David Foster Wallace Psychohistory

November 10, 2010

As a child, Wallace was forceful and imaginative. He frequently made his younger sister play audience to long, ad lib dramas populated by characters like Captain Phlegm and his sidekick Goat Bile. During adolescence, Wallace moved into the basement of the family’s Philo, Illinois home. He painted the walls black and hung cork tiles on one wall. His sister later remembered being very upset by one of the things tacked to the cork wall, a single page from an article on Kafka, whose headline read: “THE DISEASE WAS LIFE ITSELF.”

    Wallace first began using drugs in high school, starting with pot and progressing to psilocybin. He was apparently able to hold this down, remaining an A student, while also playing football and very competitive tennis. In his senior year of high school, he began carrying a towel around with him to wipe away the perspiration from anxiety attacks, and a tennis racket, so that no one commented on the towel.

    Midway through his sophomore year at his father’s alma mater, Amherst College, Wallace had a nervous breakdown. He returned home, where he lived for about nine months. He drove a school bus and read almost continuously, later saying that nearly everything he’d read he read during that period. He saw a psychiatrist and for the first time began taking antidepressants. Wallace returned to Amherst in the fall of 1983, and completed his bachelor’s, with a double major in English and Philosophy, in 1985.

    While negotiating the publication of his undergraduate English thesis as his first novel, The Broom of the System, Wallace moved to Tucson to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. The book was published in January of 1987, and Wallace completed both his MFA and a follow-up book of short stories by June of that year. Mid-way through the summer of 1987 Wallace called his mother from his apartment on the outskirts of Tucson and said he was thinking of hurting himself. She flew to Arizona, helped him load his belongings into a U-Haul, and drove him back to Illinois. They passed the time by reading a Dean Koontz novel aloud to one another.

    In Urbana, Wallace and his sister Amy watched the Todd Haynes movie Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story. After the film ended, Amy told him she had to go back to the University of Virginia the next day. He asked her not to go. The day after she left, Wallace tried to kill himself by taking all the antidepressants he had on hand. He survived, and checked himself into a local psychiatric ward the next day.

   In late 1987, Wallace was given a course of electroconvulsive therapy. The experience horrified him, but he thought it helped. Wallace’s mother remembers that David emerged as delicate as a child. “He would ask, ‘How do you make small talk?’ ”, “ ‘How can you know which frying pan to pick out of the cupboard?’ ”

   Deciding that fiction was no aid to his mental health, Wallace applied to and was accepted on scholarship by, Harvard’s graduate philosophy program. By the time he started coursework there in the fall of 1989, he was already disappointed with his decision. In August, his collection of short stories had been published as Girl With Curious Hair to no acclaim whatsoever, and soon after, Wallace began drinking heavily. Less than a month into his studies he called the Harvard psychiatric-services hotline, explaining that he had to go to a hospital again. He was taken by ambulance to the McLean Psychiatric Campus, in Belmont. While at McLean, and sitting next to his mother, he was prescribed the MAOI Nardil for the first time. In December of 1989 Wallace was released into a halfway house in Brighton. It was here that he began his lifelong relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous. True to his anonymity, Wallace always denied involvement with AA, going so far as to turn off journalist David Lipsky’s tape recorder when mentioning it.

    By the middle of 1990, normality had begun to return to Wallace’s life. As part of his recovery he began to keep notebooks of observations. He found the simple clichés by which his fellow addicts anchored their sobriety strangely inspiring. His condition steadily improved, and by February of 1991 he was writing ‘The Project’ on a daily schedule. In an April letter to Bonnie Nadell, his agent, Wallace made a promise: “I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.”

    In June of 1992, Wallace moved to Syracuse, cheap rents and a part time teaching position. By the summer of 1994, now living in Normal, Illinois, Wallace had sent a completed manuscript to his editor Michael Pietsch. It topped out at 1,600 pages. Infinite Jest was published in January of 1996 to immediate acclaim.

    Much of the nineties passed in relative tranquility. Wallace accepted journalistic assignments, published another collection of short stories and, in 2000, began work on a second novel. In 2004, at age forty-two, he married a visual artist named Karen Green. A year later he moved to Claremont, California to begin a sweetheart teaching position at Pomona College.

    By 2007, after nearly a decade of work on what would become The Pale King, Wallace felt stuck. He became increasingly suspicious of his old-fashioned MOAI, Nardil. In April he and his wife ate at an Iranian restaurant, and Wallace developed severe stomach cramps. His doctor told him that he had probably experienced a minor hypertensive crisis caused by Nardil’s interaction with the tyramine in his dinner. With his wife’s support and his psychiatrist’s advice he stopped taking the drug in June.

    At first things seemed to go smoothly. In August, Wallace was able to write to Jonathan Franzen with a tone of neurotic optimism about the possibility of living without medication. By the fall however, Wallace was hospitalized again for severe depression. By the spring of 2008 a new combination of antidepressants seemed to have stabilized him; he was well enough to have dinner with his wife, Pietsch and Nadell at the National Booksellers convention in Los Angeles.

    Nevertheless, ten days later Wallace checked into a motel outside of Claremont and tried to kill himself by overdosing on anxiolytics. When he woke up, he called his frantic wife, and apologized. He agreed to another course of ECT. He had twelve sessions. They did not help.

    In the summer of 2008 Wallace went back on Nardil, but was too anxious to give the notoriously fickle medication time to take effect. On Saturday, September 6^th he began deceiving his wife about his mood. On Wednesday he made an appointment with a chiropractor, which he blew off but told his wife he had kept. On Friday, September 12^th his wife left the house to prepare for a gallery opening. Wallace stacked the unfinished pages, disks and hard drives of The Pale King on his desk, wrote a two page note and left the lights on in his office. He went to the patio at the back of the house, bound his hands behind his back with duct tape, and hung himself from a leather belt nailed to the beam of an arbor.