How did you go about ordering a novel that, by its own design, seeks to be non-linear, seeks to challenge, seeks to strain the limits of a reader's expectations?

I had the extraordinary guidepost of Infinite Jest, which I think the reader is something like 350 pages into before they've met all the characters and have all the elements of the story up in their heads. I think one of David's methods was flood the reader with pleasure with many different kinds of stories that were so entertaining and so funny and so interesting and so beautiful that they kept opening up, and taking more and more—and then he'd work with that enormous assemblage to create something even larger.

So I read again and took notes, and read again and took notes, and read again and took notes. I tracked everything I read in terms of whether it was a unique piece, or whether it was a version that existed in other forms. If other versions existed, I'd look at all the multiple versions to find what appeared to be the last version. Once I had all of the distinct pieces, I read them again to try to understand the story that was within them. And gradually, I saw that there was a chronological sequence and spine to the novel. There were characters who arrived at a particular date, and things happened in a particular order.

So the main work of assembling the novel was finding those things that needed to happen an order for the reader to make sense of what was happening—and then arraying the other pieces, which are less time-specific, around those in a way that creates what I hope will be a pleasurable flow of David Wallace—of his brilliant, brilliant range of voices, and narrative techniques, and ideas.

One thing Wallace is known for is a kind of super-inclusion. You once described the painstaking process of cutting Infinite Jest for length and manageability, in which Wallace half-jokingly presented himself as a kind of bear mother, snarling protectively over paragraphs and whole pages ("My canines are bared on this one," he said of one of your proposed edits). How did you edit material out of this book without Wallace's help—and protestations? What kind of material did you decide not to include?

Well, that is the enormous and heartbreaking aspect of editing a book posthumously. Editing with a writer is a joyous collaboration—not even a collaboration, but a conversation, a colloquy, a back-and-forth. The editor makes suggestions and proposes and points things out and acts as a sort of super-reader for the author—and the author chooses what if any of that advice he or she wants to take. That interplay with David was one of the most joyous I've had in my life as an editor.

Without David there to respond, my goal was to include everything that made sense. Everything seemed that it fit with all the other things to make a novel. And to change as little as possible. I didn't feel like I had the liberty to edit his words without him there to respond to them. So I restricted myself, and restricted my editing, to making names consistent, and places consistent, and ranks—achieving a kind of consistency so the story made sense. Because as he wrote this, over these many, many years, he was constantly trying out new character names, but it would be clear that this character that he's writing with one name now is the same character who had a different name in an earlier chapter.