David Foster Wallace’s Pen Pal
Photo © Giovanni Giovannetti/Effigie
On the morning of January 12, 2010, Susan Barnett and Greg Delisle said goodbye to their three dogs, closed the door of their Cape Cod–style farmhouse in rural upstate New York, and got in their car to go to jobs twenty-five miles away in Ithaca. Susan was a copy editor at Cornell University Press, Greg was a website manager for an academic department. A big snowstorm was scheduled to arrive that afternoon and they anticipated their return might be difficult. What they didn’t know was that in the ceiling of their kitchen, faulty wiring was sparking against the rafters.
At two o’clock, a neighbor called them to say their house was on fire. Susan rushed home through the snowstorm. She was stopped by the police down the road from her house, and from that spot she could see blazing curtains fluttering out of the second-floor window. Fire crews from three towns battled the blaze late into the night.
The result, in insurance parlance, was a burnout. The next day, Greg buried the dogs, who had been trapped in the living room. He and Susan had made a mental list of items that he should try to find. A computer hard drive. Passports. Jewelry. And Dave’s letters—Susan wanted Greg to look for those, too.
Did it seem like an odd priority, I asked Greg, to want to save these letters?
“It’s not an odd priority, if you know Susan,” Greg replied.
I did know Susan. We were undergraduates together at Williams College in the late eighties. Susan was pale, blond, with chipmunk cheeks, and she’d dress in fur muffs one day, straight from and the next day in pigtails and a gingham dress, à la Laura Ingalls Wilder, and
