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A review by heidihaverkamp
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max
4.0
A searching, painful, paradoxical life. I've struggled to connect with DFW's fiction but ever since the same author's biographical piece appeared in The New Yorker (taken from this longer biography), he's fascinating me as a thinker, person, and writer. He was so focused but so scattered, so brilliant but so immature (until he was about 40), addicted to many substances but finally transformed and touched deeply by the recovery movement, so earnest although often such an embellisher or even liar. His struggle with mental illness is aching. His promiscuity, anger with his mother, and sometime misogyny (?), contrast with his searing critiques and lament for the state of American manhood.
Three stars because this early biography is sometimes a bit clunky on a sentence level. Also, the way Max talks about the Midwest as the primary influence on DFW's "orderliness," manners, kindness, and even some of his neuroses seems contrived. The Midwest he describes comes off as flat sometimes, and a place I don't recognize, as Midwesterner myself. He gives only simplistic examples and characterizations of its culture, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising since he's a literary East Coaster. Still, I was disappointed since rural Illinois and the Midwest were clearly a big part of what formed DFW and it seems as though it should've been more important in Max's research to get it right instead of just a superficial glossing.
Three stars because this early biography is sometimes a bit clunky on a sentence level. Also, the way Max talks about the Midwest as the primary influence on DFW's "orderliness," manners, kindness, and even some of his neuroses seems contrived. The Midwest he describes comes off as flat sometimes, and a place I don't recognize, as Midwesterner myself. He gives only simplistic examples and characterizations of its culture, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising since he's a literary East Coaster. Still, I was disappointed since rural Illinois and the Midwest were clearly a big part of what formed DFW and it seems as though it should've been more important in Max's research to get it right instead of just a superficial glossing.