The brilliant American writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th, 2008. He was only 46-years-old. For many months prior to his death, Wallace had been in a deep depression. About ten years after Wallace’s death, Dr. David Kessler M.D. wrote an article in Psychology Today reflecting on what may have caused Wallace’s tragic end:
Wallace’s 2008 suicide at the age of 46 devastated the literary community. He was, at that time, acclaimed as the boldest, most innovative writer of his generation … Despite Wallace’s frustration with his inability to complete the book [The Pale King], in some ways his life had never been better. He had married four years earlier and was comfortably settled in California, with a teaching job he loved. Why then did he take his own life?
Wallace’s life offers an example of what can happen when … striving perfectionism, which evolves into relentless self-criticism and becomes coupled with an uncanny ability to analyze the flaws in one’s own analysis … Wallace was caught up by this very loop, which resulted in a despair that ultimately he could not conceive of ever escaping. Yet, swimming upstream through his own torrent of disapproval, Wallace always hoped for more: more achievement, more recognition, more love.
