Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide “took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain route.”

Based on firsthand accounts of what Wallace suffered, this seems like an irresponsible account of his death to run unqualified --- though it fits with the rest of the one-note cynicism that runs through the article.

Wallace had a life-long struggle with clinical depression, and was hospitalized in his 20s. He was for years on a regimen of Nardil, a third-line medication for treatment-resistant depression. The major depressive episode that preceded his suicide appears to have been triggered by an effort to wean himself off the drug.

Mental illness is a real thing. Just as Steve Jobs cancer didn't make him a martyr to tech and Keith Haring's AIDS didn't make him a martyr to art, succumbing to clinical depression doesn't make Wallace "Kurt Cobain" or his death a "career move".

The whole article bugs me, with its shrill hipsterism, a literary version of Courtney Love's "REM's important work was done before they signed to IRS". On a limb: I think the article itself is doing the same thing it accuses the world of doing by rewriting any sincerity out of the stuff people like about Wallace's writing. This despite the fact that in addition to being by all accounts kind of a dick, Wallace was also apparently just a "treacly" kind of dude, as the essays he wrote in Normal, IL indicate.

I agree; furthermore, I think the author skewed Franzen's take to be more cynical than it was:

I imagine the side of David that advocated going the Kurt Cobain route speaking in the seductively reasonable voice of the devil in “The Screwtape Letters,” which was one of David’s favorite books, and pointing out that death by his own hand would simultaneously satisfy his loathsome hunger for career advantage and, because it would represent a capitulation to the side of himself that his embattled better side perceived as evil, further confirm the justice of his death sentence.

This is not to say that he spent his last months and weeks in lively intellectual conversation with himself, à la Screwtape or the Grand Inquisitor. He was so sick, toward the end, that every new waking thought of his, on whatever subject, immediately corkscrewed into the same conviction of his worthlessness, causing him continual dread and pain.

Franzen's take, IMO, was less suicide as final career move and more suicide as final act of self-loathing and rejection of last remnants of positivity.

I think the difference between the quote you've highlighted and the one in the article speaks for itself. Thanks.

Maybe it's just me -- and I never met the man -- but I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW. It boggles my mind that someone could miss or misbelieve that.

The way that "This is Water" speech/pamphlet is brought up in particular horrifies me. Hindsight granted, it's always read to me as someone who, stuck in a deep, dark hole for so long, has given up on finding a way out. Blaming himself for being there in the first place. Standing so close to an answer, but unable to see it. And we know how the story ends.

It's a feeling I know well, and I'm routinely shocked how people without (I assume) first-hand experience with depression can completely ignore the darkness there, and see something banal or even encouraging.

I don't love the Kenyan College address as much as a lot of people do, but the idea that it's treacle, or a depressive's accounting of the tribulations of going to a grocery store (and one wonders: how can it be both?) seems like horseshit. To me, it seems like a pretty straightforward recapitulation of the ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy, which Wallace probably had more than a passing familiarity with.

To answer your rhetorical: It can be both because depression makes boring things terrifying in a way non-depressed people find boring again. shrug

Anyway, I don't want to go too deeply into this, so I'll just say you're actually not far off from what I'm saying. What saddens me about "This is Water" is the fact that it's so close to something that might have been really helpful to him. He's talking about these daily experiences, and noticing how he's feeling. He feels bad. That's good; feeling bad helps.

And what he thinks next is... You have a choice of how to feel. Think about everyone who feels even worse. You can decide what you care about. Don't think of an elephant.

That isn't CBT, nor anything therapeutic-- that's depression, at its most pernicious and deadly.

I love the Kenyon address more than any other piece of writing I can think of. I don't read any particular complexity or symbolic meaning into it other than the seemingly revolutionary idea that all the people in the world with you are pursuing their own goals, and are harried by their own demons, and are basically doing the best they can in the circumstances they're in, so maybe you should be a little bit charitable to them, in your own mind, and by extension charitable to yourself.

