David Foster Wallace’s biographer: tackles author’s battle with depression

So much has been written about the link between mental illness and creative genius. Do you think he would have been uncomfortable with being seen as another example of that linkage?

 He might have been. He was very frightened of the diagnosis of bipolar condition, which is the classic productive literary personality. He was very uncomfortable with it. He much preferred having a diagnosis of atypical depression. I think that may suggest that he didn’t want to identify with those people. If you think about the people he identified with – Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo – I don’t think there’s even a whiff of such a condition in those people. He identified with these straight arrows who produced every day.

.. The book is primarily a transcript of the interview, with some of Lipsky’s thoughts at the time added in, and a few notes about which bookstores were now defunct. It might have been a better book with more (some?) shaping. As it is, I felt sad, almost queasy, at those times when Wallace expressed his self-consciousness, his wish that he could edit the article before it ran. But Lipsky kept everything in. So we are voyeurs to this raw conversation between two young writers, accessories after the fact.