Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max Page A

to get better so that I could exist.” He added that he now found himself in the hands of a doctor he trusted. He made light of some of the revelations to his friend: “One hideous symptom of severe depression is that it is impossible both to do anything and to do nothing; as a devotee of Jumping Joe’s [their logic professor’s] Celebrated Excluded Middle I am sure you can assess that this is an Intolerable Situation.” More seriously the psychiatrist, whom Wallace nicknamed “Dr. Tetemaigrir” (French for Head Shrinker), had, he wrote Washington, “real valid and non-sterile things to say” about depression. The doctor took him off Tofranil and likely put him on a different antidepressant. Wallace was beginning to understand things that had either never been told to him before or that he was only now ready to hear: that he had a biological condition that was with him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t just ignore it. Though he shared his family’s worry that, as Amy says, “his potential as an autonomous adult was pretty much vaporizing,” Wallace began healing, the “festering pus-swollen c[h]ancre at the center of my brain” diminishing, as he wrote to Washington. He apologized for the façade he had been putting up, adding in another note, “You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real ‘Waller’: an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit.”
    Even in the midst of his depression and treatment, Wallace continued to read widely. He picked up Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow
and finished it in eight nights, or so he told McLagan. He wrote as well, focusing as he had not before. The work Wallace undertook now was at a different level. His hope that he could lose himself in the rigors of logical philosophy shredded, he may have felt he had no other choice. He had nowhere left to hide. In the event, he was now able to achieve things he had not before. One result was “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” the story of a young man who withdraws from college with psychiatric problems. Though it was not pure autobiography, the authorial “I” and the “I” of the narrator parallel each other in the story in a way they never would again in Wallace’s fiction; the sense of dismay at being mentally ill is fresh. The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form. For much of his story, Wallace drew on his memories of his recent traumatic breakdowns. His namelessnarrator is also suffering from “the Bad Thing”—his phrase for depression. He has tried to commit suicide in his parents’ house—“a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don’t wish to say a whole lot”—and at story’s beginning he finds himself in a psychiatric hospital. In the ward, Dr. Kablumbus gives the narrator a choice between electroconvulsive therapy and a course of antidepressants. The narrator chooses the latter, but the drug he is given, Tofranil, makes him feel tired and affectless, just as it had Wallace the previous summer. Still the narrator—earnest in the style of Wallace when he first entered Amherst—assures us that being medicated is not so bad. “They’re fine, really,” he claims of antidepressants, “but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously.”
    A fellow patient may come to the rescue, though. In the ward the narrator meets May Aculpa, a young woman likely recycled from the story Wallace had shown Costello the year before. May Aculpa and the narrator chat and flirt, but just as a human connection is being made, the pretty young depressive is discharged, only to die in a car