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This
month, Dorothy Parka takes a much deserved vacation. In her
place as guest writer is HBC staff writer Marie Mundaca.
A long
time ago, I gave David Foster Wallace a birthday card, which
I signed with the last line of one of his novellas, Westward
the Course of the Empire Takes Its Way. The story is about
pretentiously earnest students trying to find a new way to
write fiction, rebelling against their post-modernist professor.
The protagonist wants "to write something that stabs you in
the heart," subjecting the reader to the sort of pain "only
real lovers can inflict." He doesn't get there in the course
of the story, but Wallace ends this 150-page novella with
this: "You are loved." It's a cruel, beautiful, messy story,
and I adored the sentiment so much that I decided to sign
my birthday card to him with his own very detached declaration.
 David
Foster Wallace was a big part of why I wanted to work at Little,
Brown and Company. It was just a strange twist of fortune
that the production people there also get to art direct the
books' interiors. And another strange twist that I had a book
design background. When Wallace published Oblivion,
I decided to design it myself.
It's
a little odd to design interiors for fiction and literary
non-fiction. It's just text—what is there to do? There
are the obvious things, like leaving enough space at the margins.
Basically, the designer's job is to pick a font that enhances
what she thinks the book conveys, make all the text fit in
the amount of pages editorial thinks it will take up, and
decide what to do with the chapter openers and any strange
elements, like lists and subheads. Designing Oblivion
was easy: I picked a classic font that fit a lot of words
on the page but was still easy to read. I wanted to emphasize
the density of the thoughts, but still allow the reader the
opportunity to linger on the page. I decided on generous gutter
and outer margins, and a slightly longer than average lines-per-page
count to highlight the structural aspects of the book. Oblivion
opens and closes with stories that feature giant, imposing
women. They reminded me of caryatids —the columns in
female form that stand outside ancient Greek temples. The
pages are the columns of that temple. The words are what readers
come to worship, meditate, ponder.
I did
not communicate with the author when I did Oblivion.
It was pretty straightforward, and it's LB's custom that all
communication go through the editor. The design was approved
with no changes, the book was set, and we were done.
Consider
the Lobster was a little different. Most of the book was
very typical, but there was one particular essay called "Host"
that required some special treatment. Wallace, infamous for
his footnotes and endnotes, wanted to try something a little
different with "Host." He wanted to stress the immediacy of
communication and the speed of thought that occurred in the
studio where the talk radio DJ John Ziegler worked. The
Atlantic Monthly had already run a version of this essay
and did a spectacular design job, using a format with color-coded
callouts, as if someone had highlighted a script and made
note in the margins. However, there are intrinsic differences
between a magazine and a book. The Atlantic Monthly
used color; we were not going to do that. Magazines are usually
8-1/2 x 11, and we were 6 x 9. We had to figure out a way
to do this essay.
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| A
page from David Foster Wallace's essay "Host"
in Consider the Lobster. |
Wallace's
idea was to have leaders and labels, like a diagram. He wanted
something that looked like hypertext rollovers that were immediate
and at hand. I
thought this whole thing might be a bit much for me to design.
It seemed like it might be a full-time job. I sent it off to
one of my favorite designers, who shot me an email back saying
something along the lines of "There is not enough money in the
world to make me do this."
So I
did it. Had I realized at the time that this job would entail
my spending close to an hour every few weeks talking to my
favorite author ever on the phone, I would have never considered
giving it to anyone else. Mostly we just went over changes
that needed to be made, but initially we had some very intense
discussions regarding the semiotics of the leaders (the lines
going from the text to the boxes) and the tics and the line
width of the boxes and the ampersands. He'd leave me voice
mail messages at work in the middle of the night, telling
me what time I should call him the next day. One time when
I called, I got his answering machine, but when I began to
leave a message, he picked up. "I heard your mellifluous voice,"
he said. Sometimes I'd hear the dog barking in the background.
He was recently married, and he obviously relished saying
"my wife" when he would tell me about upcoming plans and where
I could find him if I needed him.
I always
knew we would work on another book together. I didn't know
that he'd be dead when that happened.
I haven't
worked at Little, Brown for several years, but in late 2008
they were kind enough to allow me to design This Is Water,
the book version of his Kenyon College commencement speech
from 2005. The speech was widely circulated after his death,
both for its incredibly sage advice and its references to
suicide.
Working
on This Is Water was emotionally exhausting. By this
point he had ceased being David Foster Wallace, author, and
had become Dave, a dear acquaintance whom I missed dreadfully.
Spending so much time ruminating on the words that failed
to save him was a bit much. Reading his sagacious words about
mindfulness and kindness were a continuous reminder of what
the world lost. I couldn't do anything else for Dave, and
so instead I fretted over where the mostly sparse text should
start on the page, the thickness of the wavy lines meant to
evoke water, whether the text should be centered or flushed
left or justified or ragged. I went through several designs
before I was satisfied enough to submit one, and that came
back with corrections, as I suspected it would.. While no
major changes were made, tiny adjustments showed how much
everyone was emotionally invested in this book. Everyone wanted
it to be perfect.
When
the book design was finally approved and the pages marked
up, I felt spent, depleted, and incredibly sad. I wanted to
hear that soft voice on the other end of the phone, calling
from Arizona or California, dogs barking, wife calling out
that she'd be right back. I wanted to discuss ampersands and
his schedule. I walked home that day, a rather warmish day
in late November 2008, my head down, staring at the sidewalk,
thinking about Dave. Oblique pink-tinged light cast a strange
glow as I trudged down West 20th Street, past the noisy café,
the cramped police station and the smoky youth hostel. I saw
that something was written on the sidewalk a few doors down,
and as I approached I saw a note scrawled in chalk whose words
made my heart jump with happiness as I read them.
"You
are loved."
(June,
2009)
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