David Foster Wallace

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals.  This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his body.

His arms to his shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child's play.  After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf.  The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him.  He was six.

From his bizarre but fascinating short story, "Backbone," which appeared in the March 7, 2011, issue of the New Yorker.  Wallace was 46 when he committed suicide in 2008 by hanging himself.  He had long suffered from depression.  He tried to wean himself from his primary medication when he suffered severe side effects, but his depression returned, and the medication was no longer effective when he started taking it again.

David Foster Wallace