Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.  

Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right. 

“Watching television with David was an interactive experience,” Amy says. The two children weren’t content with what was on offer. Often, they would invent new dialogue for the characters extemporaneously.

“That was one of our hobbies,” Amy says. “We just thought, whoever’s writing this, it could be so much more interesting.” 

David identified as the Road Runner and told Amy she was his Wile E. Coyote. He had the speed, the tools—and the upper hand. She was left with only her wits to try to keep up with him, but of course she never could. The lot of Wile E. Coyote was to follow the Road Runner hopelessly, never to catch up. 

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. 

Amy, who lives in Arizona, is now the only living member of the nuclear Foster Wallace family. James (a philosophy professor) and Sally (an English professor) moved from Urbana to Arizona in 2012. James died in July 2019, and Sally died just over a year later in July 2020.  

The grief over the deaths of her brother and then her parents is a constant companion. 

“Nearly every morning of my life, as a fully grown adult woman living a full adult life, I wake up and I’m back in my childhood bed,” she says. “My mom is making breakfast and David’s in his bedroom and it’s so vivid. Then I open my eyes and it’s like nope, that’s all gone.”

Amy’s own children are adults now. She says her eldest is now a writer as well. (Amy asked me not to describe them, to preserve their privacy.) They were old enough to have strong memories of their uncle, and they bear a strong physical resemblance to him. David’s death was a very public wound for a mostly private family. 

In 2001, David published a piece of fiction about a man grappling with suicidal ideation. He wrote, in part: “I apologized for whatever pain my suicide and the fraudulence and/or inability to love that had precipitated it might cause” his family. To some extent, he foresaw the shadow he would cast. 

Years after David’s death, their father asked Amy to write a book about him from her perspective. He asked her to make sure the people who raised him got a say in his memory, too. 

Amy decided a book would be too invasive—but she came to understand that she had a responsibility to talk about her brother beyond the legend that was partly of his own fashioning. She has given radio interviews, appeared at a conference dedicated to David’s work, and has spoken to me at length about the person who teased her, protected her, alienated and embraced her, and eventually broke her heart.

“I do feel that it's kind of incumbent on me to let the world know what a very normal person he was,” Amy says. “And that he was mostly happy, generous—and extremely funny.”

Amy has a knack for making you feel, very quickly, like you too knew this brotherly version of David, knew the sincerity of his often oddly shaped affection. 

My own connection with Amy came as the result of my insecurity around David’s work, not the sort of deep, life-defining fanaticism that one often encounters in the cult of DFW. Generally, I have viewed his work the way I have at times felt about Salvador Dalí—we’re all humans with the same general set of blood, guts, and brains. How could these people pull so much more out of themselves than the rest of us? 

In many ways, this envy has stood in the way of my own appreciation of David’s writing. It’s great, profound, and will never be repeated. But how did he know so many words? What’s the deal with that syntax? Why do I write in plain, gray English while his work hits my eyes like Technicolor?

In April 2025, I emailed Amy out of the blue. Here is what I said:

“I'm hoping that you might be willing to be interviewed about your mother and let me learn more about her life and work. I have always had a hard time getting past my envy of your brother's vocabulary, and I felt a little bit better about it when I read a bit about Sally. 

“So, naturally, my curiosity turned to her and her life. I'd love to write a real feature piece about Sally.” 

Amy and I spoke at length over the following weeks. She suggested I buy a copy of her mother’s textbook Practically Painless English. I read it on the subway and felt immediate clarity upon reading just the first few pages. 

In a section about verbs, Sally laid out an exercise: 

Practically Painless English isn’t just a textbook for people who want to learn to speak proper English. It’s a guide to using language with personality. If Strunk and White offer a guide to frictionless diction, Practically Painless English demonstrates how to stand out within a traditional framework. I probably would have been a much more interesting writer if I’d been raised by a parent who felt so strongly that storytelling should contain detail, whimsy, and flair. Then I realized that Amy was raised by just such a parent, too. 

Eventually, months after our first conversation, I reached out to Amy again. This time my curiosity turned to her and her life. I asked her if I could write a real feature piece about her. 

In the course of subjecting Amy to many, many hours of conversations about herself, her brother, and my own writing life and hangups about it, I found someone who is as entertaining as she is earnest. Scrutiny around David’s upbringing is inevitably scrutiny of her own upbringing, though hardly any of those critics care to understand her experience—or even know she exists. 

She carries that family trait of delighting in absurdity. She hasn’t deified or demonized her brother despite the persistent desire in the literary community to do one or the other. One afternoon, as she was detailing how David watched television, she described just how long she had to sit with him on Saturday mornings before the start of their cartoons. 

“Well, no one ever accused your brother of brevity,” I responded, anxiously. I wondered where the line was between respecting the memory of someone and treating them like they were a real person whose peculiarities were worthy of note.

