Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive.

passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings.

John Barth’s long story “Lost in the Funhouse,”

“If, in a piece of creative nonfiction, an event is claimed to have happened, it must happen.”

novelist had to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him or her on an airplane;

The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form.

Bag Men,

“Basically—I empathize.

writing,

the sense of terrified isolation that is key to the story, the worry that what we feel we can never express. And it held out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace’s earlier work but dear to his recovery experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal.