An editor chronicles her meteoric rise and tumultuous relationship with David Foster Wallace
Aux Features Book Review
If you’re a straight woman with some artistic sensibility, you may have dated a David Foster Wallace: a red flag who charmed his way into your heart by claiming you were the only one to truly understand him, but who turned out to be less sensitive than he at first seemed, to say the least. Chances are your David Foster Wallace read David Foster Wallace, an author whose writing left an indelible mark on the literary world. Over the years, Wallace has transformed into an avatar for a certain kind of lit-bro who scorns anyone who hasn’t read Infinite Jest, but doesn’t consider why he hasn’t read a female writer in his entire adult life.
If you’re Adrienne Miller, who, in 1997, became the first woman to serve as Esquire’s literary editor, a position she held for nearly a decade, you have dated the David Foster Wallace, and part of your story is contending with the late writer’s near mythical status, which has grown more complicated in the #MeToo era. Miller’s new memoir, In The Land Of Men, grapples with that experience, in the context of a larger industry that celebrated, coddled, and enabled all sorts of terrible men.
Miller’s meteoric rise in the world of ’90s glossies occupies the memoir’s first half. Bookworms, former English majors, and anyone tired of Old White Men novels will enjoy the blunt descriptions of petulant literary giants (John Updike), high-brow celebrities (Todd Solondz), and other behind-the-scenes figures (editor Rust Hills). Miller likes to emphasize her level-headed Midwestern sensibility and rarely presents events salaciously. She needn’t, as the awfulness is so explicit. A colleague calls her “veal”; she gets groped after a lunch meeting; Norman Mailer is, of course, a total dick.
Miller was 26 when a 36-year-old Wallace came into her life. The intellectual chemistry between them is alluring, and there’s something satisfying in her ability to hold her own with someone who, for all his faults, was incredibly talented. Miller is clear, however, on what a nightmare Wallace was as a romantic partner. Needy, dismissive, manipulative, and demanding, he gave her backhanded compliments and held grudges. “I already understood that David would always define the terms of your reality,” she writes. “And I also already understood that I could never be a woman who slid into a man’s premade life and claimed it as her own.”
Despite this, Miller doesn’t demonize Wallace by airing all his dirty laundry— and there are moments of tenderness here. Focusing on her own life with him, when she references Wallace’s relationships with other women, she’s mum about the details and only shares how they affected their bond. His confession of wanting to hire a hit man to go after an ex was offered to her as a redemption story; he shared it to prove he was no longer that person. (Whether this had anything to do with Mary Karr’s allegations of abuse against Wallace is unknown.) Women “want a respect story. We merely want to see what we understand of the human estate represented on the page,” Miller writes when discussing one of her literary disagreements with Wallace. In these pages, she makes space for the respect she was too often denied, both in her professional and intimate life.
Until his death by suicide, in 2008, Wallace continued to entrust Miller as a reader and editor, his professional esteem far outlasting their romance. Miller is sensitive to his struggles with mental health, but she also acquired her own demons because of him. The author is, by her own account, very private, and as a result, the book doesn’t really take off until Wallace makes a more definitive appearance about 150 pages in and she shows more vulnerability. This may be the memoir’s most conflicting aspect. There is something unsettling about wanting to give due credit to her identity as separate from Wallace, but it’s hard when this is the most riveting part of the story.
Miller says Wallace helped her “understand that anger is active, that it is a process and a decision.” As a young woman who was just trying to do her work, Miller often chose to back away from it. But if this memoir is about a woman coming into her own, it’s telling that the result is anger, and that such passages are the most powerful in the book. It’s a fury that extends beyond Wallace. The misogyny expressed individually could only happen in a world that allowed it at all levels. Maybe the best way to fight Wallace-as-idol is by pointing out precisely how pedestrian his callousness was. Wallace’s death occupies only a few pages, but it is in her grief that Miller finally allows herself to put her anger into action. “What I really wanted to do was write manifestos, organize opposition parties, pick fights, scream obscenities into a bullhorn,” she writes. “I wanted to destroy everything and rebuild it better.”
