In another section of the book: “A month later, in May 1992, Wallace packed up what little he had and drove to Syracuse,” Max writes. “He had rented a first-floor apartment in a house around the corner from Karr and a few blocks from the main campus. It was in a typical graduate-student neighborhood, full of warping clapboard houses and semi-kempt lawns and right across from the food co-op. But being near the woman he loved made all the difference.”

At the release of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, The New York Times conducted an interview with Max. One of the questions was this: “What was it about his feelings for her that created such trouble for Wallace?”

That created such trouble for Wallace. This is the bias at work. Here, once again, is the male genius emphasized while the female genius is relegated to the margins. Karr is there, as a slight character, in Max’s biography of Wallace; she’s there, too, as a kind of human predicate, in interviews about him, in assessments of his literary contributions, in effusions about his great talent. And often, too—the world can be so myopic that it can fail to see the genius sitting right in front of it—she is directly asked about him: what he was like. What it was like. How it was to have had, for a brief time, the privilege to spin around such an axis. “Sometimes people go on and on about David Foster Wallace,” Karr noted last year. “As though my contribution to literature is that I fucked him a couple times in the early ’90s … Everybody in America owes me a dollar who read Infinite Jest.”

This is the thing we do to women in a world of biased idolatry. Women’s stories get treated as one of Wallace’s trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial. Pretty afterthoughts. Optional. (The book, after all, is already so long.) Meanwhile, the less heroic elements of the male stories—the fact, say, that David Foster Wallace referred to the female fans who attended his book tours as “audience pussy,” or that he wrote in a letter to a friend of a day spent “unpacking, trying to write, chasing tail,” or that he pushed Mary Karr out of a vehicle—get lost in the fog of genius. And in the blunt transactions of fetishized talent. “It isn’t that I doubt that Wallace uttered the sexist remarks attributed to him in any literal sense,” one fan of the author put it. “Rather, I cannot bring myself to believe that Wallace’s interpersonal cowardice comes close to overshadowing his many acts of monumental literary courage.”

Nor can many people. Genius, after all, is a powerful force. (Talent is its own expectation.) A fealty to genius is its own kind of faith: in transcendence, in exceptionalism, in the fact that gods, still, can walk among us. And genius, itself, is its own kind of infrastructure. We have organized our art around its potential; we have organized our economy around its promise. We have oriented ourselves according to the light of its stars—and so when they flicker, even momentarily, we lose ourselves. And: We defend ourselves. We delude ourselves. We choose not to question the makeup of the firmament. It’s so much easier that way. “Something I’ve noticed since Wallace’s suicide in 2008,” Glenn Kenny wrote in The Guardian a few years ago, “is that a lot of self-professed David Foster Wallace fans don’t have much use for people who actually knew the guy. For instance, whenever Jonathan Franzen utters or publishes some pained but unsparing observations about his late friend, Wallace’s fan base recoils, posting comments on the internet about how self-serving he is, or how he really didn’t ‘get’ Wallace.”