A fan letter to David Foster Wallace

(This piece can also be found in my book Four Essays about Four Modern Books.)

April 1, 1998
David Foster Wallace
c/o University of Illinois

Dear Mr. Wallace:

My name is Jason Pettus, and I'm a writer in Chicago. I have recently been reading your book of nonfiction, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (I am perhaps three-quarters of the way through it) and I have decided to write you a fan letter, a document telling you how much I have been entertained and moved by the book thus far.

The story of how I came about your book is rather a long and winding one and I'm afraid will take a bit of explaining.

A. I am a writer mainly of novels. I have four completed, the first of which is a fairly simple love story entitled Dreaming of Laura Ingalls which was published last year by a small press in Chicago named GAD Publishing Co. Although not nearly as popular or well-received as your books, I can proudly state that it has in six months sold half its print run of 1000 copies with almost no press and virtually no formal publicity or promotion (GAD, as most small presses, being incredibly strapped for finances, almost going broke just in the very act of printing 1000 copies of a trade-paperback book), and which has garnered an almost fanatical response from a handful of people, admittedly most of whom were already friends of mine but in some cases were actual and complete strangers, which filled me with elation and was one of the reasons I've decided to write this letter. My fourth novel, a sexually-graphic book about the Internet and the relationships that people form over it and which is entitled t.w.o.h., is currently being considered by an actual big-time east-coast publishing company, the name of whom I hesitate to mention for fear that it might cosmically come back to haunt me and end up jinxing said consideration. Suffice to say it is not your publishing company and this letter is not a thinly-veiled plea for you to help me with said consideration.

A(1). I have just read what I've written so far and am afraid I've already given the wrong impression. I am simply trying to establish that this letter is being written by a fellow working and publishing author, not a wide-eyed yet sincere undergraduate still struggling to get his first short story finished and gagging at the idea of writing an entire book, not a glassy-eyed slack-jawed potential stalker (who admittedly would usually much rather develop an obsession over a pop music star or movie chanteuse but still can be a potential threat to even intellectual writers). For the life of me I have no idea why it's so important in my mind to establish this fact to you. But it is.

B. I am also a writer of personal nonfiction. The gulf between your career and mine widens even further at this point, in that the majority of my assignments are for small, independently-produced popular culture magazines usually run by slackeresque people around the same age as me (29): "Zines," as the more astute of my generation call them. The most well-known of these zines I've written for is Darby Romeo's Los Angeles-based Ben Is Dead, which last year was culled into a nationally-released book entitled Retro Hell which had tons of hype and promotion but unfortunately didn't sell very well at all. Other commissions have been for magazines even smaller and more marginal than this, including MOOjuice, riot nrrrd, Tunnel Rat, Static Inc., magazines with funny names and lots of clip art for illustrations, magazines which afford little to no pay and for which I write simply for the pleasure of getting published and the pleasure of knowing that I am helping my friends who are the ones running these magazines.

C. So. Last year I wrote a 20,000 word essay entitled "Slacker Wedding." It is the story of a wedding I attended in Columbia, Missouri, my old collegetown (I was born and raised in a small town outside of St. Louis). It was the wedding of a friend of mine from the seminal midwestern band Ditch Witch in which the members of many other seminal midwestern bands attended, along with various other underground movers-n-shakers. I had a very strange experience while back in my collegetown and started writing about it, which resulted in the essay.

D. Upon returning to Chicago my booking agent Greg Gillam read the essay. (Oh, I've forgotten to mention that I'm also a spoken word performer and this actually is where I have gained the most notoriety, having appeared on National Public Radio twice now, performing at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, headlining the Albuquerque Poetry Festival, and placing second in the nation at last year's National Poetry Slam. I always forget to mention this because I don't really consider my poetry "writing" at all, but instead a fun excuse to shout into a microphone, get really drunk, and hit on women in public.) Greg immediately pointed out to me the eerie similarities between "Slacker Wedding" and an essay he'd read of yours in Harper's magazine about the Illinois State Fair, including but not limited to:

D(1). A propensity for impossibly long detailed sentences which are typically magazine editors' worst nightmares;

D(2). A strictly non-journalistic belief that the writer of the article is as important as the subject of the article;

D(3). An uncanny ability to take the flotsam and jetsam of our American pop culture and somehow pull incredibly serious and profound conclusions out of their sum;

D(4). The annoying habit of delivering essays which are five to ten times the length originally commissioned;

D(5). A personal style of writing that somehow pulls every reader in, no matter what type of person they are, and makes them feel an affinity for the writer, his personality, his quirks.