“Or patience,” she said, upping the ante and putting me at ease. “He bounced off the walls in those days.” 

One of the ways that Amy protects her brother’s humanity is by showing how his anxieties seemed to travel through a prism and shoot out at unexpected angles. The gloomier results are well known, but there could be humor, too, in the fears provoked not just by his anxiety but by his own ethic of deep care.

She recalls David had an obsession with sharks—which she believes stems from a book called Shark Attack that lived in the bathroom they shared for a portion of their childhood. 

Many years later, Amy went to study abroad in Australia. The water was warm there, and she was enjoying herself at the beach regularly after spending her childhood in the landlocked Midwest. Back in the United States, though, David kept thinking about the sharks. He sent letters reminding his sister how to spot them in open water. There was money, too, because he was distraught at the idea that she might wind up short on resources while out on her own. Amy was fine, but David was determined to protect her, in his own way.

“He’d sign off his letters to me with a picture of a shark fin,” Amy says. “Then there’d be a little stick figure. Oh my god, it was great.”

Amy says the last time she and her family spent significant time with David was on a vacation to Stinson Beach. 

“When any of us were in the water, he'd be standing on the deck with binoculars scanning for fins,” she recalls. “He was so terrified of sharks and he didn't stick a toe in the water.”

Before he was the most revered and studied contemporary American author, DFW was just someone’s older brother. Amy didn’t see him as DFW, the public character. But she can talk at length about the person she grew up with.

In 2024, she found herself in Austin, Texas, sitting in the university library where her brother’s archives are stored. Matt Bucher, who runs the International David Foster Wallace Society, had asked her to be the featured speaker at that year’s conference. Many of the attendees were there for fine-grained analyses of David’s writing. Presenters included Tim Personn, a literature professor from the University of Victoria, who wrote a dissertation titled, “Fictions of proximity: the Wallace Nexus in contemporary literature.” Another panel included Dr. Corinne Scheiner, a comparative literature professor at Colorado College. Her academic page says: “Her current project is on the abject and its role in the production of selfhood in the fiction of David Foster Wallace.” 

Amy asked the conference organizers not to record her keynote speech. She felt that she should offer something exclusive for the people who were willing to travel to Texas in July to honor her brother. But Amy wasn’t there to break down the production of selfhood in her brother’s work. Instead, she told them personal stories about her brother that they hadn’t heard elsewhere—and read aloud some essays he wrote in the sixth grade.

After her keynote, Amy saw a man walking toward her from across the room. He had a large, David-like frame and wore a white bandanna. He seemed nervous. Amy didn’t know what to expect. He shook her hand—and kept shaking it, not saying a word. Minutes passed, it seemed like.

“The longer I held his hand, the more I just felt love,” Amy says. “I started wondering, is this [connection] going back and forth? Or is this just coming from me? Because the longer he held my hand, I realized that he really, really loved David.” 

Eventually, the man simply thanked her for her presence at their convention. Her testimony meant something to this group of people who still comb through her brother’s work looking for entertainment or comfort or a deeper understanding of the world. She brought his memory to life for a crowd who needed to feel it.

Amy has now found a friend and confidant in David Lipsky, one of the last people to get a genuine look into David’s life off the page. 

Over the course of a now-infamous days-long car ride, David opened up to Lipsky—a writer at Rolling Stone—about the severity of his emotional distress. It was the first time he was explicit about his suffering, but it wasn’t made public until after he died.

The Lipsky interview is a third-rail topic because maybe, DFW fans believe, it could have been an intervention. His family and friends had been intervening in his extreme mental health struggles for nearly his entire life. Jonathan Franzen, his friend and fiercest competitor, was often by his side near the end of his life, too. But what if the general public had known about the extent of David’s suffering before he died? 

But “what ifs” can act as a protective mechanism for people who have to live with the painful reality that someone they cherished truly felt he could no longer tolerate his own suffering. 

“What Amy is fighting against is an understandable tide of the culture,” Lipsky says. “When a writer dies, it feels like you should read their work as a puzzle. It’s a way to find an explanation for why they died.”

“When he died, it was such a shock because I had no idea that he was actually so depressed,” says Bucher.

Bucher, who has also become a friend to Amy, might know David’s work better than anyone—he was part of a community in the 1990s and 2000s that tracked down his magazine writing, and he now publishes the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies. 

“In retrospect, it seems foolish to not have realized that this was all thinly veiled in his writing,” Bucher says. 

“Amy is brave, and what she’s doing is unenviable,” Lipsky says. “Imagine her position: You are going to be getting attention for something that you don't necessarily want to be spending a lot of your time on, which is the private feelings of mourning about your brother.”

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 and clues in his songs,” Amy says. “When people started to do that with David, I was infuriated and grossed out. His whole life wasn’t an allusion to ‘I will off myself when people least expect it.’” 

