Don DeLillo came into my life when I was 25. I had heard whisperings of his name by different folk artists I followed and my best friend would mention him and his work nearly every time reading was brought up in conversation. Sometime shortly after my 25th birthday, I wandered into Borders looking for something new to read and there he was, staring back at me in a 25th Anniversary edition cover: White Noise by Don DeLillo. I picked it up and haven't looked back since. White Noise was the defining moment in my adult life. I've always dreamed of being a writer and I lost almost all of that dream when I left for college. It wasn't until 25 that I found myself careening back towards it and White Noise was what threw me back at it full throttle. DeLillo has this way of defining and describing our most internalized fears as a person and as society that it feels as if he's talking directly about you. White Noise is the true embodiment of that. It didn't just make me want to be a better writer, it forced me to take notice of everything around me and realize that being an adult isn't what we've been told. It's not about the house or the car or the kids, it's not about the job or how much money you have (or don't), it's about finding the things in life that make us feel full and to appreciate, if only for a moment, the things that make us truly happy. I go back to White Noise once a year to remind myself how far I've come and to let me know I still have so much farther to go.
My first experiences with David Foster Wallace were stutter steps. Almost in the way that you don't see something until you're truly ready to see it. I tried several times to get through Infinite Jest but was never serious enough about it. Then last year I read DFW's biography 'Every Love Story is a Ghost Story' by D.T. Max and was determined to get through Infinite Jest next. It took me six months to read and I loved every word. The attention it took to read this book, following Wallace through footnotes and a magnitude of characters with fears and doubts as real as my own, brought me out of the haze of passive reading and propelled me into the world. Not just the world that Wallace creates but the real world with which he is trying so desperately to communicate. It opened up my eyes to the lives of other people in our simplest interactions. I read it at the age of 30. It was the alarm that woke me up to being an adult: putting aside the apathy and angst of childhood and becoming a part of society, as challenging as that can be day in and day out. Allowing the world to teach you, to hurt you, to change you is what will push us forward as people and as a society.
