Had the author wished to, he could have destroyed this work; instead, he seems to have meant for it to be published … he had been famous for long enough to know that there were people interested in reading even a stray shopping list he’d left lying around, so if there’d been anything he didn’t want seen, he would have destroyed it.

Wallace had a polarizing effect on readers when he was alive. I heard him once at a reading describe the letters he received from readers, how some of them would say, “I love your work, it means so much to me,” and others, “what pretentious, meaningless twaddle.” And then he said, “and neither of these groups seems to me to be entirely deluded, or insane.” What happens after you’re done writing can’t ever be controlled, isn’t ever “fair”; or rather, questions of fairness are beside the point, somehow.