The letters he wrote to his sister—which she keeps private—were playful and absurd. In the company of the people who knew him best, his brightness was memorable alongside his darkness. He was still, in all the ways that a sibling can be a friend and a foe, Amy’s cartoon-obsessed big brother.

Amy was the first person to serve as David’s competition, the sibling who first showed an interest in writing fiction. Eventually, David asked her if she would feel comfortable with him trying it, too. 

“He came to visit me at college and sat on my roommate’s bed,” Amy recalls. “He said, ‘You know, I know that fiction writing has always been your thing and I don’t want to step on your toes. So I want to ask: Do you mind if I try my hand at it?’” 

Privately, Amy thought: “Oh, how adorable. Go for it.” Eventually, they both submitted work for a fiction writing contest at Amherst—the Borden Freshman Prize—and David won. As Amy continued to write and share her work with David, he realized that they were going to run into a serious problem: They sounded too much alike.

“For a while I was like, wait a minute, this is my voice too, asshole,” Amy says. “But then when he got there first, I realized my work would always look derivative. I wouldn’t have written Infinite Jest, but we were spoonfed the same instincts by our mother.”

Their writerly voices came from a childhood spent in the home of academics. There would be dinnertime discussions of syntax and linguistic precision, led by Sally and her practically painless English. 

The kids would also welcome guests at the parties James threw for his colleagues in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois. David and Amy first had to serve hors d'oeuvres—then they were encouraged to participate in the conversations with the other professors.

“We were raised to feel as if we could certainly converse with adults,” Amy says. “We got positive feedback from the philosophers anyway, so that kind of enabled us to have a more grown-up voice in our heads.” 

Ultimately, Amy chose not to pursue a professional writing career. She applied that signature Foster Wallace syntax to her work as a public defender. Amy really does sound like her brother when she speaks—the same penchant for vivid detail (see: scratchy green couch), the same piercing precision. 

Just listen to her as she describes her brother’s childhood bedroom. It’s like some place that could have existed in Ken Erdedy’s delusions: “His walls were covered in these horrible stills from horror movies—like there's one scene where her brain is falling out of the back of her head. And I remember that really vividly. And then there was one of two hideously burned bodies, and it was captioned ‘toasted ghosties’ and that just kind of grossed me out. Then we’d meet in there to watch The Price Is Right.”

The Wallace children were conditioned to captivate an audience. David found his among disaffected literary-minded Gen Xers. Amy found hers, much later in life, while facing the jury box. She now credits her storytelling skills for an above-average rate of acquittals. 

Despite their early intimacy and Amy’s willingness to be David’s sidekick, the relationship between the Wallace siblings was often tense. David suffered from emotional highs and lows even in adolescence. Amy can look back now at her mercurial brother with deep compassion, but companionship with a person whose emotions are beyond their control can be a bruising experience.

David trusted Amy. It was Amy—and no one else—whom he asked to proofread Infinite Jest. This was a monumental task that entailed his mailing her hundreds of pages of the manuscript at a time. She scrutinized every word, every sentence, every plot device of that book, but she was perplexed by one part of the assignment: Everything was already in its proper place.

“I was going crazy because there was nothing wrong with it,” Amy says. “No typos, no misspellings—nothing. And finally, on page, like, 682, I found a comma splice. I thought: ‘Thank God.’ I was so relieved to circle it.”

Amy wanted the book that would become her brother’s masterpiece to be exactly as he intended—but she is relieved that he ignored one significant piece of feedback she gave him upon finishing the manuscript. 

“I told him, ‘You’ve got to lose those end notes. No one’s going to bother,’” she recalls with deep amusement now. “That was my contribution to 20th-century American literature: I tried to talk David out of the thing that really made Infinite Jest stand out.”

For all her work, Amy received a nice payment from her brother—and a brutal snub as well. When Infinite Jest was finally published, she asked him to send her a final copy. He told her to buy her own.

He was serious, too. It wasn’t clear to Amy why her brother had gone so cold toward her after asking her to collaborate on the book. She decided to silo off the slight to maintain her relationship with her brother. 

Amy did make one major change in the wake of this insult, though: She stopped reading her brother’s work, reeling from the pain of having been involved in the making of his masterpiece, only to be shoved aside at the very end. 

It was fraught territory for Amy. She admits that she felt “incredible jealousy” that David became the full-time writer. For a moment, she was an adjunct English professor at a community college in Tucson. She pivoted and worked as an executive at a homeowners association management company, and then later went to law school. While her work as a public defender was interesting and fulfilling, she still thought about the career her brother had and she did not have. Writing had been her first passion, too. 

