Review: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky

Review: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky

Broadway Books

2010

What a trip that was, too!  Exhausting is the first word that comes to mind to describe this book, but in the same way a good workout at the gym might be exhausting. 

 

I came to this book with little more than the knowledge that David Foster Wallace (DFW) wrote books, but because I had read one of those samples from an online retailer I went for it anyway.  Glad I did now.  Why? Because it’s like listening in a conversation between Lipsky and Wallace, both writers, both young, and both trying to get something from the other.  The maneuvering was fun to watch.  Insights into what it takes to make it in the book world were excruciating.  So if you think you can write this would be an excellent book to read to see if you can make it in that world.  Eye opening, to say the least.

More important though is meeting DFW, and being there to listen to him respond to Lipsky was worth the effort.  He was quite a guy, gone way too soon, in my opinion.  Conflicted, brilliant, and chewed tobacco.  The conversations do not have all the hesitations, ums, and blue stuff edited out.  Seem like a raw transcripts of the tapes.  (Tapes? Seems like so long ago now.)  So now I am tempted to read Infinite Jest which was the book that the road trip mentioned in the subtitle promoted, just to see what the buzz was about.  

Lipsky et. al. did a good thing with this book.  I’d recommend it for the reasons above.   

I received this book form the publishers in return for a review.