The author on the ‘meaningless noise’ that pours through the internet, the writing of his fourth novel, Freedom, and the death of his friend David Foster Wallace
The inception of Freedom was curiously bound up with the death of my friend David Foster Wallace. In June 2008, after struggling for six years to get a new novel off the ground, I went to Berlin and barricaded myself in a room at the American Academy. There’s something about Germany – maybe its distance from America, or the seriousness of its literature, or my immersion in a language that I understand but don’t write in – that seems to help me start writing a novel. I wrote the first pages of my first book in Berlin, early chapters of my second novel in Bavaria. In 2007, I went back to Berlin to try to get Freedom moving. I ended up with nothing usable, and I became so discouraged that I set aside the project for a full year.
At the academy, I continued to be discouraged. But then suddenly, one morning, I found the right prose tone and wrote what became the opening pages of the book. I knew right away that I had it, and I spent two happy days writing. Late on the second afternoon, it occurred to me that Dave Wallace hadn’t answered a time-sensitive email I’d sent him the week before. This was unlike him, and so I called his home phone number and learned from his wife, Karen, that he’d tried to take his life the day before, and had very nearly succeeded. The exact coincidence of his attempt and my breakthrough seemed uncanny. It still seems uncanny. Dave and I had been very close for many years, and sometimes I feel as if he and I were a single unit that split in two in 2008: as if the force of his downward movement, into severe depression and death, were matched on my side by an upward surge of liberation and renewed life. The day after his second memorial service, in Manhattan, I started writing Freedom in earnest. A year later, it was finished.
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