You're listening to the London View of Books podcast.

I'm Joanne O'Leary, an editor at the paper, and my guest today is the writer Patricia Lockwood.

She's the author of the memoir, Priestaddy, and the novel No One is Talking About This,

and is also a contributing editor at the LRB.

Her most recent piece for us is about the fiction writer and essayist David Foster Wallace,

who died by suicide in 2008, and is best known for his doorstopper of a novel Infinite Jest,

which came out in 1996.

Patricia's piece is a review of something to do with paying attention,

a novella of Wallace's published posthumously last year by McNally Editions.

But her piece is really a wide-ranging essay about reading Wallace then and now.

What it means to have encountered him in his heyday when he was taken to be a kind of literary guru and moral instructor.

And what it's like to return to him today, especially in the wake of recent revelations about his misogyny and treatment of women.

Patricia, thanks so much for joining me to talk about the piece.

Oh, thank you for having me.

We'll talk about something to do with paying attention in a moment.

But first of all, I want to take you back to Stuart, Florida, sometime in the mid-notes,

when you first picked up Infinite Jest off a bookstall.

Who was Wallace to you then?

And what was it like grappling with that novel?

So at that point, he was strictly an essayist.

I don't remember at what point I picked up a copy of a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.

And then afterwards considered the lobster.

...