From Times Literary Supplement review by Rozalind Dineen:
The artist-addict bromide is not what it once was. It’s easier to imagine a successful young artist in 2018 with a publicist than a habit.
And [writer David Foster] Wallace was, perhaps, the first artist-addict about whom one could not say “but I don’t really care” while still preserving literary credentials.
Caring is an intrinsic part of Wallace’s work and the effect he wished to have: he addresses a community – no longer the loner artist behaving as though he should be maintained through his otherness.
AA was a defining narrative for Wallace as it is for [writer Leslie] Jamison. In “This is Water” he extolled its precepts without naming them:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday”.
He acknowledged that the artist is held up in a net of understanding and revealed all the lines of equivalence between the addict who produces art and the one who does not.
via Story of thirst | Review: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison
