A Brief Interview with D.T. Max. February, 2014 Originally published on hofenglishsociety.wordpress.com D.T. Max is a graduate of Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, was released by Viking Penguin on August 30, 2012 and was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery. 1. First I thought I would ask a bit about your book Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. You’ve also written about David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker, so I was wondering what sparked your fascination with DFW? The book actually began as the magazine article. It really began in, I’d say, the ordinary fashion. The editor of [The New Yorker], David Remnick, called me after Wallace had died, and asked if I wanted to do a piece on him, and I said yes. I had always been a reader of Wallace. You have to remember that it had been a while since he had really written a book that commanded people’s attention and got people’s interest. It had been years since Infinite Jest. I actually didn’t know a thing about DFW as a person when I started the research for the magazine article, and I really knew nothing about him. Part of the process that made me want to do the book was finding out so many things about him and feeling by the end of the magazine article I had really only scratched the surface of what was clearly the most extraordinary person of my generation, not just in terms of his life but also in terms of his work. I grew into both him and his life as I went along. 2. Do you believe that to an extent, a lot of the people just discovering DFW are drawn in by the legend that has built up around him? Sort of the archetype of the tortured artist that is often romanticized by younger generations? I think that what draws people to Wallace initially is actually more often the idea of this figure who stood above and apart from modern society. I think there’s a purity to David. If you read my book you’ll see that this purity is very complex. It might not be conventionally understood as purity, but there is a purity to David. And I think it’s the purity, the cleanness of his person as a writer who wasn’t in it for the money, wasn’t in it for the fame, and often found writing itself as an inadequate way to get past this tortured isolation of being a human being that first grabs readers. Another thing that grabs readers is that his books are very funny, especially his nonfiction. If you start with the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” you’re hooked. He has a voice like no one else’s. 3. DFW was characterized as a “symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age.” Since his untimely death in 2008, the phenomenon of social media has taken off in a way that I don’t think could have been predicted seven years ago. How do you think DFW would have reacted to our social media age? Do you think he would fall into the camp that champions social media as uninhibited, free expression, or the camp that views it as a phony way to present our ideal selves to the world? That’s an interesting question. I think two things would go for David. One, he always appreciated the need for humans to interact. Since he always felt isolated the idea that people
would reach out through Facebook, I think that would find a place in his thinking as a positive. On the other hand, he didn’t like computers and he didn’t like the way information was devalued in the computer age. I don’t think he was an admirer of the idea that you could spend your life in front of a screen or clicking through a device—a handheld device that also records your location. Naturally that’s something that makes people uncomfortable. 4. Was there anything in your research about DFW that was really unexpected or shocked you in any way? There’s a lot of things that surprised me. You have to remember, I started from zero. I think the highs and lows are certainly surprising to me. It amazed me how quickly he wrote Infinite Jest, or at least the first draft of it. I don’t think it took more than a couple of years, maybe even less, but it’s hard to know exactly. It was really fast. And he wrote it almost right after being admitted for alcoholism and psychiatric issues. It’s said he started writing after leaving this halfway house, but that’s not true. He actually started writing while he was there, which certainly shocked me. On the downside, there’s a moment I write about in the book when he tries to buy a gun to kill his girlfriend’s stylist. I never would have thought that that’s something he could have imagined or contemplated, so that was a surprise. I think one of the pleasures of researching the book was being constantly surprised by the movement in his life. If David thought a thing, he wrote it. It’s exciting to research to see how in his own life he came to the understanding that human life is really about contact and connection, to simplify it. And then he creates Infinite Jest, this whole massive story about people who are trying to connect. So that’s really exciting as a writer to see this conversion and connection between a writer’s life and his or her work is always really amazing. With David it’s really hot and really sizzles in a way that it doesn’t ordinarily for writers. You can take any writer and sense a connection between the work and the life. But with him, there’s something really thrilling. His commitments are so