Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William

I’ve worked with so many wildly talented young writers over the years that I feel qualified to say that there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t. First, a willingness to revise. Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.

“Properly speaking, of course, we cannot call it chaos. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for using it, but people won’t necessarily follow them.”

With sufficient care, that wheelbarrow full of things could become an entire system of meaning, saying truthful things about our world, some of which might have been impossible to say via a more conventionally realistic approach. That system would mean, not by the plausibility or acuity of its initial premise, but by the way it reacts to that premi