A nomad lands in Alabama

I’ve owned three copies of Infinite Jest. The first copy went missing when lent to a friend. The second copy was, believe it or not, a mass-market paperback found on a bargain table. I remember rereading it in the summer of 1999, while doing fieldwork in the western Aleutian Islands. The binding could not, of course, sustain the weight of the text and Copy Two soon fell to pieces. The third copy is the trade paperback that I still own. When I opened it in search of a few passages yesterday, two bookmarks fell out—one from the main text and the other from the footnotes.

I once had a vivid dream of owning a chocolate Labrador retriever named Hal Incandenza.

Since buying my house, in May 2008, I have thought of the essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” every time I’ve pulled out my lawnmower.

I saw DFW read selections from Oblivion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was only a few days after I’d fallen down the stairs at work and I was nursing a rather swollen sprained ankle. Because of the crutches, I was slow to make it to the signing line, and ended up bringing up the rear. It was hot and there was no air-conditioning. I was knitting an intentionally ugly sweater out of extremely ugly yarn from the 1970s, and the guy in front of me in line joked that I should tell DFW that the sweater was for him.

Having spent years of my life as a bookseller, I’ve met quite a few authors, but none I admired so much as DFW. I was a little worried that meeting him would diminish my opinion of him. I only spoke to him for about a minute, and I could tell he was exhausted, but he was genuine and kind. He signed my copy of Oblivion “To Ellen—thanks for hobbling to the reading.”

Last night, when looking for a passage in which Kate Gompert describes depression—the only written description that has ever captured my own demon—I began to sob. My dog woke from his gassy slumber and bounded into my lap to lick the tears off my face. I can’t stop thinking about his dogs.
—Ellen Knowlton Wilson