Two Davids embark on a road trip...

One David is a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. The other David has just written this magnum opus of a novel called Infinite Jest. The Davids hang out in airports, drive through midwestern sludge and ice, eat terrible food from Denny's and McDonalds, argue about music, and movies, and literature, and what it might be like to sit down for five minutes with Alanis Morisette and a cup of tea.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is an almost straight up five-day transcript of the time shared between David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace. And it's the story of two fundamentally different writers trying to understand each other. It's a story about friendship, and about two humans attempting to let down their guards.

And it's so sad in retrospect. Here is David Foster Wallace, bright eyed, optimistic, surprised, nervous, just this brilliant and kind of normal-sounding midwestern guy in an unexpected moment in his life. He doesn't know what happens 12 years later. But we do. Lipsky writes, "Suicide is such a powerful end, it reaches back and scrambles the beginning. It has an event gravity: Eventually, every memory and impression gets tugged in its direction." But for this brief five-day snapshot, we get to experience David Foster Wallace in that happy afterglow, chewing tobacco, hugging his dogs, reading Cosmo magazine, planning for the rest of his life.