Biographies

About the author

David lipsky.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

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A not-so-brief interview with david foster wallace.

Michael Schaub

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace By David Lipsky Paperback, 352 pages Broadway List price: $16.99

Read An Excerpt

Time does not heal all wounds. It's been over a year since novelist David Foster Wallace committed suicide at the age of 46, a death that stunned the world of contemporary literature, but his readers and fans have never stopped mourning. Wallace was best known for Infinite Jest, his thousand-page 1996 novel, which remains required reading not just for young literary hipsters but for anyone who cares about American post-modernism. Wallace's work brought something new and exciting to a literary audience that had previously been reluctant to venture far beyond the borders of realism. There was never really anyone like him; it's likely there never will be.

While Wallace wasn't exactly reclusive, he wasn't a fan of giving interviews, especially after Infinite Jest took the world of fiction by storm. David Lipsky, a novelist and writer for Rolling Stone magazine, was granted a rare interview with Wallace in 1996, following him from town to town on his tour for the now-iconic novel. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is Lipsky's account of the road trip, told mostly through transcripts of his recorded conversations with Wallace. The picture Lipsky paints is of an author alternately confused and excited, sincere and suspicious, childlike and beaten down by the pain and intensity of the writing life.

It's impossible for anyone who ever fell in love with Wallace's prose not to read Lipsky's account looking for clues. And while suicide is never really logical, it's heartbreaking to read Wallace discuss his history of depression: "I think somebody who's been in a suicide ward is either way better prepared or way less prepared. Because I mean, I don't think we ever change. I'm sure there are still those same parts of me. I've just got to find a way to not let them drive. " Somehow even sadder are Lipsky's observations of Wallace's moments of happiness: his love for his dogs, his fondness for television, the music of Alanis Morrissette. Even his Diet Pepsi and McDonald's habits read as sweet, childlike and, in the end, crushingly poignant.

David Lipsky is an occasional contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and author of the best-selling book Absolutely American. Shaune McDowell hide caption

David Lipsky is an occasional contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and author of the best-selling book Absolutely American.

Lipsky mostly steps out of the way, and lets Wallace talk for himself, but the rapport that he and Wallace built during the course of the road trip is both endearing and fascinating. At the end, it feels like you've listened to two good friends talk about life, about literature, about all of their mutual loves. And while they were both young men in 1996, they seem wise beyond their years, yet still filled with a contagious, youthful enthusiasm. At one point, Wallace tells Lipsky, "[T]here's no single more interesting time to be alive on the planet Earth than in the next 20 years." The world became too much for Wallace, and he'll never get the chance to see himself proved right. But his fans and his readers at least have this: a startlingly sad yet deeply funny postscript to the career of one of the most interesting American writers of all time.

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One Writer's Road Trip with Novelist David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

It's obvious now that Infinite Jest was a huge book and David was well on his way to becoming famous. But being involved in the literary world at that time, can you describe what the buzz was like?

You were pretty young at the time. Was there any kind of anxiety or intimidation going into it?

Yes, because he was so smart. I didn't want to write the piece because he was going to read it. It was extremely unsettling. It's very different than interviewing a movie celebrity or a TV celebrity because they're famous for being charming or funny. It's like interviewing one of the X-Men; they have a talent they can use against you. David's skill is that he is brilliant and he can see things more clearly.

You guys seemed to get along really well, at least that's how it appeared in the book.

Yeah we started having fun. I think if you drive with anybody for 40 miles plus, you'll become friendly with them.

You mention a few times in the book that you started talking like him, started adopting his Midwestern accent.

Your conversations are all over the place; did you have a favorite topic to discuss with him?

I loved talking about Tarantino. I loved talking about writing with him; he said a great thing about what writers do. He said that if a writer does his job right, what he really does is remind the reader how smart the reader is and wake the reader up to stuff that the reader has noticed all along. For me it was those moments when he was just being funny. Like at the NPR station when that guy says, "We are going to record digitally," and David says, "So only yes or no answers." I can't think of anyone else who would be capable of making that joke.

After you left his house in Bloomington, did you maintain a relationship with him?

Never spoke to him again.

And the piece never ran?

What happened was I came back and I tried to write it, and it was impossible because I kept imagining him reading it. There's a great remark that Martin Amis made. He said that writing about books is the only thing in the world where you write about something in the format in which the performance was done. Like if you see Avatar , you don't shoot a Super-8 about how you felt about Avatar , or if you see a ballet, you don't dance out your feelings about Martha Graham. But when you are writing about someone who is a writer, its in their format, so you can't help but be less good. I was really unhappy about having to write it. I could visualize the reading chair he was going to be in. There had been a lot of heroin stuff with musicians in Seattle, so [ Rolling Stone editor] Jann Wenner sent me to go live with heroin addicts for a month. When I came back, the [Wallace] moment had passed, and I didn't have to write it, which was a relief.

Did you ever consider writing the book differently, or was it always going to be presented as a straight transcript?

