Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace

By David Lipsky

Overview:

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.

Favorite Quote:

The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.

Other Quotes:

- And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn't mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.

- For us, it's gonna be that at, at a certain point, that we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being.

- I think it's-I mean I think the whole thing is an enormous game of Little Red Riding Hood, and you're trying to find what's just right. And you, you know-what is it?-you can't find the middle till you hit both walls? You know? The thing that really scares me about this country and again, I'd want you to stress, I'm a private citizen, I am not a pundit. Is I think we're really setting ourselves up for repression and fascism. I think our hunger, our hunger to have somebody else tell us what to do-or for some sort of certainty, or something to steer by-is getting so bad, um, that I think it's, there's even a, Hayek's Road to Serfdom, I mean, makes a similar argument economically. But I think, you know, in Pat Buchanan, in Rush Limbaugh, there are rumbles on the Western horizon, you know. And that it's going to be, that the next few decades are going to be really scary. Particularly if things get economically shaky, and people for instance-people who've never been hungry before, might be hungry or might be cold.

- I think somebody who's been in a suicide ward is either way better prepared or way less well prepared. Because I mean, I don't think we ever change. I mean I'm sure there are still those same parts of me. I've just got to find a way to not let them drive.