Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

By: David Lipsky

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain, Danny Campbell

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JASON SEGAL AND JESSE EISENBERG, DIRECTED BY JAMES PONSOLDT

An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour

In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”

Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.

A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.

"If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious."
—David Foster Wallace

great for dfw fans

this book is full of insights and humor for all to enjoy. even non-dfw fans will like this book, but true fans will love it.

Glad to get an insight on such great author

What made the experience of listening to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself the most enjoyable?

It was so well done. It felt like you were hanging out with Lipsky and he was telling you about his times with David Foster Wallace. I wished the book was 20 hours, the time flew by.

Who was your favorite character and why?

I loved getting to hear about everyday things about Wallace. What he liked and a feel for his lifestyle. These things are so interesting because you think about his work you don't think about how he was with his dogs and what songs he liked.

Which scene was your favorite?

The talks about writers, what IJ meant to him after it had been released. Wallace seemed so down to earth and I think that is important in what makes a writer's material worth anything in the end. I am no scholar obviously, but I don't get why he was so embarrassed by Broom of the System.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

I liked how he didn't talk down about many people, he was familiar with the work of other writers I enjoy. I am glad this was made and any Wallace fan will know why on their own.

Any additional comments?

The Narrators did a tremendous job going back and forth.

Mutual strokefest

The structure and methods of this book were really novel and interesting--like one reviewer said, a four-part piece for typewriter or a Tom Stoppard play in two voices. I enjoyed Lipsky's account of a 5-day road trip with DFW, but the flirtation and flattery and mutual masturbation got a bit tiresome. Maybe I tired of the one-upmanship and competitiveness evident in the interview because I'm female and just don't function this way in conversation, even conversaton with a brilliant and talented person (not that I've had that many of those). I thought the two narrators' voices were excellent and helped to flesh out the give and take and the involuted recursiveness of DFW's thinking. He was very guarded about his biographical details (DT Max's recent bio contradicts several assertions made by DFW in this interview) and obviously wanted to control the essay Lipsky planned to write for Rolling Stone (the essay was never published). But I was surprised at the seeming need to impress his interviewer and convince him that he was just like him, when in fact DFW is like no one else I've ever read or heard speak. To his credit, Lipsky acknowledges the flirtation and flattery going on, with little editorial asides, and I guess this is just the way intellectual males talk to one another, with both trying to establish the pecking order without openly engaging in feats of strength. I wouldn't have guessed DFW had such a need to please! or be admired. In the end, this is an interesting interview done in a novel way, but is probably only going to appeal to completist fans of DFW's work. The DT Max biography is more informative and less irritating.

Left me in tears

As an avid DFW fanatic AOCYEUBY was an insightful window into what, for me, was a really beautiful, charming, heartbreaking, and reassuring journey alongside an author who had felt such pain he needed to end his life years before I would ever read his work. A very well done audiobook and I found it to be so touching. And so interesting to hear DFW talk about fans with whom I certainly identify and to hear DFW discuss how it’s weird interacting with them because they feel such an intimate connection and they’re looking for him to reciprocate and that’s just not possible. But during these 10+ hours it is, in a way, possible to share that time with this mind in whom I have found such precious companionship.

Worth it for the serious Wallace fan only

I love DFW, and have read or listened to almost everything he wrote. If you're looking for a Wallace listen, I'd probably go with Consider the Lobster if you're up for non-fiction, or else Girl with Curious Hair or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men if you're looking for fiction.

For those of us obsessed with Wallace, AOCYEUBY is a worthwhile, interesting listen, which provides a great window into the inner Wallace. It also made me interested to read more by David Lipsky.

But for anyone who's not already obsessed with Wallace, I just can't imagine why you'd spend your time on this.