Making Friends of Strangers

Some thoughts on "The End of the Tour" and relationships because of a book I bought for 25 cents at McKay's.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

—Pico Iyer, as quoted by Colleen Kinder in the introduction to Letter to a Stranger

Years ago, I watched The End of The Tour alone at my favorite movie theater. The film, in which Jesse Eisenberg plays the role of writer David Lipsky and Jason Segel is David Foster Wallace, is based on Lipsky’s book chronicling their time hanging out during the final leg of Wallace’s reading tour for Infinite Jest, the famous, encyclopedia-length novel that every dude of a certain ilk owns but has never read more than a few pages of.¹

The movie and book are among my favorites. Instead of narrative, what you have are conversations—literally, transcribed conversations—that took place in cars and diners and bookstores about the kinds of things we all talk about: finding purpose in life, reckoning with failure (and achievement), desiring what is unattainable, contentment in the digital age. The title of the book—Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself—could serve as the epitaph for any great adventure we’ve gone on that we were ultimately disappointed didn’t change us. In the end, we can’t escape ourselves.

But I think that’s why I so enjoy stories about strangers.

The circumstances of how Lipsky and Wallace meet—the former, a contemporary of Wallace’s who writes novels but is not as famous, begs Rolling Stone to send him to follow Wallace around so he can figure out what makes him so special—may not be the same as how we’ve come to know each other. But every relationship we’ve ever had began as strangers meeting for the first time.²