D. T. Max’s Biography of David Foster Wallace
as Alcoholics Anonymous would put it, Whoever is upsetting me most is my best teacher, and as Wallace put it, in his novel “Infinite Jest,” “It starts to turn out that the vapider the A.A. cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”
.. Wallace’s oeuvre is internally varied but also of a piece. It reminds me of what an amateur deep-sea diver once said to me about why he liked diving solo: If you stop concentrating for even a few seconds you might die, he said, and I have a hard time concentrating, and so, well, I like to dive. Wallace had a problem with distraction, too; likewise, he converted it into a ferocious attentiveness.
.. One understandably slips from reading something concerned with how to be a good person to expecting the writer to have been more naturally kind himself. That thinking is perfectly wrong, though. Alec Baldwin surely has more to teach us than most about how to hold one’s temper; the co-founder of A.A., Bill W., is a guru of sobriety precisely because sobriety was so difficult for him.