intense, both literarily and in life. 5. Did you, as a writer, learning about DFW make you reflect on writing or think about the craft in a way that you hadn’t before? It certainly made me think about my life in ways that I hadn’t before. One of the things that makes David interesting is the extent to which he shows even non-writers a way of living. To some extent you can find that in other places, sort of a holistic or mindful presence in the world. You can go into his work, even the graduation speech he gave at Kenyon College, and even if you’re not particularly a reader you can come out of it with your life changed. And on writing that’s a very good question. David and I certainly write in different ways. Sometimes for fun I would write out some sentences and try to sound like David, you know these seventy-word sentences that balance spectacularly around their dependent clauses. Amazing writing. He had this issue, which I do think about a lot, is how do you record a world that’s moving so fast? I think that’s something that I think about a lot as a writer. Thanks to David, one of the decisions that I have in my mind about this is knowing what to include and what to leave out is really important. I think that’s probably the biggest thing because he and I could conceivably take the same subject, because he also did nonfiction writing, and sometimes I would think about ‘well if I were on that cruise ship what would I be including, what would I be excluding, which of these characters is indispensable to my way of writing these types of stories?’ I think these are the key ways he makes me reflect
as a writer. His fiction, especially as he moves along, and as you get to Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews, and even Oblivion, which wasn’t as widely received, impresses every writer with his technical skills. You just can’t help but be amazed by this writer who really was on his own remarkable trajectory. I think he’ll always get readers who are writers. Actually, since finishing the book it’s those last two collections, Brief Interviews and Oblivion, which have taken most of my attention than I’d say Infinite Jest has.
6. I wanted to move now to the topic of writing itself, because there is a huge community of young writers at Hofstra. In particular I wanted to ask you about nonfiction and biographical writing. A lot of writers are attracted to the idea of the novel and creative writing, so I think that the path of nonfiction writing flies under the radar. So, what attracted you to this type of writing as opposed to fiction writing? Do you value it in a way different than fiction writing? One thing I’d say about nonfiction not necessarily flying under the radar but takes resources and is expensive. Most students don’t really have the resources so nonfiction kind of becomes an impossibility. You can do it for your newspaper and that’s great, but it’s expensive and can take time, and often takes travel. I think a lot of writers on campus tend to turn toward memoir as a form of nonfiction, which makes sense because you can write about your experience and yourself. I’ve always felt that literary nonfiction does a good or better job of capturing the world as fiction does at this point. With literary fiction you get the best of both worlds. And of course it’s accurate, that does matter. I think we respond to what’s really happening in a different way than how we respond to things that haven’t really happened. We respect them more. We record them in a different place in our head. But I do think the problem is where are you going to get the resources to do a five thousand word piece on something going on in the Amazon—you can’t. So, you draw on resources you have, on your experiences. You do that either for fiction or nonfiction and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
7. Do you have a method or system when you go about writing? Does this differ between writing an article or essay and a full-length book? And if you don’t have a go-to method, why is this? I’m not a person who sets out an outline and then hits his points as he goes. I tend to, in my articles, try to write one really compelling first paragraph, and they tend to be long, and everything else tends to be determined by everything set out in that first paragraph. That almost becomes the structure. Books are more complicated situations; it really depends on the book. My first book The Family that Couldn’t Sleep is a mixture of approaches and genres. It’s a story that is a history of insomnia, a history of what’s called a prion disease, but the more fun parts of the book are these stranger excursions like the recreation of historical Italy in the eighteenth century when the first member of this Italian family gets the disease. There in that book what was fun was that every chapter is almost like a mini, humanistic essay on this small corner of the world that you never knew you wanted illuminated. Love Story is a Ghost Story is more like a bullet train. It was more about cutting away. In this biography I was really more interested in the story rather than a reference type of book. This
was a huge motivation in working on this. And a lot of things didn’t get in than if I had written a different type of biography. The way I describe it is as a memoir by a person who didn’t have those experiences. That’s how I conceived of it and followed that concept.