He said he was extremely unhappy with the idea of someone shaping the impression of him that's coming across and I thought, Look here is what he actually was like. If you would have asked me in August of 2008 who was the best writer, obviously it would have been David Wallace. If you had asked me who was the healthiest American writer, it would have also been him because he was warm and he could understand people and love them at the same time, which is a hard thing to do. He was just funny and alive and great and it seemed like that image — which is the image that you find in his books and which was the impression I had of being with him for five days — was being replaced by the image of this dark, unhappy person. It seemed like the best thing was to say, Here's what he was like to be with. Here's what he was like to be with in a car and on an airplane. It seemed like the only way to write about him.

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Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Paperback – Deckle Edge, April 13 2010

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date April 13 2010
• Dimensions 15.67 x 2.34 x 23.52 cm
• ISBN-10 030759243X
• ISBN-13 978-0307592439
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Lipsky’s transcript of their brilliant conversations reads like a two-man Tom Stoppard play or a four-handed duet scored for typewriter.” —Lev Grossman, Time Magazine    “For readers unfamiliar with the sometimes intimidating Wallace oeuvre, Lipsky has provided a conversational entry point into the writer’s thought process. It’s odd to think that a book about Wallace could serve both the newbies and the hard-cores, but here it is…You get the feeling that Wallace himself might have given Lipsky an award for being a conversationalist…we have the pleasure of reading two sharp writers who can spar good-naturedly with one another… What we have here is Wallace’s voice.” —Seth Colter Wallis, Newsweek   “Insightful… Lipsky seems at ease with Foster Wallace, despite being awed by his fame and talent. More importantly, Foster Wallace seems relatively at ease with Lipsky. The two men drive through the raw and icy Midwest, all the while trying to make sense of art, politics, writing, and what it means to be alive.” —Lee Ellis, The New Yorker Book Bench   “The reader goes inside the cars, airports, and big-portioned Midwestern restaurants with the two men and, ultimately, inside Wallace’s head.” — Stephen Kurtz, The Wall Street Journal   “Crushingly poignant… It’s impossible for anyone who ever fell in love with Wallace’s prose not to read Lipsky’s account looking for clues… The rapport that he and Wallace built during the course of the road trip is both endearing and fascinating. At the end, it feels like you’ve listened to two good friends talk about life, about literature, about all of their mutual loves…his fans and his readers at least have this: a startlingly sad yet deeply funny postscript to the career of one of the most interesting American writers of all time.”  —Michael Schaub, National Public Radio   “Required reading… Lipsky not only got the local color of a book tour. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, let loose with his life story in the week-long conversation.” —Billy Heller, New York Post   “Compelling…The conversations are far-reaching, insightful, silly, very funny, profound, surprising, and awfully human…a profoundly curious and alive personality…Ultimately, the only person who can talk about David Foster Wallace is, apparently, David Foster Wallace.”   —Menachem Kaiser, The Atlantic   “One thing that the book makes clear is that Wallace’s vigor and awe-inspiring writing was, in some ways, part of a deeply intricate personal effort to beat death…The book has some elements of good fiction: blind spots, character development, and a powerful narrative arc. By the end, no amount of sadness can stand in the way of this author’s personality, humor, and awe-inspiring linguistic command. His commentary reveals how much he lived the themes of his writing; all of his ideas about addiction, entertainment, and loneliness were bouncing around in his head relentlessly. Most of all, this book captures  Wallace’s mental energy, what his ex-girlfriend Mary Karr calls ‘wattage,’ which remains undimmed.” —Michael Miller, Time Out  “Exhilarating…All that’s left now are the words on the page—and on the pages of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , too, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night.” —Laura Miller, Salon “Lipsky is not telling us about Wallace’s life: He is showing Wallace living his life…One thing is certain: If you didn’t already love Wallace, this book will make you love him…Wallace’s humor, his pathos, his brilliant delivery—his tendency to explore the experience of living even as he’s living it—make this book sing. If art is a way of caring for others, Wallace cares for us through the novels, short stories, and essays he left behind. And Lipsky, in the wake of Wallace’s death, gives us a narrative that does the same.” —Alicia Rouverol, The Christian Science Monitor   “It’s a road picture, a love story, a contest: two talented, brilliant young men with literary ambitions, and their struggle to understand one another …You wish yourself into the back seat as you read, come up with your own contributions and quarrels…the wry commentary of the now-mature and very gifted Lipsky, is original, and intoxicatingly intimate.” —Maria Bustillos, The Awl   “A gift… The reader, hanging out with Wallace vicariously, gets the sense of jogging along with a world-class sprinter…Wallace’s writing illuminates the painful truth that life can be unbearable. But we owe it to him not to let those passages eclipse the vitality that made his prose, and his readers, come alive.” —Michael O’Donnell, Washington Monthly   “A remarkable book…A heartbreaking and surprisingly intimate visit with a giant talent…Lipsky is a skilled interviewer and a terrific writer and so what we end up with is far, far beyond what might be expected. One of the great literary minds of his generation speaking frankly and at length with an award winning journalist who, himself, has a great deal to say... I doubt, however, we’ll see another portrait that cuts quite this close to the bone…You hear Foster Wallace’s amazing voice on every page. And your heart breaks all over again.” —Linda Richards, January Magazine   “Wallace was the next great voice of a young generation. But he wasn’t a dweeb-child shut-in hiding with books. He was a big handsome dude who played football and tennis, chewed tobacco, cussed, watching action movies