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Karen Green Talks About Her Husband, David Foster Wallace

Photo: Gary Hannabarger/? Corbis. All Rights Reserved.
Photo: Gary Hannabarger/? Corbis. All Rights Reserved.

Karen Green, an artist and David Foster Wallace’s widow, spoke at length with the Guardian for a long piece that ran this past weekend. “I think I’m supposed to buck up and be the professional widow,” she says, “and I have found that very hard. Very hard. I mean one day you are a couple living in a little house and watching The Wire box-set for the third time, and letting the dogs do their antic stuff, and then suddenly you are supposed to be functioning as the great writer’s widow. That wasn’t how we lived when David was alive. I felt about him like I would if I had been married to a sweet school teacher.” She also talks about her work (building a “forgiveness machine” among other things), her husband, his new book, The Pale King, his friend Jonathan Franzen, and her reluctance to talk about Foster Wallace’s death: “I know journalism is journalism and maybe people want to read that I discovered the body over and over again, but that doesn’t define David or his work. It all turns him into a celebrity writer dude, which I think would have made him wince, the good part of him. It has defined me too, and I’m really struggling with that.” [Guardian UK]

Karen Green Talks About Her Husband, David Foster Wallace