56 Comments
I maybe one of the few white male readers who has never really read “Infinite Jest”. I remember looking at it in the library one time and just thinking “Nah”That and the endless footnotes/endnotes, of course.
“That and the endless footnotes/endnotes, of course.”Hmm, tasty kibble. Suppose I’ll have to read that now.
In all seriousness, if that’s your bag you are going to LOVE this book from what I vaguely remember about it from a cursory look.
If you want some tasty footnotes/endnotes check out Susanna Clarke. This one amazing book of hers, “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” has like 200 of them. Not quite as long as “Infinite Jest”only 782 pages and definitely has a different style. However, the footnotes are one of my favorite parts.
So he’s like Pratchett, but a wanker?
It is one of my literary white whales, but anytime I think about tackling it , I realize that I can’t really half-ass it so I start reading something I can pick up and put down, while having to add to/consult my notes. Canonicity (is that a word?!?)/universal critical acclaim is a trap.Of course, I’m sure there’s plenty of people who will tell me it is totes easy, that I’m working myself up for no good reason.
I agree with you. I don’t see putting aside a month of time to read this.
I don’t think there’s a way to assess a single axis for “difficulty” in a reading experience, especially since a lot of what “difficulty” really means once we’re all adults who can parse a complex paragraph if we care to is something like “what do I have patience for”. That said, in my subjective experience, compared to other famously “difficult” novels I’ve tried:IJ is certainly a more challenging read than Moby Dick (basically because it’s jumping around and there’s a lot to keep track of and DFW’s intention with the endnotes was specifically to disrupt your reading experience, whereas I feel like if you have the patience for Melville’s digressions [I love them] he holds your hand pretty well), but a lot less challenging than Ulysses … which I didn’t find THAT hard to deal with, although to be fair I was reading it in a college class and the instructor was very helpful. V., Gravity’s Rainbow, and JR are all books that I’ve failed, on at least two occasions, to get into past the first twenty pages, basically because I didn’t have the patience and there were other things to read.
Fair enough. I’ve tackled “difficult” books/authors before, but it was almost exclusively for a lit class (and even some of those I cheated a bit). Off the top of my head:—Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: Perspectives that change from chapter to chapter, stream-of-consciousness prose. I think if I had taken this on outside of school, I might have bounced off it. A very evocative book, but you really have to be on the ball.—Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away and a bunch of her short stories: Her writing could shift from ugly and violent to quietly beautiful in the bat of the eye, but the real problem is often discussing her…views on the world. A boy gets raped in the woods by a stranger at the end, for chrissakes, and it treated as a good thing because it puts him back on his path to becoming a prophet.
Most white male readers have never read Infinite Jest; in fact, that book has the cachet of being the “big smart book on my shelf I’ve never actually read” for a reason.
I always thought that was reserved for…I dunno, Gaddis “The Recognitions” or James Joyce longer works.
That may have been the case for a while, but Infinite Jest now holds the same role for most Gen Xers and Millenials. Sometimes infuriatingly so; the general consensus is that people who own it haven’t read it, and people reading it in public are just doing so for attention and approval.
As a Gen Xer I’m wondering if I need to follow the pack then…
The best thing about asserting a consensus is that you can dismiss anyone who asks if you have any evidence for the consensus. 😉
I’ve really only seen that sentiment from twitter checkmarks who obsess over stuff like Harry Potter, I don’t even see it on lit forums. Truthfully the idea that “this stranger must be reading a famous book for attention” seems like total projection.
Infinite Jest is sat, unread, on my bookshelf. 5+ years and counting.I doubt it will change since I realised (having attempted Girl with Curious Hair as a warm-up to Infinite Jest) that I don’t actually like his fiction. His non-fiction on the other hand gets an airing every year, but I’ve not had success getting my boyfriend to read it (just to be clear I’m female), and he was really put off by Big Red Son – so maybe I’m the misogynist in our relationship??
“so maybe I’m the misogynist in our relationship??” – You could be my little sister: your self description matches her pretty well.