Greg rather forcefully suggested that I quickly become a reader of your work, including the novel Infinite Jest which had recently been released and was garnering fantastical praise at the time.

E. I unfortunately and rather apologetically have to make the public disclosure at this point that I had no interest in reading your work when Greg made the suggestion. I had read the reviews of Infinite Jest, I had seen the things being written about your work, and I had seen the types of people who were fans and carried the book in and out of the myriad coffeehouses in Chicago where I and my friends lurk. I had the mistaken assumption that you were a high-falutin' type of writer, an author of impossibly complex, poetically-laden, chocked-full-of-arcane-metaphor, typically-academic-self-indulgent novels. And I am not a fan of these types of novels, I have to admit.

F. Nonetheless I fully trust the instincts of Greg, who is not only my business agent but also my personal friend, as well as much more well-read than I and a great source of new enlightening work in my life. So the next week I bit the bullet and bought Infinite Jest, which I planned on starting as soon as I finished the current novel I had been reading, the name of which eludes me now.

G. Greg asked if he could borrow the book while I was finishing my current reading. I of course agreed.

H. It has now been exactly a year since that incident and I have still not seen the book. Every few months I ask Greg of his progress. He typically says, "Well, I've gotten a little further into it. But it's one of those books that... well, it's one of those books where you have to read about fifty pages and then put it down for like a month. Fifty pages of Infinite Jest is like reading an entire novel of someone else."

I. Nevertheless I was undaunted. Later in 1997 I ran across a copy of The Broom in the System at a used bookstore on sale for a few dollars and decided to pick it up. I quickly ingested the first fifty pages and discovered that what Greg had said is indeed true: reading those first fifty pages was like reading an entire novel (hell, reading simply that story between that couple that paranoically slips between made-up fable and true confession without me ever knowing for sure which it was -- even that was a novel unto itself). Happily exhausted, I put the book down and (Confession #2) have not picked it up again.

J. Greg, knowing of course that our similarities lie not in our novels but our nonfiction, was especially adamant about my purchase of A Supposedly Fun Thing. I however, being perpetually broke and also politically opposed to the supremely ridiculous mark-up conspiracy of hardcover books that the entire publishing industry seems to be a part of, refused to purchase said book until said book was released in paperback form.

K. As I have to imagine you are already well-aware, the paperback version did finally come out, and last month I bought the book.

Whew!

So as said before, I've been reading through the book and find it not only creepily reminiscent of my own writing but also so fantastically good that it is directly influencing my own writing that I'm doing while reading it (witness for example the format of the above story, a fact which I'm sure has not escaped your attention and has you either goofily grinning as you read or angrily shaking your head back and forth. In fact, every ten minutes or so I have to physically stop myself from adding footnotes to my letter, which would admittedly be pretty pathetic of me and would also guarantee that you would come to Chicago and find me expressly for the purpose of smacking me silly).

I began with the essay about David Lynch, since coincidentally he has been a big influence on my work also and which I was also introduced with Blue Velvet while I was in college and spent an entire evening with my friends sitting and discussing into the wee hours. I moved on to the essay on television and American authors, followed by the infamous Illinois State Fair article which was my favorite at that point. I am now about halfway through the title essay, the one about the seven-night Caribbean cruise Harper's sent you on, and I have to say a curious thing has happened to me in the course of reading it, a thing that happens at small isolated spots in my life and which has not happened in quite a while: I literally do not want the story to end. I literally want to be able to know that I could pick up the story on and off over the course of my life and never reach the end. It is always at once a joyous feeling and a terrible one, knowing of course that the story does eventually reach a conclusion. I have been so moved by this emotion in the past that there are several novels out there which I have literally read four or five times and still not read the last ten pages, just so emotionally I know that there exists some part of the story that is still an unknown to me. Strange, yes. I'm dying to know how they end.

The act of writing fan letters has become exponentially more important to me as I grow older, as my own writing becomes more serious, as my own reputation as a writer becomes larger myself. When I was at the age when most people are expected to write the majority of their fan letters throughout their life (namely the span of approximately 10 to approximately 18 years old) I had no interest in it at all. Perhaps it was growing up in a weary postmodern age, knowing full-well that my letter would not be read by the addressee but a poorly-paid studio flunky instead and relegated to a growing pile of addresses which will each receive xeroxed form letter and blurrily-autographed black-and-white glossy photo. Maybe it was the realization that I would have nothing to say to these people that thousands, maybe millions of others had already said (and pretty vapid stuff at that: "Ms. McNichol, I loved you in Little Darlings. You were just so hot!"). I don't know. Maybe just the utter pointlessness of it all, the star-worship, the "message in a bottle" aspect. I just wasn't interested.

