An Opportunity for Clarity

Ben Gaffaney on David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water”

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In today’s essay, Ben Gaffaney revisits “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon commencement speech, through the lens of his own experiences with rehab, sobriety, and AA. Readers should know that this piece discusses suicide and intimate partner violence. Do take care.

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The Elements of David Foster Wallace

by Ben Gaffaney

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This spring marks 20 years since David Foster Wallace debuted “This Is Water,” his 2005 commencement speech to Kenyon College. Wallace was, it seems, in a good mental place, sober since 1989, and two years away from trying to get off Nardil, a blunt instrument of an antidepressant he’d taken since the 1980s. The story of Wallace’s suicide seems to be purely chemical, rather than part of his life’s narrative: He tried to transition away from Nardil and its brutal suite of side effects to a more modern treatment, then returned to the drug, then found it less effective. He hung himself in 2008.

“This Is Water” showed up all over the Internet in the years after his death. It even reached my parents, who shared it with me in 2012. “He sounds like you,” my dad said.

Wallace and I were both Illinoisans, smart (at varying magnitudes) and obsessed with tennis. He grew up in Philo, Illinois, 10 miles from the main campus of the University of Illinois, where I studied rhetoric. By my senior year in 1994, Wallace was already a big deal in fiction workshops, with students aping his discursive style and making off-putting word choices designed to put a wedge between the writer and the reader, the worst version of Wallace’s early style.

By then, Wallace was at nearby Illinois State. I knew someone who took independent study with him, in which the student produces a few short stories and has a few meetings with the professor. I was jealous, since I was placed with realist fiction writer Jean Thompson, who told me to toss out my more experimental work and never think of it again. At 20, I was not immune from Wallace’s intellectual-jitterbug style, reaffirming my tendency towards irony without the earnestness that comes with wisdom.

So I responded to my father: “No dad. I sound like him.”

In 2019, on the insistence of my wife, my parents came to Austin from Illinois to drive me to rehab. I had just wrecked a second car, this time spending the night in jail for a DWI, and I had spent the year drinking heavily in secret, often blacking out several times per week. My wife and I had a toddler, and we both hoped that hitting my rock bottom would lead me to lasting sobriety. (It did, though our marriage ended anyway.)

It wasn’t my parents’ first trip to rehab. My older brother had gone to a more institutional, hospital-style rehab in his late teens, and he now has nearly 40 years of sobriety himself. My dad was the one who signaled that my marriage was over, when my wife didn’t come to “family week,” where the on-site therapists help you work through the pain you’ve caused. My parents didn’t come to family week either, since they were back in Illinois again, and they’d already done that once.

In 1989, when he was 27, Wallace spent four weeks in detox at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, then moved to Granada House, a sober facility in the Allston neighborhood of Boston. Wallace set chunks of 1996’s “Infinite Jest” in rehab, but those portions of the book ring untrue to me. There’s a romanticization of characters like the tough-love gang member (Ferocious Francis) and the porn star-turned-counselor (Calvin Thrust). Wallace’s brainy writing style creates some remove in lines like: “It turns out the vapider the cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”

Still, it must have felt real enough to addicts at the time, since I remember Wallace taking criticism for violating AA’s 11th tradition: “AA members are encouraged to maintain their anonymity at the level of public media.”

And the characters, while untrue, weren’t false. Sobriety was important to Wallace, and “This Is Water” is, to my mind, the clearest example of that. In fact, he seemed to realize his speech was an opportunity for clarity. From D.T. Max’s 2012 biography of Wallace:

At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about without the frustrating contrivance of the novel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters.

This Wallace, age 43, could directly address overthinkers like me:

[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

To me, that’s a share at an AA meeting. I didn’t realize that until revisiting “Water” in 2025.

My substance abuse rehab included a curriculum for professionals, since it’s not unusual for doctors, lawyers and other ego-driven high achievers to require a different approach to accepting their powerlessness over their drug of choice. People who ask themselves: “How can I need help when I make mid-six figures? It’s part of why I’m so successful, the cocaine driving me forward, or the heroin keeping me still.”

