Was David Foster Wallace a selfish manipulator?

[noname223]

This is not me speaking. This was his former best friend Jonathan Franzen. I like DFW texts a lot. But the persona DFW seemed to live a lot of demons inside himself. I think Franzen was really angry about DFW. There is a video of BigThink where he says DFW's work would be overrated. This was 4 years after his death. It does not really fit to the things he said about his work before DFW ctb.

Here is the source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen


Here is it: "He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend … If you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more loveable — funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies — than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him."



"David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing or formal contact with him took his rather laborious hyper-considerateness and moral wisdom at face value"


"To deserve the death sentence he'd passed on himself, the execution of the sentence had to be deeply injurious to someone. To prove once and for all that he truly didn't deserve to be loved, it was necessary to betray as hideously as possible those who loved him best, by killing himself at home and making them firsthand witnesses to his act. And the same was true of suicide as a career move, which was the kind of adulation-craving calculation that he loathed in himself and would deny."


"while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him."

Here some remarks which I read in different articles about DFW. He sleeped with a lot of female fans I think he called them a very pejorative term like sluts. I cannot remember exactly. There are a lot of accusations how bad he treated women. Mary Karr said Wallace wanted to kill her husband (because he was jealous) and stalked her son. She called him a misogynist.

I am not sure how I shall think about Wallace. He had his demons. But I really really appreciate his writing. He seemed to be severly suicidal for some decades. I think this is somewhat of a excuse to act like a dick. If this was the only thing that brought him through the day...Something I don't understand. He had a lot of self-hatred. But imo for the wrong reasons. He should not have been so hard on himself. But it was pathological. Probably he should have not hated himself at all. However the way he treated women seemed to a little bit sick. And if Franzen says the truth this also seems to be problematic. Maybe I should not judge. I did not know him personally. I think other family members and friends are not as critical as Franzen. I will do more research to have a better picture of it.

What do you think? Is being severly suicidal an excuse for this behavior (if it is true)?

 

[Xanabby]

Johnathan Franzen seems like the self centered one to me. Just another moralist on a high horse

First of all, we don't owe life to people just because they love us it's silly. They don't go through mental health problems instead of us, they will never be able to do anything to ease it, it's nobody's fault it's just a fact. Some people don't want an existence full of mental health problems and it's their right to put an end to their own suffering. DFW had agency and free will over his own body, a true friend would have understood that.

As for loving strangers more than friends seeing what so called friends have to say about it I would have chosen a stranger over Franzen too. Better a stranger that gets you than a friend that envy you (because for me it's envy for his status, for the fact that he will be supposedly overrated).

CTB at home while not living alone was not the best idea though but I remember how one of my impulsive attempt was uncalculated and really like a hot burst of "I have to do it" and I was at home. Non suicidal people just don't understand how the urge to die can be just as strong and in some cases comes as naturally as a will to live.

 

[Superdeterminist]

These allegations could all be true. I doubt he was any kind of perfect saint, who is? I'm not desperate to defend Wallace from these criticisms, equally though they may be exaggerated and coming from people who just disliked him. I don't think being suicidal is any excuse, I think he probably would have said so himself, if you caught him in a sober moment. What I do know, is that we all do bad things that hurt others, inescapably. As someone who never had to be the victim of his worse behaviours, it's easy for me to take such a neutral stance. For his actual victims, perhaps not so much.

 

[noname223]

Johnathan Franzen seems like the self centered one to me. Just another moralist on a high horse

First of all, we don't owe life to people just because they love us it's silly. They don't go through mental health problems instead of us, they will never be able to do anything to ease it, it's nobody's fault it's just a fact. Some people don't want an existence full of mental health problems and it's their right to put an end to their own suffering. DFW had agency and free will over his own body, a true friend would have understood that.

As for loving strangers more than friends seeing what so called friends have to say about it I would have chosen a stranger over Franzen too. Better a stranger that gets you than a friend that envy you (because for me it's envy for his status, for the fact that he will be supposedly overrated).

CTB at home while not living alone was not the best idea though but I remember how one of my impulsive attempt was uncalculated and really like a hot burst of "I have to do it" and I was at home. Non suicidal people just don't understand how the urge to die can be just as strong and in some cases comes as naturally as a will to live.

Maybe I am too biased because I like DFW's work a lot. But he tried a lot in order not to ctb. He even tried ECT. Wallace stopped his antidepressants due to severe side effects and Franzen even blamed Wallace for that which is quite unfair. This might have killed DFW that he stopped his antidepressant. I read he feared it stopped him from writing (creativity) and other good reasons.