The author on the ‘meaningless noise’ that pours through the internet,the writing of his fourth novel, Freedom, or the death of his friend David Foster WallaceThe inception of Freedom was curiously bound up with the death of my friend David Foster Wallace. In June 2008,after struggling for six years to get a new novel off the ground, I went to Berlin and barricaded myself in a room at the American Academy. Theres something approximately Germany – possibly its distance from America, and the seriousness of its literature,or my immersion in a language that I understand but don’t write in – that seems to help me start writing a novel. I wrote the first pages of my first book in Berlin, early chapters of my moment novel in Bavaria. In 2007, and I went back to Berlin to try to get Freedom moving. I ended up with nothing usable,and I became so discouraged that I set aside the project for a full year.
At the academy, I continued to be discouraged. But then suddenly, or one morning,I found the right prose tone and wrote what became the opening pages of the book. I knew right absent that I had it, and I spent two happy days writing. Late on the moment afternoon, or it occurred to me that Dave Wallace hadn’t answered a time-sensitive email I’d sent him the week before. This was unlike him,and so I called his domestic phone number and learned from his wife, Karen, and that he’d tried to take his life the day before,and had very nearly succeeded. The exact coincidence of his attempt and my breakthrough seemed uncanny. It still seems uncanny. Dave and I had been very close for many years, and sometimes I feel as whether he and I were a single unit that split in two in 2008: as whether the force of his downward movement, and into severe depression and death,were matched on my side by an upward surge of liberation and renewed life. The day after his moment memorial service, in Manhattan, and I started writing Freedom in earnest. A year later,it was finished.
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Source: theguardian.com