This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen” (301). “This was his effort to show the world what it was to be ‘a fucking human being.’ He had never completed it to his satisfaction. Max generally steers clear of the “ Was his suicide an expression of generic/metaphysical anxiety?” fray, but his final lines nonetheless linger on an uneasy parallel between life and art: There’s no closing retrospective glance-no depiction of the mourning or eulogies-only the hanging and the unfinished manuscript left behind. The book’s structure reinforces this suggestion of totalizing importance by closing, somewhat abruptly, with the event of the suicide itself. Max’s new biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, suggests the size of his suicide’s shadow: it has become impossible to love Wallace’s work without reckoning with his ghost, how he ghosted himself. “It was just a day in his life,” she says, “and a day in mine.” 3 She folds his death back into the longer story of his life-it was one day amongst many-and robs it of the sense of inevitability that others have forced upon it.Įven the title of D.T. Wallace’s widow, on the other hand, doesn’t talk about his suicide in terms of aesthetic or metaphysical despair.
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