But as I've grown older and my writing has turned from a hobby -- something I did while pursuing a degree in fine-art photography -- into a full-fledged career -- an activity that overwhelmed my photography and crowded it out of my life for good -- I found the urge to write fan letters becoming larger. I discovered that the act of writing these fan letters turned out to not just be an expression of joy and awe but indeed a primer. I learned how to specifically determine what exactly is it about these artists that I love, so that I could start applying these lessons to my own work. Writing fan letters has actually made me a better writer. And not only this, but the finished letters have turned out to be rather astute literary criticisms of the artists themselves, to the point that I have had several of my "fan letters" printed in the aforementioned zines as an introduction to these writers for their readership. (In fact, the also-aforementioned zine Static Inc., upon hearing of my plan to write this very letter, asked if they could publish it sight unseen. I have to imagine that I will agree.)

Here is a list of the fan letters I have written, in the order I've written them.

Gary Gygax, founder of the gaming company TSR, Inc. and inventor of the role playing game Dungeons and Dragons. This was the only fan letter written before college, and was pretty much forced on me. In seventh grade a rather clever English teacher came up with the idea of having all of us in class write a letter to a so-called "expert" of a particular field, asking them all kinds of questions about their field in that demanding-yet-endearing way that only junior high school students can. I of course being a D&D freak (as any self-respecting nerd in the early 1980s was) decided to write to Mr. Gygax and ask him various detailed questions about game rules and inconsistencies in combat charts. Mr. Gygax was incredibly gracious and wrote back, answering all my questions in hand-written blue ink across a cream-colored piece of TSR stationary (little dragon on top as you can imagine), even including my original letter of query in case I had been a dunderhead and forgotten what questions I had originally asked (I had).

Bill Clinton, president of the United States. It was 1992 and Mr. Clinton's elective victory had fairly overwhelmed me. I was writing a comic strip at the time for my student paper, the University of Missouri Maneater, and I wrote my fan letter in the form of a five-panel comic, urging my readers to do the same. I actually mailed the strip, along with a letter of explanation. I felt good about writing, even knowing that there was no possible chance on God's Green Heaven and Earth that it would ever ever ever reach Mr. Clinton. Sure enough, we found out that during the same month I mailed my letter, the White House received officially 1.7 million pieces of mail from private citizens such as myself. Surprisingly, four months later I received a formal thank-you from the White House, an exquisitely-expensive looking piece of parchment personally thanking me for taking the time to write and reassuring me that whatever subject it was that I wrote about was tallied in some sort of vague "complaint/virtue" computer bank. However, they did misspell my name, making me wonder if other typographical errors occurred and that my letter praising the National Service Corps was actually filed as an obsessive rant against, for example, a woman's right to choose. I xeroxed the letter and ran it in my next comic strip, saying "See? See?" (I also ruminated on the idea that if they were using such expensive paper to answer 1.7 millions letters a month, we were all going to be in big trouble.)

Greg Bills, author of Consider This Home. A book I randomly chose from the library one day, I found the story very moving and emotionally joyous. Even though I was now fully into the concept of fan-letter writing, I still had a paranoid mistrust in sending said letter to the company in charge of printing and distributing said work (and still do, thus this letter arriving to you via your campus address at the University of Illinois). The book jacket said that the author lived in an obscure town in northern California, so I simply called directory assistance and received his address, fully aware of the scary stalkeresque qualities of such a move but trusting my judgment that my letter would be sincerely nice and not creepy. Mr. Bills truly surprised me in his response, which was to personally handwrite a letter back to me, telling me how incredibly pleased he was to receive my letter and answering all my questions about writing with much more detail than I could have imagined. All in all, a totally positive experience.

Liz Phair, writer and singer of the albums Exile in Guyville and Whipsmart, both on Matador Records. A move of which I am still morally divided, I decided to write to an honest-to-God pop star, one who invariably receives thousands of letters and probably reads very few of them. Still, her albums meant enough to me that I felt the need to go ahead and write, at least to explain to myself why I enjoyed them so much, just possibly also to explain to her. This was the first of my fan letters to be reprinted in a magazine, and was also the piece I read on my first NPR appearance. Naturally I received no response.

