At The Awl, Maria Bustillos provides an in-depth look at David Foster Wallace‘s psychology based in part on the scribbled notes inside his self-help books (taken from Wallace’s archives at The Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin). Bustillos writes:

One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace’s library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully….

Wallace’s notes in Bradshaw On: The Family and especially in Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child reveal a person who felt himself to be messed up totally and permanently.

Bustillos records the sections Wallace highlighted in pink and the notes he wrote in green. Again and again, Wallace seems to view “genius” as a sign of illness and crave a kind of normalcy. Here are a few examples:

Grandiosity- The constant need to be, and be seen as, a superstar He has especially severe standards that apply only to himself. In other people he accepts without question thoughts and actions that, in himself, he would consider mean or bad when measured against his high ego ideal. Others are allowed to be [circled] “ordinary” but that he can never be.

admiration is not the same thing as love

Basically he is envious of healthy people because they do not have to make a constant effort to earn admiration, and because they do not have to do something in order to impress, one way or the other, but are free to be “average”….

Writing Success
Fame
Sex

Spiritual Bankruptcy You live totally oriented to the outside believing that your worth and happiness lies outside of you