I’m in the middle of reading Consider the Lobster (just finished Dostoevsky essay) after jumping around in How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen and admiring where David Foster Wallace puts himself vis-a-vis his subjects in his essays, thinking how smart and human he is, how critical and, um, really, wise. And then bookninja tells me there’s a memorial in Trinity Bellwoods Park? For David Foster Wallace? Impossible. He is too alive to be dead.
In disbelief, I google his name.
And get “Related searches: David Foster Wallace suicide.”
Again, this seems impossible. And wrong. The guy who wrote “The Depressed Person” has killed himself? No.
The loss is… The loss is… My god, there’s no saying what it is. Everything in that mind.
Harper’s has put everything Wallace wrote for them online here.