“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”
I know at least one person whose life was saved by this story. I’m not exaggerating. My own experience – who knows? The effect it had on me was so intense, it’s certainly not far off. Reading it at 19, trying to work out why I couldn’t find a way of being alive that felt natural, or make connections that felt effortless, or have an emotion that felt pure – it put those experiences I saw as insoluble personal failings into the context of being a human subject and having to deal in the insufficiency of concrete things. I re-read it every couple of years, so I can confirm – it’s not just a late-adolescence thing. The stubborn sense of knotty anguish that forms at the beginning gives way to a struggling acceptance of the indignity of it all, and it’s so tender, so kind, so tremulously sublime, that every time I read it again, I feel it opening up inside my lungs. “So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”
First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014
A Personal Anthology 