Wallace: One of my little family stories that Mom always tells is that on the day in second grade, when we all had to talk about what our fathers did for a living, I said my father didn’t do anything for a living. He just stayed home and wrote on yellow paper, because he was a professor, too. I know that part of what interested me in this story was trying to remember what I thought about what my parents did when I was a child. Because when you’re a child I don’t think you’re aware of how incredibly easy you have it, right? You have your own problems and you have your own burdens and chores and things you have to do, but, yeah, I think my intuitions were very much like yours. When they went into these quiet rooms and had to do things that it wasn’t obvious they wanted to do, I think there was a part of me that felt that something terrible was coming. But also, of course, now that we’re putatively grown up there’s also a lot of really, really interesting stuff and sometimes you sit in quiet rooms and do a lot of drudgery and at the end of it is a surprise or something very rewarding or a feeling of fulfillment.

Paulson: That’s the life of a writer, isn’t it?

Wallace: Yeah, but it’s also probably the life of a radio-host, and probably, in many cases, the life of office workers, who we think of as having very boring, dry jobs. Probably all jobs are the same and they’re filled with horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anyone else about. That’s just a guess.

—  Stephen J. Burn, Conversations with David Foster Wallace