If only...

...‘The David Foster Wallace Reader’, by David Foster Wallace

Also there from the first page is Wallace’s biggest subject: depression. And knowing how his own story ends makes many of the pieces extracted here difficult to read. “All this business about people committing suicide when they’re ‘severely depressed’ ”, he wrote in “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”: “We say, ‘Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!’ That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they’ve already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they ‘commit suicide,’ they’re just being orderly.”