DFW c. 1996

A "lost" profile of David Foster Wallace from 1996, which all too clearly foreshadows things to come (good and bad). (Craig Fehrman/Kottke)

Before long, Wallace had dropped out of his philosphy Ph.D. program at Harvard and stopped trying to publish fiction. Living in a series of crummy apartments around Boston, he began to degenerate. “I was haunted by the idea that I was a sham and a whore and a fraud.”

He doesn’t want Infinite Jest to be seen as autobiography, which it’s not. On the other hand, if Wallace hadn’t been hospitalized in 1988 and put on a suicide watch, he might not have written so accurately about Kate, a character in Infinite Jest who keeps trying to die: “It’s like something horrible is about to happen,” she explains to her doctor, “there’s the feeling that there’s something you have to do right away to stop it but you don’t know what it is you have to do, and then it’s happening, too, the whole horrible time, it’s about to happen and also it’s hapening all at the same time.”