Consider the Sister

Lindsey Adler, at the small bow (via The Browser), with a profile of Amy Wallace. It was hard work being David Foster Wallace’s little sister. It still is. The job of preserving the memory of her brother as a complex, vibrant, often joyful person has fallen to her. It’s been nearly 20 years since his death by suicide, and while the legend of DFW the writer has grown, the story of the human has been flattened to the stereotype of a tortured artist who came to a tragic end. … It’s a massive and impossible assignment to turn around the cruise ship that is David Foster Wallace’s legacy. Amy could simply recede, as many family members of famous artists do after a tragic and untimely end. She could keep the fullness of her brother’s life to herself and stay away from environments where her presence challenges the conventional perspective on him. But she has a lot to say about David, and she wants people to hear it. “I remember that when Kurt Cobain died, people started going back for hints…