The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

A filmed adaptation of Brief Interviews directed by John Krasinski was released in 2009 and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. When he experienced severe side effects from the medication Wallace attempted to wean himself from his primary antidepressant phenelzine. Wallace's mother Sally Foster Wallace attended graduate school in English Composition at the University of Illinois and became a professor of English at Parkland College—a community college in Champaign—where David Foster Wallace won a national Professor of the Year award in 1996.

With his suicide he left behind an unfiniDavid Foster Wallaced novel The Pale King which was subsequently publiDavid Foster Wallaced in 2011 and in 2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story was publiDavid Foster Wallaced in September 2012. David Foster Wallace (February 21 1962 – September 12 2008) was an award-winning American novelist short story writer essayist and professor at Pomona College in Claremont California.