You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do
Wallace had been taking Nardil for his depression since 1989. Nardil is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, or MAOI, a member of the earliest generation of antidepressants; newer drugs are usually not only more effective against the illness but also less likely to cause collateral damage. In 2007 Wallace was a happy man, writing, married since 2004, for the first time, to the artist Karen Green, and teaching at Pomona College, one of the distinguished Claremont Colleges, where he had an endowed professorial chair that gave him pretty much free rein. After dinner at a Persian restaurant in Claremont one evening, he developed excruciating stomach pains that lasted several days. His doctor suspected a dire food interaction with Nardil, and suggested Wallace go off that outdated medication and try something newer. Wallace had already suspected for several months that Nardil was impeding the flow of The Pale King—though it evidently had not interfered with Infinite Jest—so the idea sounded promising. But then Wallace tried doing without any medication at all, and he landed in the hospital in the fall of 2007. After that he went on one drug after another but never really gave any of them the chance to be effective. Not wanting to foul his home, he tried suicide by overdose in a nearby motel, but survived. A course of twelve electroconvulsive treatments failed to work. He went back on Nardil; it did not kick in quickly enough. Not caring any more what he fouled, on September 12, 2008, he waited for his wife to leave for her gallery, wrote her a two-page note, and hanged himself on the patio of their Claremont home. He left a neat stack of manuscript pages in his garage office for his wife to find.
