He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things.1 The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: "No, look ... you don't need anything more than high school math, that's all I really have." He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I'll always miss him.
1 And let's say them grammatically.
—Zadie Smith
We first contacted David Foster Wallace while we were putting out Might magazine back in 1996. We had read Broom of the System and so asked him if he would send us something—an essay, a story, a note on a napkin. He sent an essay, about sex in the age of AIDS, that was easily the best thing we ever published. I remember it came in flawless, without any errors or punctuation mistakes at all; it was not really editable. But one of our editors dug right in and began red-lining it like it was something by a first-timer. We all came to our senses just in time and realized the man knew more about writing than we did or could.
It was a year or two later that I first met him in person. I was living in New York and working at Esquire; he had just written a short story in the magazine. Adrienne Miller (then the magazine's fiction editor) and I took him out to a diner around the corner. I was relieved that he seemed to know as little about food as I did, or care as little as I did. The diner was a relief to us both. We talked about how he'd grown up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and how I'd gone to college there, how his father taught there, about the pleasures and quirks of east-central Illinois.
There's something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world—and who seems exactly like someone who would have come from your part of the world. He was funny, decent to a fault, and thoroughly unpretentious. He was, as everyone has said and will say, exactly what you would hope; he was the human you wanted writing those books. You knew it within two or three minutes with him. He was an actual human, far more colloquial and normal than you could imagine, given what he engineered on the page.
During dinner he kept a cup right below the table, semi-out-of-view, into which he spit his tobacco juice. Until that time I had no idea he was a dipper. It was hilarious, because it's such a strange habit, and so problematic for any life lived indoors. For a cowboy or baseball player, there's always the dirt to spit on, but for anyone else you always have to carry around a cup full of brown spit. Which is what he had below the table all during dinner. I had to stop looking at it.
A few months later, Dave was the first person we asked to contribute to McSweeney's, thinking we could not start the journal without him. Thankfully, he sent a piece immediately, and then we knew we could begin. We honestly needed his endorsement, his go-ahead, because we were seeking, at the start at least, to focus on experimental fiction, and he was so far ahead of everyone else in that arena that without him the enterprise would seem ridiculous.
Along with his first piece, he also sent a check, for $250. That was the craziest thing: he sent a donation with his contribution. Thus he was the first donor to the journal, though he insisted that his donation remain anonymous in that first issue. I had such a problem cashing that check; I wanted to keep it, frame it, stare at it.
The note he wrote was printed in 8-point type, with a serif font, and was cut so that no paper was wasted. This was before he e-mailed; he was a very late adopter to that method. Until that point, he would send envelopes from Bloomington, Illinois, with one single piece of paper inside, cut so that only the paper that had been used for the note was included. He cut the rest away, or used it for other notes. So you would get a four-inch-high-by-eight-and-a-half-inch-wide note in your envelope. And again, never a word out of place.
These letters in the mail became the main way I personally communicated with Dave. Though I admired him as a man and a writer more than I could ever express to him, we remained professional friends. I asked him to send us any work he could, and we published whatever he sent.
My in-person anecdotes, though few and not deeply evocative, will be posted as the week goes on. But part of the reason we so badly want to hear from those who knew him is that we didn't know him as well as we wished we had. I certainly did not. But even reading the contributions so far has been, however painful, so enlightening and healing and warming, and in an absolutely necessary way. Let's continue.
—Dave Eggers
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