Big kudos to Craig Ferman who tracked down and posted an obscure 1996 Details magazine profile on David Foster Wallace by David Strietfield. You can read the full profile here. Here are a few (heartbreaking) excerpts:
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 happening all at the same time.” . . .
Unlike some of his characters, Wallace managed to extricate himself from the downward spiral before the damage became permanent—these days, he won’t even drink beer. Moreover, he got the raw impetus for a new book. By this point, Wallace was living in upstate New York, in an apartment so small that he had to move everything onto the bed when he wanted to write. “It was,” he says, “like spending two years in a submarine.”
Recently he found a Mennonite house of worship, which he finds sympathetic even if the hymns are impossible to sing. “The more I believe in something, and the more I take something other than me seriously, the less bored I am, the less self-hating. I get less scared. When I was going through that hard time a few years ago, I was scared all the time.” It’s not a trip he ever plans to take again.
Biblioklept 