“Big Red Son” is so good! It’s the only one of the major essays collected in Consider the Lobster that I didn’t hate; the title essay, Up Simba, and Authority and American Usage were all big disappointments to me, though I liked a lot of the smaller pieces (having previously loved most of his nonfiction, though it should noted a fair amount of it is probably fictional).
Same. So glad I didn’t inadvertently become part of that tribe, mansplaining life to poor innocent victims before that was even defined as a thing.
I’m usually someone who looks for books based on size to boot. That doesn’t sound like a tribe I want to belong to.
I’ve never had any desire to read it. I’ve thought I might want to read “Consider the Lobster” just because I think it’s a great title, but I haven’t gotten around to that, and I’m not sure I ever will. Honestly, I feel like I missed the David Foster Wallace cultural moment somehow; I never heard of him until well after he was already considered the big important author of his generation. But honestly, the guy sounds like a dick, and I don’t really want to read something that sounds like it was designed to be deliberately off-putting to the majority of potential readers.
You can read “Consider the Lobster” in about 25 minutes and it’s easily found online. (It’s an essay from an eponymous collection.)It’s trendy to hate on him, but to me, put Infinite Jest aside for second and he’s second to none as an essayist. His fiction seems to polarize people though.
http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
I’ve never read anything by him. I do hear good things about the essays, but I just haven’t gotten to any of them. I may some time, but I’m certainly in no hurry. There’s only so much content one can consume, and I’m way too busy dicking around on the internet.
Most white males haven’t read Infinite Jest, and the vast majority of the few who do read it, do not understand it, especially some of the book’s biggest fans. I reckon you’d be the latter, so don’t bother.
Ah, found the asshole who wants to think he’s deep because he ‘understands’ a book that most folk realize is a dull slog. You’re so deep and misunderstood…Here’s a thought: you’re not special and your ability to read and comprehend a long book doesn’t in any way make you more intelligent than other posters, just more pompous. But it’s okay: I remember taking my first lit course in college as well.
I read it back in 1997, lying in the central corridor of our crumbling share house to escape the oppressive summer heat of Bathurst, NSW, Australia. I was 20, with limited life (and literary) experience, so a bunch of it I didn’t really understand but I remember thinking the Eschaton sequence was some of the funniest goddamn shit I’d ever read. Pemulis (IIRC) going down under a hail of tennis balls ha ha ha that other kid ends up with the monitor stuck on his head ha ha ha etc…I’m 42 now and I recently made time to have another go at it. I found the initial description of the Ennis House complex much funnier (in a dark way) especially the prank where Gately and friends put up a sign on the door of the methadone clinic saying it had been closed by order of the Mass. state gov, and also the mentally disturbed woman who stood at the window yelling HELP! and so they put a sign under her window saying “Help wanted”…Eschaton itself though? It left me meh. Possibly because I was now distracted by the way DFW has the DEFCON numbers backwards: he says DEFCON 1 is the lowest level of alert, when of course DEFCON 1 in reality means nuclear war is imminent or has already started. It’s a weird error. But more than that, the pacing in that sequence just doesn’t seem funny anymore. Probably just my taste changing over time……but then the sequence with the homeless(?) drug addicts and DFW’s attempt at writing it in what I guess is how he thought homeless drug addicts talked, seemed super cringey to me now (I think this is a widely held opinion these days?)……and a few hundred pages in I got to the parts where the ETA boys do training and an exhibition tournament and those sections are juuuust soooo loooong… like every stroke and every piece of footwork is described…Sure it’s cinematic but what a boring fucking movie. At least with Melville the digressions are about something, you know? The significance of the colour white mostly, I understand, but these bits in IJ just go on and on…I’ve been an editor and I’ve managed to get a Masters in Creative Writing (which is basically a license to dance around the quadrangle with flowers in my hair but still) and so I’ve now read a lot more and seen people trying to write a lot more, so I like to think I have some understanding of the process.And so I got maybe halfway through IJ this time and just thought “You know what Dave? Shut the fuck up. Just shut the fuck up. I don’t need 10,000 words on Gately driving a car down the street angrily.”Or as we sometimes say here in Australia: “Jeez Davo, get your hand off it.”Isn’t there a bit where he spends thousands of words just talking about students lounging on the lawn listening to a radio broadcast? Ugh! And I remember even back in 1997 being bored by Remy Maranthe and Helen/Hugh Steeply talking on that mountainside for like a billion words.Paragraph by paragraph the writing is pretty brilliant. There are still a lot of fun and funny concepts in the book. So now, sure I can find it fun to read in small doses, because there’s cleverness of language and all that. But after a couple thousand words in one sitting the cleverness starts to really grate.I think bottom line the problem with IJ is that it doesn’t really say anything, to me anyway. It doesn’t really give insight into the human condition or whatever. Like, it’s fantastical but not fantastical enough, if that makes sense.After losing motivation on IJ I went to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and that’s just 67,707 words of people being incredibly awful to each other and it’s captivating because it seems so true. Or maybe I found it such a contrast to IJ because Hemingway resisted the urge to meticulously describe the process of bullfighting for 8000 words with no paragraph breaks.
