But where David Foster Wallace became singular, in my opinion, where David Foster Wallace transcended all the postmodern games and became flat out heroic--that was the point where he took these structures and took all those superb toys from his playground and applied them to nothing less than the singular struggle to manage the doubts and voices and fears and weaknesses inside your head and ... just ... fucking ... live.

It is unbearably difficult to read writing that makes you more connected to yourself and the universe and all the wonders and disappointments and tiny desires for decency that come with being alive, and also to know that the person who wrote those words hung himself. The easy and natural guess is that Wallace was able to portray the loneliness and sadness and struggle so well because he was so deeply enmeshed in this struggle, every single day of his life. Enmeshed to the point where maybe he related to and saw the struggle more clearly as a mechanism of coping with his depression, the point where maybe his writing about these things was his only release from what was going on inside his head. Where maybe even the struggle and joy of expressing all this so clearly was also its own pressure and caused its own anxiety and depression and problems.

The hard, cold fact is, for a period of almost twenty years David Foster Wallace was able to focus all of his considerable writing gifts and powers of observation on the struggle of fighting with yourself to stay alert and alive. And he was able, with more clarity and acuity and brainpower and charm and humor and insight than anybody else of our time, to express what it was to be completely and utterly locked in this fight.