On David Foster Wallace

The Harper’s Podcast

“The reason it’s so hard to write a cruise piece is because of David Foster Wallace,” explains Lauren Oyler, a critic and the author of the novel Fake Accounts. In her recent Harper’s Magazine cover story, she takes on Wallace’s 1997 cruise essay, also published in Harper’s, as she describes her experience aboard the Goop cruise. “But I didn’t want it to just be a work of criticism reckoning with David Foster Wallace’s reputation,” Oyler adds. So her essay goes beyond reputation to discuss “male feminists,” class dynamics on cruise ships, and the tired nature of materialist critiques of wellness in order to—as she puts it in her essay—“unite irony and sincerity once and for all.” Oyler’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/2023/05/goop-cruise-gwyneth-paltrow-goop-at-sea/ Wallace’s essay: https://harpers.org/archive/1996/01/shipping-out/ Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save ● [3:16] Some problems Oyler takes with David Foster Wallace ● [10:08] How the public understanding of David Foster Wallace reflects on the popular understanding of the essay as well as contemporary women’s literature ● [15:41] “The male feminist” and women’s writing in relation to David Foster Wallace ● [24:05] The confusing economic class of people who goes on cruises ● [31:51] On the tired nature of materialist critique of wellness (Goop) ● [46:40] Oyler’s unification of irony and sincerity ● [55:35] “Didn’t anything good happen to you on this cruise?”