I was not part of that curriculum, and at first I was a little put out. I am, after all, a genius. Did they not know I was the first ever National Merit Scholar in my rural high school in 1989? That I skipped a grade and could’ve skipped two? Why was I in a drum circle with the degenerates after I spent years getting wasted in an office, in a suit, like a professional?

The program wasn’t that granular about who went where. Basically, if you had an advanced degree, you received a different colored notebook. I drunkenly began claiming an MFA in creative writing circa 2007, and never corrected that lie when my wife and I got together in 2011. By 2019 that pretend MFA was just part of my being, but one year at Emerson College (where Wallace taught in 1990; I attended in 1995) wasn’t enough to make me special.

Still, I felt left out, once again overlooked and resentful. I imagined the smart set at rehab getting more advanced instruction. Something cleverer than “Don’t forget: your best thinking got you here,” or “You have to keep your side of the street clean.” Instead, they probably got, “Your addiction deserves a case study,” or “If you stay sober and tell us about it, you’ll probably end up with a book deal.”

While I was in rehab, my wife discovered reams of obsessive thoughts and behavior by reading a decade’s worth of journals full of the AA trinity of adjectives: restless, irritable and discontent. When I read Wallace’s most famous work, I see that same unquiet, as he circles thoughts endlessly, struggling to reach a core truth. Then, via D.T. Max, I see him in early sobriety, chasing after Mary Karr in the worst way possible:

Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no; he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm.

And:

Where the alcohol and pot had held sway, there was now an enormous amount of anger that was not easily acknowledged.

From a 2018 tweet by Karr, reported by Megan Garber in the Atlantic; Wallace:

tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.

None of this is excusable. Wallace was pilloried online in 2018 for his abusive behavior, yet I expect “Water” to make the rounds again in 2025. This makes Wallace a classic flawed helper.

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There’s a Reddit thread Instagram really wants me to see: “People without anxiety — what do you think about when nothing is going on?”

Wallace was fascinated by minds that operated in a different register than his. “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” is a 1994 essay about Austin’s ghost-written biography, Beyond Center Court: My Story. He’s floored by what appears to be Austin’s complete lack of inner life, and the essay is full of examples:

Here’s Beyond Center Court’s Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evert at the 1979 U.S. Open: “At 2-3, I broke Chris, then she broke me, and I broke her again, so we were at 4-4.” And on her epiphany after winning that final: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the U.S. Open, and I was thrilled.”

In 1994, Wallace was still moving away from irony as a perpetual mode of writing, which he later considered destructive. He applied the film criticism term “new sincerity” to fiction, and began interrogating his own intellectual judgment. But in the Austin essay, his conclusion remains incredulous:

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?

By 2005, in “This Is Water,” he’s able to say, in a manner just as flat as Austin’s in 1994, “banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.”

Wallace’s style was overwhelmingly restless, and that never changed, but his focus did. In 1990, Wallace was 28, still showing off, but also in residential rehab at Granada House. His drugs of choice were marijuana, tranquilizers and alcohol, a mixture of drugs I understand, a way to seek quiet.

There’s a testimonial on the Granada House Website that appears to be written by Wallace, in which he notes his resistance to the “radical simplicity” of 12-step programs, and the banal advice to simply keep coming back. The testimonial references 14 years of sobriety (so: 2003) and the perspective to recognize that he didn’t know what he needed in 1989. If the testimonial is fake, it’s a reverential one.

But then, the description of his AA life in D.T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story even feels kind of eye-rolly:

He took the same seat at every meeting. The members loved the way he talked — for many he was the most articulate person they had ever met — and felt his elaborate, run-on narratives of the daily battle to maintain the equanimity that kept him sober expressed what they were thinking, only better.

There’s a guy like that in every home group, and he goes on too long, he makes the same shares with the same tics, and he’s probably a double-dipper, AA parlance for a person who shares twice, which is considered bad form.

