[...] The day I bought BIWHM at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I was still reeling from having been recently left by my fiancee (I even spontaneously asked out the girl who rang the book up; she said no), and was basically spending ungodly amounts of time alone. I went to the movies alone, ate dinner alone, went to the park alone; I was a bouquet of loneliness, irradiated by grief and bewilderment, and this book, which is also irradiated by a different kind of grief and bewilderment, felt in this midst of this self-loathing megalomania somehow aimed at me. [...] I read "Octet" in a Chinese restaurant in Chelsea, and something about Wallace's direct address of the reader, in which he admits that this maneuver is doomed to make him appear "fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even [his] most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like" the way he, David Foster Wallace, does--well ... can I ask for a critical full-stop here? Can I say something not smart or interesting or James Woodian at all, and just tell you that, reading those words, in this ghastly Chinese restaurant, I put the book down and started to cry? I was lost, and confused, and frightened, and the one person I thought I knew better than anyone, my fiancee, had now revealed to me that, in fact, I knew nothing and no one, not at all, and there I was, as desperate as some kenneled animal, and who do I see beside me, equally caged, but a writer I admired and loved as much as any in this world? It was terrifying as well as heartening, and so my relationship to this book, which I love very much is caught up in the ganglia of a profoundly miserable time in my life, which makes it difficult to talk about on a purely literary level. It is like asking me to describe the fabric of the life jacket I was wearing when I was pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean after being lost at sea for five weeks. [...]