Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace Audiobook

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JASON SEGAL AND JESSE EISENBERG, DIRECTED BY JAMES PONSOLDT An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour   In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.” Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church. A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace. "If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves.  To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself.  And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that.  I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it.  I know that sounds a little pious." —David Foster Wallace

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"David Foster Wallace is one of my absolute favorite writers, and this book was a rare and wonderful opportunity to just sort of, hang around him. You get to hear his thoughts on fiction in general (some great stuff on the purposes of fiction-- capturing the mental landscape our our time (how the world feels on our 'nerve endings'), breaking the wall between the interior lives of the writer and reader and combating lonlieness, being able to take the time to think about and point out things that the reader has always been aware of but not ever really able to articulate and thereby remind the reader that they were already smart and perceptive (sort of the opposite message of a lot of telivision.) But then there's also these more banal and somehow more intimate moments where you just get to sort of see what its like to go to MacDonalds with DFW, or hang out with DFW and his dogs while he chews tobacco and smokes. One the the reasons this book works so well is that DFW really seems to open up to Lipsky-- he seems to like Lipsky and really makes himself venurable at times. He was open and warm as an interviewee. Lipsky was also a great interviewer. The formatting of the book is wonderful, and sort of drifts from being in the scene to a refreshing pull back to Lipsky in the editing room, or Lipsky reflecting about the scene after DFW's death. As sort of warmly open and sloppy as David's speech is, Lipsy tightens his own up. The square brackets are somehow great, I can't really say why. Lipsy also gets along really well with DFW, but at the same time presses him on uncomfortable issues that need to be pressed. For example, he's ever villigant that David's putting on a front, and it's this villagance that in the end lets us see that David really isn't putting one on. A wonderful read that's over all too soon, and leaves you feeling sort of sad, like you're parting with a friend (a sort of wierd phenomonon that's also commented on by DFW in the book.)"

— Kyle (5 out of 5 stars)