First, this was a great read. I’m a frustrated former English major who got my associates, decided I’d be a rock star in the 90’s, tried but didn’t make it, and became an IT/Business shill for the money. It’s cool to see someone who pursued the literature based life experience. Hemingway famously said “all prose must be spare and true” and while I don’t always agree, I do think that IJ could have used some pruning to put it mildly. To me, the parts I skimmed through, felt like the equivalent of a prog rock guitarist who is just noodling for the sake of playing notes.
Thanks man! Semi-ironically I ended up an editor of a videogames magazine, then a science magazine, so not entirely un-literary but, well, at least I write for a living, I tell myself. As for Infinite Jest, remember that Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys? Where he’s a famous writer who has taken seven years to write his second novel, and you think “oh yes, the usual, unable to think of what to write etc” but then when we finally get to see him sit down and do some work, he puts a fresh piece of paper in his typewriter and at the top bashes 2 6 1 [dramatic pause] 1.Then later you get this exchange with Katie Holmes:Hannah Green: Grady, you know how in class you’re always telling us that writers make choices?Grady Tripp: Yeah.Hannah Green: And even though you’re book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it’s… it’s at times… it’s… very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. And… I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all. She goes on to criticise (and he to defend) his drug use, but I think for Infinite Jest we can just leave it there. DFW wrote a bunch of stuff and just included it all.My time as an editor did ruin a lot of books for me, basically anything where it now seems really obvious when the writer is thinking “damn I’m good…”
The fact that you get to write for a living alone makes me envious. I design IVR networks: those are the annoying automated dial in networks that do their best to make sure you can’t reach a live human being. Pretty sure if there’s a hell I’m going to it for my contributions to this nefarious technology. That’s a great point on the ‘details’ that some authors want to put in. To me, it’s always been a big turn off in regards to my enjoyment of reading something: I don’t need the exact minutiae of something to the smallest molecule. If anything, it throws me out of the story. When I’m really engrossed in a story, it almost becomes like a movie that I can ‘see’ in my mind. You lose the feeling of ‘reading’ and you’re involved in the flow. Books like IJ throw me out of that too often. Although I have to admit I did like Robert Anton Wilson’s first book in the Illuminatus trilogy despite the many ‘cut away’ references and so forth.
Anger is complicated. Women in our society have an inalienable right to it – but we’re equally warned -constantly- that it is not appropriate, not ladylike, unbecoming. “Smile, you’ll look prettier.”Pay us less, give us fewer rights and protections, tell us what we can and cannot do with our own lives and bodies – use us – feel entitled to that use and abuse and it’s not surprising we’re a bit pissed.I am glad you recognized hers – and her right to it – and the best part of her reaction to a relationship that seems like she was ‘used’ more than she was ‘given.’ As usual. ;)But, sure Jan. We’re the weaker sex. How is it that we don’t go on rampages?
