used to hate David Foster Wallace. I hated him in a way that you hate people who are much, much better than you -- the way (I dunno) the star of the senior play might hate Robert Downey, Jr. It just seemed profoundly unfair that one man had been gifted with such verbal acuity, such staggering insight, such humor AND such vocabulary. Not to mention, he had the stamina to write a 1,100-page novel; I didn't even have the stamina to READ a 1,100-page novel.

I also hated people who loved David Foster Wallace, because they reminded me that I was not David Foster Wallace -- not even close, mister -- and that, in fact, I was so far from the man that I had never really bothered to read any of his work -- just one essay about a cruise ship that I enjoyed immensely, called "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which would have to be in my top 10 list of story titles. That title nails everything you need to know about cruise ships. Though, if you would like to learn much, much more, read that story. I would drop $2000 to read that story again before I would pay it to the Princess Cruise Line. But hey, maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I hated all the people who were obsessed with David Foster Wallace (DFW, as he is known, which is also the acronym for my hometown, Dallas/Fort Worth, and these two things are not terribly similar to each other.) Not hated exactly, but how about this: They annoyed me, they irritated me, I made jokes at their expense and it made me feel gratified. And I hated a lot of people in those days, and I guess it's what my mom would call "resentment." I drank a lot of alcohol that year. These things are all related.

Also related was my decision to join Alcoholics Anonymous in order to curb my excessive drinking -- a desperate and (even to this day) somewhat-embarrassing measure that nonetheless helped me do what a billion other self-help books and magazine articles and therapists and psychopharmaceuticals had not been able to do, which is to put down the fucking bottle. And that was a hard year for me. A very, very hard year, one of my least favorite in memory. I was 25 years old, and I spent my evenings in a church in the far suburbs of Austin, listening to old men talk about guzzling bottles of scotch like it was Gatorade, listening to housewives talk about discovering blood on their car grill. It was powerful, and occasionally boring, and often depressing, and I could never quite shake the idea that what I really wanted to be doing was sitting in a bar talking about movies and music with my friends. Eventually, after two years, I went back to that.

But: During that slow march through sobriety, I read "Infinite Jest," Wallace's 1,100-page novel. I read it because it was about addiction and specifically, it was about Alcoholics Anonymous. I read a lot of these kinds of books in those days, but none of them had the scope, the wisdom, and the emotional specificity of "Infinite Jest." (Not even close, mister.) In a terrific 1996 interview with Salon writer Laura Miller, Wallace explained the AA theme of "Infinite Jest" thusly:

"The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing. Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous."

I agree with everything in that statement. And so here is the thing about "Infinite Jest" (which, OK, probably could have been 900 pages -- maybe 700 -- and been much, much better and OK, I still don't know what the "Infinite Jest" of the title really is and OK, it's a sprawling mess of a masterpiece but "sprawling" and "mess" are two of my favorite things.) The thing about "Infinite Jest" is that it spoke about addiction -- the craving, the compulsiveness, the need for oblivion, the endless tape loop of pleasure and pain -- in a way that I was experiencing but had not been able to articulate. For me, this is what great writing does. It explains something I had felt but not understood. It points out something in the frame I had seen but never noticed. Etc., etc.

I have no idea if David Foster Wallace ever had a drug problem. He's never spoken about one, or written about having one, as far as I know. But I could tell from "Infinite Jest" that he was sad. Really, really sad. I don't think you could see it in anything else, in his essays or his books; he was pretty unknowable and cerebral and rarely talked about himself, if ever. But if you read "Infinite Jest," you realize that this human being has been -- or maybe even is in -- howling pain.

When people talk about "Infinite Jest," they often talk about it as this mad, pyrotechnic postmodern caper, and people despise the book for its eccentricities (the length, the pretentious title, the 100 pages of footnotes, the insane digressions, the mixing of highbrow and lowbrow). But honestly, I don't even remember those parts. To me, it's the best book about AA that's ever been written. And then somehow, there are parts about French-Canadian cross-dressers. It's weird.

So, as you've probably heard by now, David Foster Wallace was found dead on Friday night, of an apparent suicide. And that just really, really sucks.

UPDATE: A really gorgeous piece on DFW written by Laura Miller. Please read.