Sad, Sad, Sad. David Foster Wallace Is Dead

Celebrities die, I know. We all get the the news however we get it: on the internet, the TV, the radio, the paper. If it’s someone we knew, someone whose work we followed, we feel a momentary loss, a sadness that a little something beautiful has gone out of the world. Then we go on. We didn’t really know them, after all.

But this, this was like a gut-punch for me. I gasped. I sat down. I whispered, “No, no, no,” to my computer screen as my eyes got hot and teary. Because a writer, more than an actor or a singer, you feel like you know. I didn’t know him, but I read his words, I was inspired by his ideas, his sense of humor, his astounding, amazing, mindblowing intellect.

I tell people I write, and sometimes they ask me, “Who are your favorite authors?” or “Who do you like to read?” When they ask, D.F.W. is always on my list. A formalist fiction writer with realistic tendencies, a brilliant essayist, a poetic sensibility that has consistently made my heart swell with joy at the beauty of words and language. Consider this, one of those passages that has lodged in my mind because it renders so vividly my memories of summer days at the public pool, when I was younger and prettier, and when my own sexuality was as much a mystery to me as to the boys whose attention I hoped to capture. It’s taken from “Forever Overhead,” a coming-of-age story about a 13 year-old boy in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men:

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

Oh, God, the words. I could weep over “fragile colored string”. The surge of joy I feel at, “You almost understand,” because, still, I almost do.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m going to miss him. I wish he hadn’t been such a tortured, selfish genius.

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