In Reetika Vazirani’s World Hotel, published in January of 2002, there’s this poem:

Quiet Death in a Red Closet
Fourteen anniversaries.
Thirteen moons,
A baker’s dozen.
Eleven moves.
Ten attempts.
Nine lives.
Eight spoons.
Seven of us.
Six survive.
Five children.
Four daughters.
Three stay.
Too far away.
In marriage,
Someone had to go.

It’s impossible to read it without thinking about what Vazirani did on July 16, 2003, when she took her own life and that of her two-year-old son. Fair or not, a suicide colors how we read someone. With David Foster Wallace’s death two days ago, his “Suicide as a Sort of Present” has assumed a different tint. It’s a portrait of a perfectionist, self loathing woman identified simply as “a mother” or a “mother-to-be,” that is, from the perspective of her unnamed child. Disgusted by herself, this mom also despised her son, since:

there existed only a very tiny and indistinct separation in the mother’s mind between her own identity and that of her small child. The child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror. Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish, willful, or childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to loathe it.

His story ends:

So it went, throughout his childhood and adolescence, such that, by the time the child was old enough to apply for various licenses and permits, the mother was almost entirely filled, deep inside, with loathing: loathing for herself, for the delinquent and unhappy child, for a world of impossible expectations and merciless judgment. She could not, of course, express any of this. And so the son — desperate, as are all children, to repay the perfect love we may expect only of mothers — expressed it all for her.

In the same book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, there’s also this vigorously appalling fragment, “he loathes his mother and dreams of raping her with her LPGA-endorsed sand wedge and then stabbing her 106 times, etc.”, which, taken out of context, means nothing and everything, since Wallace and no one else wrote it. But literature is literature and life, life, the public author and private person two different beings. And yet, all of writing is self-portrait, as Borges said, but magnified and distorted, like a deeply flawed mirror or child, so that one becomes estranged if not embarrassed by what one has written. Constantly turning to the window, one is forced to mutter, “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.” A little later, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” And yet again, “That is not it at all, that is not what I meant, at all.”
Orbituaries are usually flattering capsule biographies. In that sense, each piece of writing, this one included, is a fitfully sly, generous and desperately vain suicide note.
[to be continued]

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