Five days with David Foster Wallace: Colin Marshall talks to author and journalist David Lipsky

From 3quarksdaily.com…

I want to tell you one thing I imagine about the creation of this book. Tell me if it’s right or wrong. As the listener probably knows by now, this book is made out of transcripts of tapes you recorded while you were on the road with David Foster Wallace for five days during his publicity tour for his big novel in ’96 Infinite Jest.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

It sounds like it. You didn’t end up writing the article that these notes were for, a Rolling Stone profile. That got canceled. So you had these laying around, I presume, stored somewhere. I would imagine, after David Foster Wallace’s untimely death in 2008, your mind went immediately to these materials, all this conversation you had with Wallace. I imagine a huge, crushing sense of responsibility. You’re thinking, “I’ve got to do something with themes, but what?” Is that accurate at all?

Well, no — it’s interesting, but when I first heard that he had died, like a lot of people, I didn’t think it was true. I got an e-mail from a friend, and I assumed it was a prank. Spending time with David, what you have a sense of is just how mentally healthy he was. If you had asked me in the summer of 2008 to name the most healthy, mentally, American writer, I would have without any hesitation, said David Wallace. He just seemed like he’d gone through something when he was younger, but he seemed healed. He seemed like someone who had a wise, funny, sharp way of looking at life, which would tend to make you live longer, not less long. I was shocked. My first response was just tremendous surprise. More…