Amy doesn’t go into details about the dynamics of her relationship with David after Infinite Jest was published, but she does allow that she thinks her brother was “crushed” that she wasn’t reading his subsequent work. He died before she changed her mind. It is one of her deepest regrets. 

“I’m really not proud of my jealousy—and what it cost me,” she says. “But I’m human.” 

“Nobody’d ever done anything bad to me, every problem I ever had I’d been the cause of,” says the narrator of “Good Old Neon.” Published in 2001, when David was on the cusp of 40, it’s one of his most celebrated stories, and the most personal of them all. The narrator is a man in his twenties named Neal, a creative associate at an advertising firm in Illinois. The voice is distinctly David’s—full of neatly drawn tangents and unconventional phrasings that still make perfect sense. Neal is self-aware but lost in his own delusions. He is disgusted with himself for being a fake—someone whose many profound achievements are hollow because he was so self-absorbed and at times cruel to people who loved him. Early on he details the things he tried to cure himself of his own fraudulence. The desperation is so extreme it becomes awkwardly amusing:

It’s the next part that brings you up short, reading it today. David/Neal writes: “I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.”

Amy read the story only after David’s death. It seized her and pulled her under like—well, like some warm-water shark. She says she can never read it again. It wasn’t just because the story was the account of a man trying to justify his own suicide. It was because it was, in part, about her. She was certain of it.

Academic interpretations tend to gloss “Good Old Neon” as a meditation on consciousness or empathy or the “philosophical problem of other minds.” But on a more basic level, it is a story about a guy’s relationship with his sister. Her name here is Fern, and a primary source of Neal’s sense of unworthiness is his memory of mistreating her, in the way siblings often do. Neal was adopted by Fern’s biological parents, but the two were raised as brother and sister. As Amy read, she noticed details that reflected the Wallace kids’ lives. 

For one thing, Amy has lighter hair and lighter eyes than her brother did. And while she is diligent about maintaining her privacy, to the point of not wanting to share details about her appearance, she says she saw something of herself in the physical descriptions of the red-haired, green-eyed Fern. But there was another detail that made Amy fully believe “Good Old Neon” was about their relationship. 

As a kid, Amy spent time on farms the way her brother spent time on tennis courts. She eventually owned a pet pig, like the kid in Charlotte’s Web who cared for Wilbur. It hit her, as she read “Good Old Neon” all those years later. That kid’s name is Fern.

Oh no. Oh shit, she thought. She finished the story and “couldn’t draw a real breath for a half hour,” she says. “There were too many personal details in that story for me to discount its meaning.”

Amy wonders now if “Good Old Neon” was David’s way of trying to figure out if she was still reading his work after the Infinite Jest ordeal. If so, he never got his answer. 

In the months leading up to his death—seven years after “Good Old Neon” was published—Amy didn’t have the opportunity to intervene. She says she “desperately” wanted to see him, but was repeatedly told to wait a little bit longer until he felt better. She is tormented by her regret that she did not just ignore these instructions and storm her way in.

“David knew that I could take one look at him and know what his plans were,” Amy says. “He knew that I simply would not have left until something had changed.” 

Amy has come to accept David’s death as what Lipsky dubbed “a medical tragedy.” He’d been emotionally intense and distraught his entire life, but he’d placed a bad bet by tapering off of his antidepressants, and he no longer had the tools he needed to fight off his depression. He was ill, and his medication had stopped working.

But Amy has to live with the permanent pain of what did happen—to her, to their family, to the people he’d met as an adult, and to his readers. She doesn’t have the opportunity now to ask David if she was the basis for Fern. She only has inferences, and an intuitive knowledge of how her brother expressed his care (even if it was often shrouded and indirect). Being David’s sister always meant being an attentive reader.

From “Good Old Neon": “Without going into much explanation or argument, I also told Fern that if her initial reaction to these reasons for my killing myself was to think that I was being much, much too hard on myself, then she should know that I was already aware that that was the most likely reaction my note would produce in her, and had probably deliberately constructed the note to at least in part prompt just that reaction. I also told Fern that I loved her very much.” 

In the years after David’s suicide, Amy began noticing something she’d never given much attention: the roadrunners that are native to Arizona. Suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere. And in that part of the country, they are: in urban areas, in the suburbs, across the area where she and her parents had chosen to live. The birds were background characters in her everyday life. 

But grief throws a long and unforgiving shadow, and soon enough the birds were evoking in Amy memories of her childhood: those mornings spent with her hyperactive brother and the color bars on their 1960s television in Central Illinois.

The scratchy couch is long gone, the shark book discarded, their parents no longer here to share the weight of her sorrow. Yet, her brother’s taunting had found her once again. 

“I thought to myself, ‘David, OK. I get it,” Amy said in a sigh of resignation. “You are the Road Runner.”

Lindsey Adler is a writer living in Brooklyn. There is no evidence to prove she is not the real Elena Ferante.