“Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning,” David Lipsky writes in an introductory note to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, the 310-page transcript of his 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace. That’s well-put, but it won’t prepare you for the experience of reading the conversation that follows, which took place over five days at the end of Wallace’s Infinite Jest reading tour, and is just now being published. The specter of Wallace’s 2008 suicide haunts this time-capsule dialogue, and I imagine that some of the author’s fans will approach the book, consciously or not, with their guards up. I found myself annoyed for the first 100 pages – bothered by Lipsky’s literary scorekeeping, and by Wallace’s neurotic approach to media attention (Lipsky works for Rolling Stone) and fear that he’ll become the kind of person who appears on game shows (huh?). But these turned out to be small complaints, hardly enough resistance to stop this book’s soul-crushing sadness, which soon enough came rumbling through.

It’s scary to peer into the mind of a man who later hanged himself, especially when much of what he wrote seemed to take life so seriously. But one thing that the book makes clear is that Wallace’s vigor and awe-inspiring writing was, in some ways, part of a deeply intricate personal effort to beat death. As he warms up, Wallace talks about an earlier suicide attempt and his stay at a halfway house. Throughout, he reveals how hard he’s worked—on his writing, sure, but also on the way he thinks. For him, the avoidance of depression became an art form.

The book has some elements of good fiction: blind spots, character development and a powerful narrative arc. By the end, no amount of sadness can stand in the way of this author’s personality, humor and awe-inspiring linguistic command. His commentary reveals how much he lived the themes of his writing; all of his ideas about addiction, entertainment and loneliness were bouncing around in his head relentlessly. Most of all, this book captures Wallace’s mental energy, what his ex-girlfriend Mary Karr calls his incomparable “wattage,” which remains undimmed.

Michael Miller