For David

David Foster Wallace, 1962 to 2008

Dear David,

We never met you. We only read you, which is a strange way to know someone, and sometimes a closer one.

You grew up in Illinois, the son of a philosophy professor and an English professor, and you kept both of them with you all your life. You were a kid who could really sing.¹ You played junior tennis in the wind and worked out the angles like geometry.² Then you went off and wrote two senior theses at once, one of which turned into your first novel, because apparently one was not enough.³

And then the big one. A tennis academy and a halfway house in Enfield, Massachusetts. Hal, who could not make himself understood. Don Gately, who stayed sober one day at a time. A film so entertaining that nobody could stop watching it. You saw us coming, David. You saw the screens and the wanting and the loneliness underneath, and you wrote it all down, notes and all, so that we would have something to hold.

You said you wanted fiction to help a reader “become less alone inside.”⁴

It worked. We want you to know that. It worked on a lot of us.

You told a room of graduates that real freedom is small: paying attention, and caring about other people in quiet ways nobody claps for, again and again, every day.⁵ You took in the dogs that no one else would take.⁶ You could have been the cleverest person in any room, and what you kept trying to be was kind.

You lived with depression for decades, and you worked and taught and loved through it for longer than most of us will ever understand. You were 46. We wish you had stayed. We wish we could have told you this in time.

So we are telling you now.

We love you, David.

Thank you for the sentences. Thank you for the footnotes. Thank you for taking us seriously. We are still reading, and we are paying better attention because of you.