The Depressed Person
On David Foster Wallace, friendship, and never crying at work
The depressed person confessed that when whatever supportive friend she was sharing with finally confessed that she (i.e., the friend) was dreadfully sorry but there was no helping it she absolutely had to get off the telephone, and had verbally detached the depressed person’s needy fingers from her pantcuff and returned to the demands of her full, vibrant long-distance life, the depressed person always sat there listening to the empty apian drone of the dial tone feeling even more isolated and inadequate and unempathized-with than she had before she’d called. — David Foster Wallace
In 1997, David Foster Wallace wrote a short story called “The Depressed Person,” about a woman whose depression has made her so self-centered that her friends don’t want to talk to her any more. Wallace, as most of you reading this likely know, suffered from severe depression himself, and died by suicide a decade after writing “The Depressed Person.”
1997 was my last year of graduate school, a year I recall only distantly as one of massive creative ferment and incredible loneliness. A prolonged and painful breakup left me vulnerable to getting into one of those endless, heady, ill-advised relationships with someone who made it clear they were not going to break up with their long-term girlfriend but were nonetheless perfectly willing to fuck with my head enough to make me think maybe it could happen. Then I met an older, smarter writer and got involved with him while simultaneously making the mistake of rekindling things with a different ex. What I learned from this experience is that I am never going to explore polyamory because it is exhausting. What I also learned was that I had nobody to talk to about what a disaster my life had become.
Gen X women are hopefully the last generation to be told that if you show any sign of vulnerability in professional settings, someone will shank you. That included graduate school, because creative writing MFA programs are probably the most viciously competitive environments outside of Mixed Martial Arts. I was close to one person in my program, but his own romantic life was in trouble by the time we graduated, and venting to him felt selfish when it was clear he needed an empathetic listener. Later he got sober, and today he has published a lot of books. We both became more stable over time. But at the moment we were both emotionally overheated writers in training who had just finished eighteen consecutive years of school and graduated into a crappy economy. So I learned to keep my problems to myself.
At some point during that same year I was working for a well-known poet (imagine a poet with enough disposable income to have a personal assistant. This scenario is inconceivable to me today.) Around the poet’s house were magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s which I couldn’t afford to subscribe to and my parents did not read. The poet would let me take home the old issues of magazines, and that’s where I read “The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace, in an issue of Harper’s.
My parents couldn’t afford to send me to therapy when I started showing signs of severe depression in high school, which immediately separated my experiences of depression from those of the short story’s narrator, who is in a codependent relationship with her long-time therapist. The narrator is from an affluent family and describes experiences of boarding schools, therapy camps with roleplay, and being used as a pawn in her parents’ divorce that were completely alien to my lower-middle-class-sometimes-plunging-into-poverty experience. But there were warning signals throughout the story about being like this character.
The depressed person of the story’s title is a self-centered nightmare whose relationships with her therapist-recommended “Support System” of female friends consist of the depressed person calling these friends to vent about her own self-loathing and never asking any kind of reciprocal question. When the depressed person’s therapist dies by suicide, the depressed person doesn’t think about why the therapist might have been so successful at masking her own mental health struggles. The depressed person thinks only about how the therapist’s death impacts her. And then she keeps calling her “Support System” and venting about her problems even when one of her “friends” is dying from a brain tumor.
Her apologies for burdening these friends during daylight hours at their workplaces were elaborate, vociferous, and very nearly constant, as were her expressions of gratitude to the Support System for just Being There for her, because she was discovering again, with shattering new clarity in the wake of the therapist’s wordless abandonment, just how agonizingly few and far between were the people with whom she could ever hope to really communicate and forge intimate, mutually nurturing relationships to lean on.
Found this picture on Reddit, of course.
Since his death, Wallace has fallen off of the pedestal he occupied in the literary culture primarily because at the peak of #MeToo, one of his former girlfriends, the writer Mary Karr, revealed that Wallace had been violently abusive to her, to other women, and allegedly to some of his female students. When this information trickled out to the public, the “hagiographic” attitude toward Wallace that one scholar describes curdled into something less worshipful.
