deeply saddening

Just before we crawled into bed on Saturday night I learned that the day before, author David Foster Wallace had hanged himself in his home. The news kept me awake for a long time.

As a writer, he was intimidatingly talented, the rare kind that simultaneously motivated me to pick up a pen and made the prospect folly. But even more impressive than his ability to find and convey a story was that the personality that shone through his stories seemed so supremely likable. Self-deprecating, bitingly funny, so nice his endless footnotes felt like a conversation that would stretch long into the night out of the wonder of finding someone who gets it, he once refreshingly said that the job of a writer is to make the reader realize how smart they are.

Our loss is, to a much lesser extent, his loss: the lonely and unacceptable death, incrementally, of hope.