8. Do you believe that the role of the writer is changing, especially in response to the boom of social media? I noticed that you are active on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Does this change the way you, as a writer, observe and interact with the world. Furthermore, has it impacted your writing? I like Twitter quite a lot actually. I grew up with computers, although not with social media. I was never really part of a generation that the writer wrote by disappearing into a cabin for five years and came out with the next book. In other words, I’ve always expected to know something about authors. I was never part of some J.D. Salinger idea that it’s just about the work and you know nothing about the writer. I think knowing about writers is useful for younger writers especially. When it comes to social media I try to be open to questions because it’s helpful for younger writers of any genre to know something about the experience of older writers. So I try to be responsive to people who reach out to me, but of course there’s only so much time in the day. I’m a big fan of careful, long form reporting, that’s what I try to do especially at the New Yorker. I think it’s exciting but also risky to have so many voices determining what is the news. I still get my news from conventional sources. I want to make sure that what I’m learning is accurate. When I watch TV, I watch a lot of CSPAN; I like to watch primary source material. The world is changing. It has always changed. I think we have to wait and see what forms come out of the technology applied to writing. In my imagination what happens is all books are constantly available to everyone. So books are no longer just sitting, collecting dust in a library. I remember years ago I went to this Microsoft conference on the e-book about fifteen years ago for an article I wrote. I remember someone had this idea that because when it comes to books, there’s not a lot of data—a lot of information but not a lot of data. And even back then, he said ‘what if you could put every conceivable book on every computer?’ That’s an exciting idea to me. But the reality is that if you did that you would be changing going forward what a book was. We read differently in different places, especially on computers. There are forms that have developed over time. The novel developed out of cheap paper and highly available printing presses. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that the book as a form is in decline and that reading on a screen, of some sort or another, is taking an incredible trajectory upward. So in the next couple of generations, what is their form going to be? Infinite Jest is a form. It’s an eleven-hundred-page book, it has letters, you feel the paper, and you put in in your backpack when you go to Europe. All of those are parts of what it is. Would a person of David’s mental qualities and predispositions feel that an eleven-hundred page book was what he wanted to write to a generation after yours? If a certain literary form developed in connection with a certain physical structure, the decline of that structure is going to result in the decline of that form or the development of new ones. I’m excited to see what comes next.
9. My final question sort of ties together everything I’ve been asking you: for the modern writer, we are constantly inundated with information, via social media, a 24 hour news cycle, and nearly instantaneous communication. Do you think this challenges the authenticity and sincerity of both the person and the writer that has been championed by DFW? If so, how do you, as a successful writer, think that young writers can find their voice and espouse their own authenticity in a world where over exposure leaves us numb? Writing can mean a whole grab bag of different things. The beauty of being a writer, unlike being a filmmaker, is that all it really requires is a piece of paper and a pencil. So there are millions and millions of unpublished writers in America. In a certain way, I think we’ve hit a golden age of writing. If you think of writing not as just professional writing or writing to a large readership, the more tools, the better. There used to be a lot of physical impediments to writing. When I was coming up and was writing, you had to hammer away at a manual typewriter and it was hard work. There were electric typewriters too but more manual typewriters. And that’s gone now. I didn’t really become a writer until the laptop was invented. For a lot of different reasons, I always found the actual act of writing incredibly frustrating. My mind always went much faster. In terns of the question of writers find their voice and authenticity, I think one very true answer is that you can’t lay yourself open to all that information all the time. You just become a consumer of all that information, which is fine, but creation is about, to some extent, closing the door on noises that are not consistent with what makes you a creative person. Years ago I wrote, I think in the New York Times, that I keep the internet caged in a room like a dangerous animal. That is still sort of what I do and I find that those really east forms of information are incredibly seductive. But, there’s more information out there than any one human could possibly absorb. It used to be that you got your newspaper and when you were done with it you threw it out. That’s not really true anymore. I’m all for blocking or structuring your day in order to be able to do your writing. I realize that doesn’t really answer how to be authentic but it is an answer to how you can combat that feeling that there really is no need for you in light of so many other people’s words knocking around. There’s always been a difficulty for writers who feel the urgent need to communicate versus the craft of writing, which always takes time. Through the gesture of writing you’re making a statement of the need for writers, real writers who are working hard and carefully. Are writers as indispensible as dentists in 2015? I think it’s a reasonable question and I’ve made the decision that they are, and I live my life according to that decision.
D.T. Max will be reading from Every Love Story is a Ghost Story at Hofstra University’s Great Writers Great Readings on Wednesday, February 25, 2015 in the Cultural Center Theater.