What I did not know when I read “The Depressed Person” was that Wallace allegedly wrote it about the writer Elizabeth Wurzel, the author of Prozac Nation, a memoir that likely opened the floodgates to the hundreds or maybe thousands of memoirs about women and trauma that now clog bookstore shelves. And if the narrator of “The Depressed Person” is actually anything like Wurzel rather than a distorted version of her, then Wurzel was likely an unpleasant person to have as a friend because the narrator is both a howling void of need and completely self-centered. Wurzel herself died from breast cancer in 2020, and the only thing I could find that she wrote about Wallace described him rather fondly. So if she knew the story was supposedly based on her, she must have been quite forgiving, or maybe she just wanted to speak to what it’s like to be “born with a predilection for despair.”
The truth, though, is that Wallace was a misogynist, which even his most ardent fans have had to reckon with in the light of revelations about his personal life. And that means that even if Wurtzel was truly the kind of shitty friend who guilt-trips people into caring for her because of her depression, it also means that the writer who portrayed her that way had a history of abusive relationships with women. The main character of “The Depressed Person” is an unreliable narrator of her own experience (albeit in third person), but the man who writes the story and brings her to life was, in some ways, truly repugnant.
But let’s say you read this story as a depressed person yourself, 26 years old, with a history of friendships that ended when people moved away, got married, had kids, found new friend groups, etc etc etc you can insert here the litany of ways in which friendships fizzle in young adulthood and beyond. Basically the lesson of the story is “do not dump your problems on people.” That lesson, though, was coming from a man who had been told most of his life that he was a genius, which in turn allowed him to get away with some truly awful behavior. But we also heard the same thing in school and at home because men who got away with truly awful behavior ran the world. So I and likely many other women of my generation who were also told that the moment you show any sign of emotional vulnerability you are doomed absorbed this lesson and those of us who deal with depression just learned to stuff it down deep, and as we all know now, that is not a great idea.
The cost of that choice was, unfortunately, that those feelings did not have anywhere to go. I have cried once at work in 25 years at my job, and it happened in a heated meeting when a now-retired colleague sharply raised her voice at me and the tears came out before I could control them. To this day I have a very vivid memory of trying to find a place to privately cry on campus and ending up on a bench under the Campanile sniveling into my blazer lining.
Later I’d see multiple threads in the Berkeley Reddit sub called “places to cry on campus” and sigh because Millennials and Gen Z are just so much better at this stuff. In Gen X, we were taught that the woman who openly cries, has panic attacks, or becomes a drain on friends by going on about her emotional trauma is a drag, a drain, or what my high school English teacher charmingly called me, “a black cloud.” That English teacher was later removed from a job at a university due to accusations of sexual abuse, but that’s just a side note (or not).
The point is that nobody wants to be The Depressed Person but also that the way we understand women’s emotions is rooted in sexism. Friendship is supposed to be reciprocal, but depression makes you self-centered because depression is isolating, and this makes it hard to reach out to people and make friends to replace the ones who move away, or the ones who stop reaching out, or the ones who were mostly using you because you are actually the kind of person who would rather help other people than ask for help because you read that goddamned Wallace story at a vulnerable age and it made you unable to open up to people in ways you’re still unpacking thirty years later
However. David Foster Wallace hung himself on his back porch knowing that his wife would find him there, which I would argue is maybe the most selfish possible way of dying, because it insists on imprinting that traumatic image into the mind of a person you ostensibly love. In “The Depressed Person,” he created a character who is awful not because of depression but because of the way a man wrote about a woman’s experience of depression. But he was awful too, and while some accounts suggest he could sometimes be kind or considerate, he also seemed fairly unrepentant about being awful. When I was in graduate school we used to argue about how much a person’s biography should or shouldn’t shape the way we read their work, but if I knew then what I know now about Wallace, I probably would have thrown that issue of Harper’s across the poet’s well-appointed living room and said “fuck that guy.”