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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9796723" data-attributes="member: 59">Finished Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky early this morning.  It's a five-day interview with David Foster Wallace at the end of his book tour for Infinite Jest.  I loved the book, which didn't surprise me, as I quite enjoyed James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour when it came out, too.  But although I found myself disliking both DFW and Lipsky when I watched the movie, I found myself feeling mostly affection towards them reading the interview here.  They're just so vulnerable and insecure and young. Two things that jumped out at me that are somewhat tangential to the main thrust of the interview: (1) There's an interesting conversation a little over half-way through where DFW predicts the current political moment in the US with startling accuracy.  His ability to observe the world around him and extrapolate possibilities from there is pretty remarkable.  This was, of course, part of the project in Infinite Jest given its depiction of a near-future North America and seems to have been a general concern of his to begin with. (2) The "mostly" in the penultimate sentence of the first paragraph is tempered by what we know now about DFW's relationships with women.  It's not entirely overt, and the interview doesn't get too far into his romantic life.  But there's some ugliness in his thinking that peeks through here and there that's distasteful and disconcerting -- for instance, the way DFW uses the word "females" in the last long conversation (he and Lipsky are back at DFW's house in Bloomington, IL playing with his dogs) was gross, especially given how much less guarded he is in this conversation while still being very careful in his diction.  There's other stuff, too, that felt off -- he says he moved from Boston to Syracuse in part because of a woman, and he's strangely cagey about the situation.</blockquote>

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