“How is it that we don’t go on rampages?”Well, I can only go off what Lifetime Network shows on TV, but women who snap seem to be less likely to pull random bystanders into their killing sprees, whereas men always want to get that high score.
Someone did a study recently that blamed testosterone – but I’m not sure it’s JUST that. At least when we do snap, it’s targeted. I guess?
You’re being kind. IMO, the sad truth is men generally suck at being focused, regardless of the situation.
When the gender tasked with keeping the little ones out of the cooking fire cannot focus, we’re fucked as a species. See, men would have benefited by being better partners, sooner. (Not necessarily – just being flippant).
“When the gender tasked with keeping the little ones out of the cooking fire cannot focus, we’re fucked as a species.”That’s how I’ve always looked at it.
My high score name is A.S.S.
You’d think a renegade genocidal military officer would have more class.
Class with a capital ASS.
That also reminds me of when they had Thomas Pynchon on there, sort of. Three times!
Why is a review of the memoir of the first woman literary editor of Esquire 85% about David Foster Wallace?
If there’s anything I get from the first paragraph, it’s that we need to just stow everything and anything David Foster Wallace in a lockbox under a volcano for a good 15-20 years. I’m tired of the pseudo-intellectuals who use his books on their shelf as an indicator of intelligence. I’m tired of the cachet he has as being a crutch for bad boyfriends, and how he’s shorthand for bro-lit. I really like his writing, but I’m completely tired of everything surrounding him and it. He was a messy person, and we should come to terms with it, decide whether he’s worth reading and lionizing anymore. But maybe not with *all this* going on around it. Whether or not we need to separate the art from the artist, I think we need to separate the artist from the era for a bit and come back to it.
As an aside:
I really hate that Infinite Jest has become associated with some kind of misogynistic, incel-style, literary bro culture because it’s an amazing book. Sure, it’s a difficult read- sprawling footnotes, esoteric vocabulary, absurdism, etc.- but the world Wallace created is just so goddamned vivid. The characters aren’t well-drawn so much as real people, I came away feeling as though I could navigate the Enfield Tennis Academy with my eyes closed, and I’ve never read anyone who understands depression the way Wallace clearly did.
Fine, Wallace was a misogynistic asshole, a shitty boyfriend, and representaive of a problematic culture, but Infinite Jest is an indispensable masterpiece of PoMo literature.
I love how half the comments are “sure DFW was a monster, but hey, he was a good writer!”No, he wasn’t. He was a long-winded hack like most of his contemporaries. Read something that wasn’t written by a white man.
Miller was 26 when a 36-year-old Wallace came into her life.And now she’ll be dining out on that relationship for the rest of her life.
Male writers, directors, painters, etc. have been doing the same to women for centuries.
So? My point isn’t about her gender.It’s about the taking a personal relationship and making it fodder for a memoir. I don’t like it when ANYONE does it. Maybe I should have made that clearer before.
*shrug* Don’t fucking read it then.
I don’t. My comment was on the article above talking about her memoir.Are you stupid?
Then don’t read the memoir. And don’t read reviews for memoirs if you have such distaste for the subject of said memoir. Or do. I really don’t give a rat fuck how you torture yourself.
Yeah, you are stupid. Thanks for the confirmation.You’re hilarious, by the way.
goddamn you are boring
Did you forget your pills today? Because you are WAAAAAAY over the top right now. I thought you were just being trollish but you’re serious, aren’t you? Do me a favor: Find someone else to be crazy at.
zzzzzzz…
Hmm. I wonder if the lit-bros are reading DFW much anymore. His persona was wounded-sincerity-despite-genius, which suited gen-x and early-oughts hipsters. Hard to give so much credit to his laborious empathy now that we know he was a dick. I loved him like a lot of liberal arts white guys did in 2011, but I don’t think he’s the patron saint of Oberlin dudes anymore. The most convincing contemporary update to “Men Recommend David Foster Wallace to Me” I’ve seen has been “Men Recommend Lydia Davis to Me.”