Garth Risk Hallberg: ‘David Foster Wallace convinced me to change the way I was living’

The American author on how Infinite Jest made him face up to his substance abuse, and the joy of Judy Blume

My earliest reading memory
My mother first read me Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat when I was four, and as with much of what I love, I became compulsive about it, wanting to hear it over and over. One day, a fbabysitter asked what I’d been up to. “Learning to read,” I lied. I pulled out The Cat in the Hat, intending to bluff my way through. Then a miracle: beneath my eyes, the word-shapes matched the sounds. I was reading.

My favourite book growing up
My sense of racial guilt as a child of the Reagan-era south was compounded by the fact that the apartheid around me was rarely acknowledged out loud. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has its problems, but for me it was a formative instance of books giving expression to what’s not being talked about.

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