Kristin McCloy, author of Some Girls. This is my absolute favorite book about New York I've read yet, a story that so completely captured the feeling of chaos and being out-of-control that I myself felt after spending a month there during my college years, deciding if this would be my destination after graduation. I actually found her address on one of those websites that act like big national phonebooks. I wasn't sure if it was the correct Kristin McCloy, but I figured How Many Kristin McCloys Could There Be in Manhattan, Anyway? and went ahead and sent it. To this letter I have also never received a response, and to this day am still not sure if I reached the correct Kristin McCloy or even if the address was her current one.

I myself, between my photography and my writing, have now received 12 fan letters, over both paper and email. They have, each and every one, touched me in a very quiet, very profound way that I never expected. To know that something I did compelled a complete stranger to put brain to hand, hand to utensil, to risk the inherent humiliation and suspicion of being a humble and untalented patron, to know that this person was so moved by my work to overcome intellectual inertia and take that time and energy to write simply to say, "Wow did I dig your work"... Well, I find that I cannot adequately describe the emotions it conjures in me. Deeply personal. Deeply moving. A complete and utter justification of why I became a writer (natch, a public creator in any realm) in the first place. Which is another reason I don't nearly feel bad or guilty anymore about writing fan letters. Why, in fact, I find them even more necessary now, knowing as I do how they make the creators themselves feel.

I feel this deep-seeded desire now to spend several pages telling you in exact detail what it is I like about your work, why I find it so powerful and entertaining and moving and creepy and funny and wow wow wow. But I realize that it has been done countless times already, sometimes also in the public forum and usually with much more eloquence and grounding in literary theory than I could possibly pull off. I am beating my brain, trying to figure out something I could tell you about your writing that no one else has told you yet (or at least not that many people have told you), some nugget of insight that exactly explains what your work means to me but in a way that is fairly new for you to hear. I guess I could say this, for all that it might mean: You have finally given my own work a context. Before, people would ask what type of (nonfiction) work I write, and I would have to stammer out a "Well, it's sort of journalism but not really, kinda like personal essay but well not really personal essay well actually it's a kind of, well no, it's a literary exposition without the big words, uh, hmm, jeez, well..." and now I can say, "You know... it's like David Foster Wallace," and I get that knowing grin and that sly wink that says "Ah-hah." I hope you take that as the compliment that it's meant, and I also hope you understand the amount of misunderstanding and ridicule my nonfiction is given by the mainstream press and how profound and inspiring it is to see you make a success of it, opening the door to all of us finally.

Well, this letter's gotten long enough already so I should probably get going. I have enclosed a number of things for your perusal.

1. A copy of my published novel, Dreaming of Laura Ingalls. I am always a little embarrassed by it, knowing how much my writing has improved since its publication and seeing how incredibly many scenes could have been better-written. Nonetheless there are several small charming parts and people seem to enjoy it.

2. A copy of Slacker Wedding, the essay which originally garnered the comparison to you and led me down the path to this letter.

3. A copy of the first nonfiction piece I wrote after being exposed to your work. It is a review of the novel Girlfriend In A Coma by Douglas Coupland, and it is significant for yet another strange incident of coincidence of which I thought you would be amused. I actually wrote this review (which is in reality an essay about the death of postmodern literature and a 'manifesto' of sorts for the new anti-irony that is slowly pervading the American contemporary canon) before reading your essay on television and American authors, which explains almost the exact same subject almost ten years ago. After reading your essay I discovered that you and I arrive at almost the exact same conclusion by the end, without either of us being aware of the other's essay (and I have witnesses who can back this up). I found the coincidence very enjoyable.

Lastly I would like to simply thank you for writing the work you do. It's very unusual and you take a big emotional chance by writing in the manner you do (which you continually make reference of throughout the essays, this fear that people 'won't get it' or that you haven't 'written enough' about the subject for the amount of money spent by magazines to get you to write the article). It's important for you to know that from me, from at least one person out there on the earth, I have completely gotten what you've been saying. Your work is important to me -- and on top of that (perhaps even more importantly), it is immensely entertaining. You make me laugh out loud in public on el trains which gets me strange stares from my fellow passengers. You make me think about things in a way I never thought about them before. From one writer to another... from a fan to a creator... I sincerely thank you for creating. I hope you continue to do so for a long long time.

Jason Pettus

Copyright 1998, Jason Pettus. All rights reserved.