I didn’t hear the news till I opened an email from a friend that said “grieving Wallace” that was right below yours that said, simply, “fuck.” It’s a horrible blow. From the reports I’ve seen, he hung himself, and his wife found him in their Claremont home.

I’m stunned, really at a loss. I keep thinking of the time that my girlfriend Angel and I met him, in  January 2007, at a reading he did in L.A. He read a little piece out of Consider the Lobster, the piece about getting the news about 9/11 (“The News from Mrs. Thompson’s”), and he was just so warm and intimate (as well as, as you said, filled with talent, humor, intelligence, and HOPE) that the whole crowd (at least 500 of us) seemed to lean toward him in order to feel closer to him. In the question and answer session, what I remember most is that he winced so much, as if certain questions or even words seem to literally bite into him, hurt him. Wallace is—I guess we now have to say was—a big guy, tennis-player tall and beefy too—but he seemed unbelievably vulnerable up on stage. If you knew his books at all, you knew that that vulnerability, that utter familiarity he felt with dread and despair, underlay all his writing. I just didn’t think, or never allowed myself to think, that it would end this way. He had recently married when we saw him, and the little glances he made toward his wife during the reading and during the Q&A were so sweet that I felt heartened that he’d finally found someone to share his pain with. After the reading, we got our books signed, and we talked a minute or two: he was friendly and unpretentious, as you’d expect, and we had our picture taken with him, which I’m looking at now: he’s in beat-up jeans and a corduroy shirt which he wasn’t aware had opened up a little at the waist to reveal a bit of belly: it’s touches me immensely right now that he was so unaware of how he came off.

The friend who wrote me said he felt like he had a friend in Wallace, and I feel that too, though I didn’t know him.  He seemed like someone who would understand anything you had to tell him, who comprehended not only the manifest strangeness of the culture he chronicled but the intimate facts of the hidden life—since he wrote about both with such incredible power, unrivalled originality, and lovely humor. (I don’t feel that way about any other writer except Salinger, in fact.) Why did he kill himself? Jesus, Jesus. Whatever currents carried him to the heights of Infinite Jest, or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, or Oblivion may have carried the waters of a depression and dread so deep that it couldn’t help but ultimately engulf him. I don’t know. Sometimes I felt, in the midst of reading some of his more probing explorations of consciousness (some of Hal Incandenza’s interior monologues in IJ, or the Kafka-esque burrowings into labyrinthine self-consciousness of “The Soul is Not  A Smithy,” “Good Old Neon,” or any number of things in Brief Interviews) that I was in the presence of a writing consciousness that was dangerously overloaded with awareness and self-awareness, that Wallace was so flooded with experience that he couldn’t defend himself against it. (His fiction was his defense.) Henry James talked about being the kind of writer “on whom nothing is lost.” Wallace was that kind of writer, but he showed how dangerous James’ dictum was, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, when exposing yourself to “reality” is a much different thing than it was to a guy in a book-lined study in London in 1884.

But this is literary talk. Why did he do it? Maybe his wife knows, maybe nobody does. Right now all I feel is weakened by the fact that he’s not here, that he’s not going to be here anymore to see and share his vision of the world, one which you and I and so many other people cherished. I’ll never forget the sheer joy of discovering him in Harper’s, in his fabulously hilarious piece on taking a cruise liner. It made me so happy that someone could be so smart and self-deprecating and funny: he seemed ridiculously talented, and I walked around for days marveling about the change in the literary weather. He was, like his character in IJ, incandescent. Now that light’s gone.  This is a grieving that will take some time.