Cindy here. I’ve purposefully avoided talking about David Foster Wallace’s suicide for a few days. It made me very angry at first, mostly, and writing angry things when others are grieving is never acceptable — even on the internet. (Full disclosure: when I first heard the news via Twitter, my very first thought was that he was a victim of the L.A. commuter rail accident.)

I was actually not going to write anything at all, until I read Michiko Kakutani’s piece (‘an appreciation’) in the Times today. Book critics, authors and book lovers are all … prickly people. Kakutani and DFW fans and DFW himself are/were perhaps the pinnacle of such pricklyness. I was brought to the article by an incensed fan (how dare she …! was the sentiment — she couldn’t STAND him!), but what greeted me was a honest and sad and lovely eulogy that illustrated the professional complications of creativity and criticism. And anyone who’s ever attempted to hoist Infinite Jest during reading sessions on planes or subways without being fully engaged in the prose certainly knows what Kakutani means when she said the book was “in need of editing” and “unnecessarily long” and “lack[ing] discipline.”

Anyway — Bruce Weber’s obit proper in the same paper then shaded my peevishness. If you’ve ever lived with or cared about someone who’s heavily depressed, who’s been medicated to a near-helpless zombie state, Foster’s suicide isn’t quite so angry-making after all. It’s terribly, terribly sad — and my heart goes out to his family … and anyone touched by his writing.