In the late spring of 1985 Dale Peterson and the other members of Wallace’s thesis panel gave Broom an A-plus, and Wallace matched Costello double summa for double summa. But he had also discovered something more important about himself — he knew now what he wanted to do. Fiction held him as no other effort had; it took him out of time and released him from some of the pain of being himself. He told his roommate that when he was writing, “I can’t feel my ass in the chair.” On a visit to campus the spring of Wallace’s senior year, Costello bumped into Kennick walking across the college green. “Costello? Wallace’s friend, right?” The professor commanded, “Tell him he must study philosophy.” Costello passed on the message to Wallace, who shrugged it off.
CHAPTER 3. “Westward!”
During his senior year Wallace applied to creative writing programs. It never occurred to him that he could just go somewhere and write: he came from academia and believed in the classroom. Moreover, he knew with his shaky mental state that he needed health insurance, and to get health insurance you needed a job, and the only job a writer could do was to teach, and to teach you needed an MFA.
He sent out a chapter from Broom along with his stellar transcript and his long list of prizes. He was accepted at several programs, among them the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the writing program at the University of Arizona. Iowa was the most prestigious school in the country — Wallace was keenly alert to this, telling Costello it was the “Harvard Law of MFAs”—but it was also the center of the sort of realist fiction that interested him least.1 In contrast, Arizona sent him a tempting letter. “Instead of the ‘guru’ system (which tends to foster a ‘school’ of writing, and a tendency of the student to write for or like one master),” the director, Mary Carter, wrote, “we encourage diversity.” In other words, at Arizona Wallace wouldn’t have to come out writing like John Cheever, as he would almost anywhere else; he could follow his own voice. The program, though small, had a national reputation and the offer of admission came with an $8,000 scholarship. When the Iowa Workshop told Wallace he would have to pay full tuition, the deal was done. He wrote the Workshop with the news. “I don’t have any money and need to go where I can get some financial aid,” he reminded them pointedly. McLagan told him he was lucky to be heading west. The desert was beautiful, the girls extraordinary. At his Amherst graduation Wallace received several more academic prizes, bringing his total awards to ten, likely an Amherst record.
Wallace arrived in Tucson in mid-August. Arizona’s beauty was revelatory to him. The light was different, the dunelike mountains “lunar.” “They,” he told his college friends in an audio letter they sent to one another that fall, “catch the sun in really pretty ways, really interesting ways.” “Accidents in Tucson,” he continued, “are basically people hypnotized by the sun, looking out through the screen.” He thought he could be happy there, amid the browned-out lawns and the cactus-dotted foothills.
He was ready for a fresh start. Earlier that year, he and Perkins had finally ended their relationship. At first Wallace found the breakup a relief, but then waves of guilt followed. He saw that his behavior at Amherst had ruined the relationship with the woman who had stuck by him at his lowest point.
In early summer, he decided to drive back to Amherst from Urbana and pick up Corey Washington, who was planning a visit, and by the time he did he was in a quiet crisis. Like Rick Vigorous in Broom, his imagination had begun to run away with him. Perkins was in Urbana too and the nearness tormented him. What was she doing? he would ask, Washington remembers. Whose car was now in her driveway? Wallace imagined her sleeping with other men. The predicament he was thrown into was not unlike the one brought about by his mother after his first breakdown at Amherst: it came from the same sense, justified or not, that someone on whom he had deeply relied, had betrayed him. They had committed the crime of remaking his reality. Wallace held so fast to his sparse emotional certainties that when they proved unstable, the impact was crushing. Then unleashed feelings of hurt and confusion would go round and round, bending in on themselves, mixing with guilt, until his brain reached a point of exhaustion.
Washington saw his friend withdraw. Wallace spoke softly and soberly, without humor. They watched hours of television together, Wallace seeming to gain comfort from the TV; his friend held his hand and tried to maintain contact with him. Offstage there were conversations between Wallace’s parents about what to do. To Washington they seemed surprisingly unsurprised, but then they had been down this road twice before in the past few years. After two days, they took their son to a local hospital, apologizing deeply to Washington, who took a bus home to Amherst.
Wallace stayed at the psychiatric unit at Carle Hospital for several weeks. The doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression. That he was crashing after an enormously productive spring would lend credence to that diagnosis, but they decided instead to give him Nardil, a MAO inhibitor often used to treat atypical depression. Atypical depression — its key characteristics are unusual sensitivity to social rejection and a quick return to mental health when circumstances improve — was a more welcome diagnosis in Wallace’s eyes. It seemed less a sentence of insanity than the medical acknowledgment of a condition he was already dealing with. But Nardil — Wallace described the pills in a story he wrote in Arizona as “look[ing] just like the tiny round Red Hots we’d all eaten as children”—was an older antidepressant, a 1960s and ’70s staple that came with many dietary prohibitions. He would no longer be able to eat chocolate or drink coffee, nor should he drink alcohol or take drugs. Smoky cheeses and hot dogs were also out, and he was supposed to avoid aged or fermented food in general, as well as liver. If he slipped up, the result would be fierce headaches and potentially dangerous spikes in blood pressure.
The Nardil helped Wallace quickly. By August he was out of the hospital and on a kind of high. On his way to his new school he stopped in Los Angeles to see a young woman he’d been close to at Amherst. Back in college, Wallace had begun a relationship with Andrea Justus, a fine arts major. Justus admired Wallace, by then a storied figure at the college. (In her circle he bore the nickname “the smart guy.”) She had approached him to help her with the language in her thesis, which was about gesture in art. Quickly they became friends. When Justus was given a B-plus by the art history department, Wallace marched into her professor’s office to ask why she hadn’t gotten an A. With Perkins far away, Wallace got more deeply involved with Justus. She loved his talk and his intense gaze — he commented on an eyelash she had pointing off to the side that no one had ever noticed before. The story he told of how he had taken a semester off to cope with the suicide of his best friend particularly moved her. When Justus invited Wallace to stop in California on his way to Tucson, Wallace accepted. In August he came to Los Angeles. Soon after he got to her home in Fullerton, a town in Orange County, Sally Wallace called to tell his friend’s mother that her son was on a powerful antidepressant and had to be careful around certain foods.