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D. T. Max on Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
Max discusses writing the first biography of David Foster Wallace at Talks at Google.
Quick facts
Science · Medical Mystery
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery
Max traces a rare genetic disorder called fatal familial insomnia through a Venetian family that has carried it for centuries, using it as a doorway into the broader, stranger history of prion diseases — the same class of misfolded-protein disorders behind mad cow disease and kuru. It’s part medical detective story, part family history, part history of a scientific mystery that took decades to even be recognized as one condition.
This is Max’s least-known book and arguably his most ambitious in scope, since it has to make molecular biology as gripping as a family curse. He manages it by never losing the human thread — the Venetian family living with the knowledge that some of them will inherit a fatal inability to sleep — while the science stays rigorous underneath.
BiographyOn my shelf
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
The first full biography of David Foster Wallace, written with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts, and journals, and cooperation from Wallace’s family and friends. Max traces Wallace’s lifelong struggle with depression and addiction alongside his relentless formal ambition, culminating in Infinite Jest, and doesn’t flinch from the more difficult material — his volatile relationships, his eventual suicide in 2008.
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story became a New York Times bestseller and remains the standard biography of Wallace for good reason: Max is clearly moved by his subject without ever writing hagiography. He shows a writer who was frightfully conventional in his ambitions and completely unconventional in his struggles, and he lets both sit next to each other without resolving the tension.
Biography · Theater
Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim
Drawn from a series of conversations Max conducted with Stephen Sondheim in the composer’s final years, Finale is less a conventional biography than an intimate portrait built from Sondheim reflecting on his own work, his collaborators, and his legacy while he still could. It captures a notoriously private artist near the end of his life talking with unusual candor.
Where Every Love Story is exhaustive, Finale is compressed and elegiac — a much shorter book built around the privilege of access rather than years of archival digging. Read together, the two biographies show Max’s range: he’s equally comfortable reconstructing a life from documents after the fact and simply sitting with someone while there’s still time to ask them directly.
Frequently asked questions about D. T. Max’s books
From the bookshelf
“Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.”
— D. T. Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
For more biographies that get past the myth to the person underneath, browse the full shelf.
