Although of course you end up becoming yourself

Description

Near the end of the Infinite Jest book tour, journalist and novelist David Lipsky accompanies David Foster Wallace on a five-day trip, recording conversations in cars, airports, restaurants, and Wallace’s home. Wallace is beginning to understand that the novel’s success may make him famous, and his exchanges with Lipsky reveal both his attraction to recognition and his suspicion of what it can do to a writer’s life. Their talk moves freely through literature, popular music, film, television, depression, ambition, loneliness, and mundane routines. Lipsky adds commentary but largely preserves the hesitations, jokes, disagreements, and changes of direction in the transcripts. The result is less a conventional biography than an extended encounter between two writers considering artistic sincerity, public identity, competition, and the difficulty of speaking honestly while being interviewed.

Themes