Read Online Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky - Free Book Online Page A

fellow whiz who would maybe benefit from a little simultaneous social translation. As long as he persuaded enough people of those different aspects of himself—sort of sending them out on missions—they would protect him on any grounds that needed defense. Done persistently enough, there’d be protection from everything.]
    Michael Pietsch’s presentation. He went to his sales force, at their conference, and said, “This is why we publish books.”
    I wasn’t there. I know he really liked it. And I know he really read it hard, because he helped me—I mean, that book is partly him. A lot of the cuts are where he convinced me of the cuts. But also, editors and agents jack up their level of effusiveness when they talk with you, to such an extent that it becomes very difficult to read the precise shade of their enthusiasm. What’s being presented for you and what they really feel.
    I’m not an idiot. I mean, I knew for them to do this, this long, it really cuts their profit margin, ’cause paper’s so expensive, etc., etc. That they had to really like it. And partly that feels good, and partly makes it feel, I mean, I got fairly lucky. I know this sounds very political. But I think as a house, these guys are—you can find houses where people really love books. And you can find houses where they’ve got a really good hype machine. But to find one that’s got a combination of the two, and that also really happens to like
your
book?—it seems to me I got fairly lucky.
    Sounds like it. But the indications: some months ago? Four months ago, you were saying?
    November. And then things quieted down—and then, ah, sameweek the
Esquire
thing comes out, came out,
Harper’s Bazaar
came out. And I thought, “Oh fuck: there’s just gonna be all this negative stuff about the hype. Those
idiots
for handing out those postcards.”
    [For six months prior to publication, Little, Brown had sent postcards alerting reviewers and booksellers to the upcoming novel. A card with no title; then, weeks later, a phrase like “Infinite Writer” or “Infinite Pleasure.” Then they announced, “David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest.”
]
    Um, I forgot, I had to go to L.A. to do this thing about a Lynch movie. For
Premiere
. It’s gonna come out next fall. It’s called
Lost Highway
, it’s gonna be
very
cool.
    Lynch had his own trouble with getting famous. Twin Peaks, the Time cover
.
    He’d been through a lot before then; he’d been through
Dune
.
    But when I was out there, I would go back to the hotel, and there’d be like four messages all the time, on the hotel machine, of various people wanting to talk to me.
    And I’d been through—I mean, I’d been through three books. I mean, one of them—like a limited edition. You know, like a $500 advance for. And I’d been through some of this, and I realized that, unless the publishing world had changed drastically, there was some sort of … So I think, I think January, when I was in L.A.
    What’s happened since January?
    [Long pause]
    You know what? I think it’s hard to describe, because—this is not going to satisfy you—it all happened sorta so
fast
. You know? I talked to
Newsweek
one week and
Time
the next, and there are likefifteen different people calling up, wantin’ to do articles. And if they weren’t incredibly obnoxious, I would talk to ’em. And then as you know, the fact checkers would call. And then I was trying to work on this Lynch piece, which was very hard and very long. And so I remember, starting at about mid-January, when I noticed I couldn’t be home very much. ’Cause if I was home, just the phone rang all the time. And I remember feeling kind of excited, but bein’ scared about … because I really thought, I was really ready for this not to be liked.
    I mean—have you read it? It’s reasonably hard. There are things about it that are reasonably hard. I was ready for a lot more perceptions I think like what that lady had, that Michiko Kakutani