The truth is, shares are for the sharers and strength comes from the community. I learned that from a story. In early sobriety, my brother was off alcohol but still smoking weed, committed to the program, but skeptical. He’d been through a hospital rehab, the sort where you rarely see the sun. He must have looked disconnected and cynical during a meeting, because his neighbor nudged him and asked, “You gonna say something?”

“Nah, I’m just listening today.”

“Aha. Consorting with the lesser beings, then.”

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My first connection with Wallace came through tennis. He and I were both Illinois tennis players obsessed with measuring the wind. We were both unpopular players, frustrating opponents who tried to paint the lines, because his home town (Philo) and my home town (Algonquin) were both prone to wind gusts that no shear could ever contain. He was a far better player than I ever was, but I know this experience:

Even with the Illinois wind I never could have won full matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice of losing to a shallow-chested “pusher” because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind.

The quote above is from “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” published in 1990. It was the first piece of Wallace’s I ever read, and I felt a kinship after that. My version of the same experience came from an opponent who, down 5-0 in the third set, shouted: “Just because you’re winning, doesn’t mean you’re better than me.” He’s still right today.

In 1990, Wallace wanted to control the uncontrollable wind. In describing his later junior career, Wallace wrote:

I was now able to use the currents [of wind] kind of the way a pitcher uses spit. I could hit curves way out into cross-breezes that’d drop the ball just fair; I had a special wind-serve that had so much spin the ball turned oval in the air and curved left to right like a smart slider and then reversed its arc on the bounce.

Then all the other boys outgrew him and started powering him off the court. Wallace — who was 6’2” and about 200 pounds as an adult — was a late-bloomer. So maybe he didn’t have the control he thought he did.

Control and acceptance are core tenets of sobriety, and while Wallace appears to have stayed sober from alcohol, his mindset lurched back and forth. After Mary Karr’s marriage ended, she and Wallace dated. It went poorly. As Karr dryly put it in her memoir Lit, minimizing the abuse that came out later, “Years later, we’ll accept each other’s longhand apologies for the whole debacle.”

In 2002, when Wallace began to date poet and visual artist Karen Green, he laid out his entire worst self in writing, so there would be no secrets and nothing to discover, the sort of thing you do as part of your Fourth Step in AA, where you make a “searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself, though you don’t typically share it with your partner. Still, they married in 2004, and while I don’t think Green “saved” Wallace by any means, I believe he finally reached a point where he could participate fully and honestly in a relationship. I hope to get there myself someday.

In 2005, he presented “This Is Water.” By then, at age 43, 16 years sober from substances, he was able to say:

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

The speech is to a bunch of smarties at a well-regarded liberal arts college, but the education, to me, comes from his own battles with sobriety. He stopped drinking in his 20s, but his obsession with gaining the attention of women ruined lives. His certainty of his own intelligence made achieving wisdom hard.

“Education” is why “Water” is so powerful to me as a sobriety text. Portions of it follow the same path as the Austin essay, when Wallace spends 800 words describing the boredom and petty frustrations of being an adult, creating a harried scene in an “over-lit store’s confusing aisles” while trying to get groceries after a long day of work, the checkout line full of people “stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman.”

But it’s a rope-a-dope. He waits till the applause starts before he hits back on that easy judgment of others: “This is an example of how NOT to think, though.”

In 2005, the judgment looks outward, not inward. It’s no longer about how awful people can be and where they deviate from the precision of the world that frustrates Wallace. It’s about the actions people take and don’t take in response.

So, near the end of his life, three years before he died, Wallace told his audience at Kenyon College, “it is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”

Staying conscious and alive is the way you can truly embrace my favorite AA cliché: “Just do the next right thing.” It is unimaginably hard to do this as well, but in sobriety my life has improved.

Wallace’s life improved too. Then it was over.

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Ben Gaffaney lives and writes in Texas. More of his work can be found at “Hopping Off the Bus to Abilene.”

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MORE BEN GAFFANEY:

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Silence

by Grace Hoffman White

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The silence is so still it creaks,
As if you trod upon a stair.
Stealthily you look around—
The edges of the world are bare.

—via Poetry Foundation

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