I was sitting on my back porch with Anne late on Saturday night after watching a movie with some friends when I heard a strange shout, and then Scott opened the door and told us that David Foster Wallace had hanged himself. The next several minutes were taken up by silence. The night felt split open, an unmistakable mark had just been made. I knew I would remember this moment, possibly for the rest of my life. This was the first time I had heard of the death of a famous person that hit me on a personal level, made me feel like something irrevocable had been lost.

At first I thought it was just the unexpectedness, the fact that Wallace wasn't on my list of people whose death I had to watch out for, because he was so young. I actually have a short list of people I check periodically just to make sure they're alive, people whose absence would make the world a different place: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Philip Roth. They're all around the age of my grandparents, and their loss would have similar significance for me as those first and primal family members. They are forces in my life, nearly aspects of my personality. They're the people who I most often look to and think of as paradigms of writerly greatness, personalities I might aspire to develop, models for myself if I took writing more seriously. I don't think I realized it before Saturday, but it turns out that Wallace was one of those too.

I first encountered Wallace in 2003, when Anne recommended him to me as one of the few writers she would call good. I read Infinite Jest first, over the course of a few weeks, and I think some part of me is still reading that book, still taking it in. Here was a modern writer who, in contradistinction to nearly everybody else, seemed to understand what it meant to write a masterpiece, and maybe had done so. A writer who took the vocation of novel writing seriously enough that he made something that was wholly his own, and yet spoke to people of my generation saying things we all knew but hadn't yet realized.

Later, I read Girl With Curious Hair and Supposedly Fun Things, and I saw that his range was even greater than I thought. He was a literary experimenter, an insightful cultural critic, a memoirist, a scholar. Moreover, his life was not so dissimilar from mine. I could identify with him in ways that I couldn't with other great writers like Dostoevsky or Faulkner, because the steps he took in learning to write were steps taken in a culture I recognized. In his youth he was smitten with the works of postmodern writers of the sixties and seventies, and then when he did an MFA program he realized that the goal wasn't imitation but rather development of the same ideas for one's self.

For years, then, I've thought of Wallace every so often when scanning the recent past for new, living writers who I wholly respect. They're not very easy to find. His work was leagues above, say, Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, because he just had a bigger view of the world, more insight into the culture, a better ability to express himself. This didn't result in my reading everything he wrote (although I've read a lot of it), but that was mainly because I thought there was time. I thought he'd be around for a long while yet, and that he'd produce a lot more work. When I learned that he taught a writing course, even though it was in Phoenix I thought that if I decided to do an MFA myself, I'd want to do it with him. I didn't know if that was possible, because I don't have the freedom to do an MFA right now, but it was in the back of my mind as a possibility. Even if I couldn't take a writing program with him, I would have liked to meet him, see him speak, get something signed.

Now that all that potential is gone, now that he is gone, I realize that for me, he represented something no other writer has: he was the best I've seen at expressing the hidden parts of our personality, the things that we feel as separations from other people and from popular culture, the thoughts that we can't share, the aspects of ourselves that seem inexpressible in words. These are the things he most often wrote about, things that seemingly preoccupied him. He described a feeling that I think is widespread in my generation that the world we're inheriting was not made for us, is not how we'd want it, but that perhaps we're powerless to change it. He was a champion of the hidden personality that can only be shared with close friends, and of the even more hidden depths that we can't share with anyone, the fear that deep down we ourselves don't know who we are and aren't sure we want to be anyone.

So today I'm feeling grief, having lost one of my champions, a man who made the world more understandable, a place that felt more desirable to live in. Mixed with that is a gratefulness that he wrote what he did. And mingled with that is a kind of despair, because if in the end Wallace couldn't find a way to live with the world as it was, to live with himself as he was, then what chance do I have?