I went to Barnes & Noble today. I’d done some online research and wrote down the names of a few books on writing that I wanted to look at. Then I walked up to the huge Barnes & Noble on 5th Avenue and 18th Street, the academic-oriented one where they sell everything under the sun. In the writing section they had all the books on my list, so I looked them over. But the one that drew my eye was the one that wasn’t on my list: How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead: Your Words in Print and Your Name in Lights, by Ariel Gore.

I leafed through it, twice. I didn’t buy it because I’m trying to be very careful about buying new books after spending so much energy on getting rid of books in the past few weeks. But the title really cuts through all the subtext and gets to the core of what I want.

On the other hand, online I came across this old interview by Charlie Rose of one of my idols, David Foster Wallace (video; text). It’s the first time I’ve ever seen video of him or heard him speak. There’s something off-putting yet sexy about him.

Toward the end of the interview, they talk about fame. And this segment really made me think.

DFW: I did — I did some recreational drugs. I didn’t have the — I didn’t have the stomach to drink very much and I didn’t have the nervous system to do anything very hard. Yeah, I did some drugs. I didn’t do as many drugs as most of the people I know my age. What it turned out was I just don’t have the nervous system to handle it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and —

ROSE: By writing.

DFW: — and realized it didn’t make me happy at all, in which case, “Hmm. Why am I writing?” You know, “What’s the purpose of this?” And I don’t think it’s substantively different from the sort of thing — you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right, and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. “The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.” So that’s why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. It’s just not particularly interesting. It’s — what it is, is very, very average.

ROSE: Yeah. Do you see yourself chasing a brass ring now?

DFW: I — this is what’s very interesting is I — there’s part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn’t really make very much difference to me because I learned in my 20s that it just doesn’t change anything and that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway…

I don’t know why I obsess about fame so much.

Part of it is that I want to do something I love. My therapist has said numerous times that she wants to help me find a career where I can’t wait to get out of bed every day and go to work. I’ve told her a couple of times that I wonder whether this is setting too high an expectation for myself, something I will never meet, something that will result only in disappointment. (The act of getting out of bed in the morning is itself a pain in the ass, no matter what’s waiting for me once I’m on my feet.)

And what I love to do is to read and write, but the only way you can support yourself as a writer is by getting paid for it, and the only way you can get paid for it – at least for the writing I want to do, not technical writing or copywriting – is by, in some sense, being famous.

Or maybe I should learn how to be a journalist? I don’t know.