and ticking off references to Hobbes and Dostoyevsky while mixing in Stephen King and Alanis Morisette… A trip into the mind of a writer who owned a dazzling style and a prescient view of modern culture.” —Mike Kilen, The Des Moines Register   “A hauntingly beautiful portrait of Wallace as a young artist, a raw and honest account of a writer struggling with what it means to have all of his dearest dreams come true…As readers, we’re given unfettered access to Wallace’s incredible wit… Although haunted by it, this is not a book about his death; it’s a book about his life. Lipsky has given us a true gem: Wallace in his own words, in a voice that remains vibrant, hopeful, and frank even after its speaker has been silenced. We all may know how it ends, but Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself takes us back to where it all began.” —Stephanie Hlywak, Flavorwire   “By mostly ignoring Wallace’s death, Lipsky offers an affecting and meaningful picture of his life: a showcase for the writer in rough cut, for his voice, his interests and his foibles. The book stands as a valuable companion to Wallace’s own work, but it’s also an enjoyable read on its own, something to tide Wallace fans over until his last, unfinished, novel is released next year.” — National Post   “A portrait of the artist as newly famous. It’s part biography, part road trip; we hear him at his most conceptual, expounding on his theories on writing, but also get a glimpse of him as a self-described ‘normal guy,’… He answers Lipsky’s questions in an infectious mixture of academically precise terms and peppery slang. The gravitational pull of Wallace’s charm is on full display, as is his hyper-intelligence, electric sense of humor, and staggering self-awareness…almost unbearably heart-wrenching… Although of Course offers a glimpse of Wallace in his prime for those of us who weren’t lucky enough to know him outside of his books.” —Margaret Eby, The Brooklyn Rail    “David Foster Wallace was, to many, the writer of his generation… An in-depth rendering of a writer whose effect on his generation was matched by few others…It is candid, intimate, personal, exploding with culture—pop and otherwise.” —Jeff Simon, Buffalo News   “[Wallace] is lucid, entertaining, self-critical, constantly self-reflective—and to read this book is to meet this personality… these talks changed [Lipsky’s] life, gave him phrases that have stayed with him forever. This poignant book will do the same thing for many readers.” —Edmundo Paz Soldàn, El Mostrador (Chile)   “If you’re a writer, or even if you just believe that art can nourish us somehow, you will read this book and feel changed. The odd thing is, you feel hopeful, too.” — Bookslut   “Full of everyman details about a writer who often seemed larger than life… Throughout the book, astonishingly profound things are said in airport parking lots and rental-car cockpits… As Lipsky writes, the author’s singular achievement, especially in his non-fiction, was capturing ‘everybody’s brain voice’; Wallace’s writing sounds the way we think, or at least the way we like to think we think…We may never have a better record of what it sounded like to hear Wallace talk... Rolling Stone sent the right guy.” —Zach Baron, Bookforum   “Lipsky’s recordings of five days’ worth of the writer’s brainy and passionate riffing on the nature of mind, the purpose of literature, and the pitfalls of both academia and entertainment are incredibly poignant. Lipsky vividly and incisively sets the before-and-after scenes for this revelatory oral history, in which Wallace is at once candid and cautious, funny and flinty, spellbinding and erudite as he articulates remarkably complex insights into depression, fiction that captures the ‘cognitive texture’ of our time, and fame’s double edge. Wild about movies, prescient about the impact of the Internet, and happiest writing, Wallace is radiantly present in this intimate portrait, a generous and refined work that will sustain Wallace’s masterful and innovative books long into the future.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist   “Among the repetitions, ellipses, and fumbling that make Wallace’s patter so compellingly real are observations as elegant and insightful as his essays. Prescient, funny, earnest, and honest, this lost conversation is far from an opportunistic piece of literary ephemera, but a candid and fascinating glimpse into a uniquely brilliant and very troubled writer.”  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)   “A glimpse into the mind of one of the great literary masters of the end of the 20th century…What shines through even more is his deep passion for writing and ideas and his kind, gentle nature…Many fans of Wallace’s writing come to think of him as a friend—by the time they have finished Lipsky’s moving book, they will undoubtedly feel that even more strongly.” — Library Journal

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Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (April 13 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 030759243X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307592439
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 522 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.67 x 2.34 x 23.52 cm
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About the author

David lipsky.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

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The End of the Tour

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Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Kindle Edition

• Print length 354 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Crown
• Publication date 31 March 2010
• File size 624 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0036S4DYM
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; 1st edition (31 March 2010)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 624 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 354 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 030759243X
• #73 in Literary Travel
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• #6,505 in Biographies & Autobiographies (Kindle Store)

About the author

David lipsky.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributes to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Lambert Fellowship, a Media Award from GLAAD, and a National Magazine Award. He's the author of the novel The Art Fair; a collection, Three Thousand Dollars; and the bestselling nonfiction book Absolutely American, which was a Time magazine Best Book of the Year.

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