The attitude taken toward that speech, and by extension toward that sentiment, by the smug asshole in TOA makes me almost fighting mad.

> I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW.

Just wanted to repeat that, because it's how I feel as well. It's why I consider his writing to be among the best I've ever read; not because of the hyper-literacy (although that's pretty fun too), but because of the level of insight effectively shared.

This is similar to how Elliot Smith died. He was getting off his medications for whatever reason. Apparently, he was also getting off booze, red meat, sugar, etc and I guess was trying to live a more "natural" life.

There's probably something to be said about how we handle weening off drugs or switching drugs for the depressed. Suicide becomes a real risk during these periods. Its no more romantic or meaningful than this. Withdrawal and being without a drug that keeps depression away leads to bad things sometimes. Apparently, an artist can't even die without his or her death being seen as an artistic statement or part of the 'suffering' of being a creative person.

"He died because of low serotonin leading to suicide," doesn't sell a lot of ad impressions I guess.

Wallace was also intensely smart. To kill yourself as such an intelligent person is to be an implicit advocate for suicide. It is, inherently, a selfish move, and it is very unlikely he would not have recognized that.

I have struggled with similar issues my whole life. It is right to empathize with his depression, but it is just as disrespectful (in my opinion) to prescribe any thoughts to his suicide. Everyone experiences different aspects of depression and he was no different. In his world, the lack of opportunity or interest may have literally killed him.

I think it says much more about you to say that this judgement is unnecessarily harsh. Franzen undoubtedly loved his friend, even if they had a strange relationship through their passion for writing and Americans. I truly believe that this is, at least in part, Franzen's effort to pay respects to his friend.

I think he articulated his thoughts about suicidal depression with incredible lucidity in Infinite Jest. This passage is etched in my memory. It haunts me and in a way I found it a bit of a relief that despite ongoing depression issues, I could not relate:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

It's nicely written. How do we know if there's any truth to it? Does it draw on research into suicide messages? Does it draw on interviews with people who survived a suicide attempt?

Suicide kills many people and while I welcome some discussion of suicide it's important to be aware of the stuff that tries to be truthy and the stuff that feels good.

It probably does draw on research. He had a lot of engagement with the mental health system. He suffered from depression. His experience with clinical psychology leaks into a lot of his writing.

Suicide as a consequence of diagnosed clinical depression is no more "a selfish move" than the fatal stroke that concludes a bout with metastatic cancer.

Thank you. I hear suicide referred to as "selfish" so often that I can hardly understand what it means.

Ascribing value judgements on people suffering from very personal diseases doesn't help and may actually prevent folks with suicidal ideations from getting help.

If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

> If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

Agreed, but this is very different from an objective analysis of why someone killed themselves.

No, the problem is that selfish moves are looked down upon. Ignore that all moves are selfish, at their root, but if you're acting purely to end your own experience without considering the consequences, that is by definition selfish.

I agree with your point. But as far as I know Franzen was one of his real life friends (in the New Yorker essay Franzen says he was given DFW's ashes to spread) and maybe has special insight into this particular situation.

The circumstances leading up to Wallace's death have been documented by his family in great detail, in fact-checked reported stories. Just prior to his suicide, Wallace suffered an intense, crippling bout of depression, during which his parents flew to Claremont to watch him. According to the same accounts, in the year before that, he was weaned off Nardil, suffered a relapse of depression, tried to resume his old Nardil regime, and found the drug had become ineffective.

I'd agree with you if it had been 'run unqualified'——but in the very next paragraph the author seems to (strongly) disagree with that hypothesis.

I would also say that 'shrill hipsterism' is a nebulous complaint.

Agree with everything else!

Sorry, I assume everyone works from the same definition of "hipsterism" as me, but that's obviously silly. Think of it as encapsulating: "I don't really like this artist. Lots of normal people like them, now. But they like them for the wrong reasons." The "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" trope, with an added sprinkling of "and did you know he supported Republicans?" (Yeah, thinking maybe the book about the first McCain campaign might have been a tip-off for you there.)

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