Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max Page B

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 surprisinglyunsurprised, 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, Wallaceaccepted. 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.
    What Wallace knew about Southern California came mostly