Writing out of Loneliness
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Memorialized this past week at New York University, David Foster Wallace, who recently died of an apparent suicide at the age of 46, was brought to fleeting life once more by those who knew him best—those who had received from him, learned from him, studied him, been sustained by him.
There is this line in the New York Times coverage that stopped me just now: "Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was “a way out of loneliness.”
I hold to that, too. I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone.
Your fiction is with you.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/books/24wallace.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin
