Shapiro finally called time on the Q&A session and asked a final question of her own, about the authors’ influences. Wurtzel mentioned Speak, Memory, and then Carr talked about reading Infinite Jest, but said he’d not read the footnotes. “Who does?” asked Karr. “I’m supposed to be in it and I never read it.” Wurtzel made it clear that she had read all of Infinite Jest.
You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.
— David Foster Wallace, the most accomplished and distinctive prose stylist of his generation (and later a member of the editorial board of the Oxford English Dictionary), wrote these lines a few months before Infinite Jest was published in 1996.
