Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story

of his genius and complexity. S. Kirk Walsh, The San Francisco Chronicle



                                                                  


I m having trouble remembering when I was last so consumed by any piece of writing, fiction or non Max s focus is, not surprisingly, more or less resolutely on Wallace s life as it related to his art. This decision to strip the story down to its narrative essentials pays off in terms of compulsive readability In providing a more complete sense of Wallace than we ever had while he lived, it makes his death feel more real, somehow more irrefutable. And, for anyone who felt a profound emotional connection to Wallace and his work, there s a strenuously cathartic dimension to this: the experience of knowing him more fully, and of thereby feeling more completely the force and finality of his absence. Mark O Connell, Slate.com

                                                                 




You find it painful, frightening, and, yes, gripping, to read about someone in chronic and severe emotional distress. In writing a chronologically narrated, thoroughly researched, objective-as-imaginable biography, Max has created a page turner. Rivka Galchen, The New York Times Book Review



                                                       




Max s long-awaited bio, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, helps us understand the man behind the words, and the mind behind the suicide [Max] makes Wallace begin to cohere and become more approachable, more real necessary reading if you care about DFW or the cultural moment that shaped him and then felt his impact. Evan Hughes, GQ.com

                                                                 




Documenting the life of a writer as revered and tormented as the late David Foster Wallace is a fraught task at best. D.T. Max has done an admirable job with Every Love Story is a Ghost Story what emerges is a vivid portrait of an artist whose verbal brilliance was continually hampered, and ultimately silenced, by debilitating mental illness. Steve Almond, The Boston Globe

                                                                     




Max s long-awaited biography of David Foster Wallace has been the end-of-summer book for readers of literary fiction. It has inspired countless reviews, conversations, and online outbursts Max somehow manages to tell a compelling story that peels back the public image of Wallace without stripping it bare, creating a portrait of a troubled and gifted man who crafted some of our time s best writing and giving readers a fuller sense of the relation of the work to the life. Samuel Cohen, The Believer

                                                                           




While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace s life and work as we can hope to find. Elissa Schappell, Vanityfair.com




Brilliant and compulsively readable Max s new biography deftly reassembles the life of David Foster Wallace strips away the legend and gives us an all-too-human writer a convincingly intimate and lucid narrative Max is respectful throughout and his account of the writer s final days is devastatingly measured. Taylor Antrim, Vogue.com



                                                              


Full of all kinds of strange surprises, painting the most complete, and warmest, portrait of Wallace yet. Rolling Stone