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David Foster Wallace: consider the exaggerations

On the film-related website The House Next Door, Glenn Kenny, a former editor at Premiere, reminisces about working with David Foster Wallace on three articles for the magazine. One of those pieces, about the Adult Video News awards, also appeared in Wallace’s 2005 essay collection Consider the Lobster. As Kenny recalls:

We worked very hard on the cut, and then there was the whole matter of legal, which was very weird, because there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s invented, starting from the dual pseudonym which he then expands into a conceit of first person plural narration. There are the characters of Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba, who were invented characters that were also composites of myself and Evan. Legal was like, “Oh-kay … Harold Hecuba’s trifocals winding up in cleavage of Christy Canyon and then never being seen again?” Obviously, that’s not what really happened. It was more like, Jasmine St. Clair got Evan into a choke hold at a party one night. But we said they should let it go because: “Neither Evan or I care about the fact that we’re Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba and … the writer’s a very big deal!”

Er, the piece was billed as non-fiction in both the magazine and the book, right?

Perhaps Quillblog is too much of a purist, but it’s disheartening to learn that Wallace apparently subscribed to the David Sedaris view that strict truthfulness is for lesser mortals. It’s also pretty dismaying to see a major magazine knowingly allowing falsehoods as long as (a) nobody’s likely to sue, and (b) “the writer’s a very big deal.”