Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max

A biography on the life of David Foster Wallace offers a profound examination of a writer whose work wrestled with the most pressing existential concerns of late 20th and early 21st-century America. Wallace was relentless, even desperate, search for sincerity and meaning in a culture soaked with irony and media. This took toll a philosophical struggle took on Wallace, whose own life, marked by depression and addiction, became the primary focus for his ideas. The man lived with inner turmoil and constantly needed survival strategies that he lived with.

At the core is the friction between Wallace's intellectual brilliance and his devastating personal flaws. The biography details his complex relationships and manipulative behaviors, contrasting sharply with his literary quest to champion compassion and self-sacrificial attention to others—themes crystallized in his famous Kenyon commencement speech.

It's intellectual insight to overcome personal suffering. Lord knows I’ve integrated this process into my life, and possibly you, too. Unfortunately, his own self-awareness did not grant him a lasting escape from the mental illness that finally claimed his life. It’s a chronicle of a life dedicated to finding a way to "become less alone inside," which, as many people know, is not that easy or simple to do.