a very small piece of shit
david foster wallace is dazzling of course, at least on the page, but it’s a performance, not so much writ large as gargantuan, and where his depression is a raped-by-psychic-Bedouins madness, my real heroine, or should i say kindred spirit, helen garner, just feels like a very small piece of shit and is surprised to learn that not everyone feels like that. but both writers can move me tears with their humanity. and so it was when i read that garner’s ambition was to write prose that doesn’t read like writing, the exact opposite of david foster wallace. if that had been his ambition he wouldn’t have found it necessary to kill himself.