I must admit, when I first heard about Infinite Summer, the online Infinite Jest book club guiding readers through the book at the rate of 75 pages per week, I was gripped by the same maddening combination of jealousy, pride, resentment, and exhilaration one feels upon hearing a song by one’s super-favorite semi-obscure indie band used in a television commercial or on a popular TV show: “Those bastards! They realized there are other people out there who like the same things I do, and now they’re going to capitalize on it! It will no longer be my special thing, enjoyed only by me and an elite few other obsessive, haughty individuals connected by Internet fan sites and tiny barroom gatherings in college towns.”

As so often happens with cult icons and subjects of small-scale but intense devotion, David Foster Wallace didn’t become really well-known until after his death, when he hanged himself last September. Before then, plenty of people had read Infinite Jest, even more had purchased it with the intent of doing so, and even more had at least heard of the book and its author. After DFW died, the mainstream encomia by Newsweek and the New York Times ensured that, in a culture predisposed to neither 1,089-page bestsellers nor frank discussions of suicide, he would now be widely known.

But with the same selfish, wounded pride that might accompany a hipster’s complaint that “I liked TV On The Radio way before they blew up and played Saturday Night Live,” around about September 13 of last year I found myself often thinking, bitterly, that I’d been on board the DFW bandwagon long before his suicide and the attendant surge of interest.

I can’t fully say whether the good people behind Infinite Summer would’ve still launched their project this past June if DFW were still alive. I’d like to think they would—that they’d been planning this project for a while, just as they’d been meaning to read Infinite Jest for years, and both projects only took on a fresh, dark urgency once their raison d’etre up and demapped himself. And while I have twice attempted my own humble online Infinite Jest book clubs, they never had more than a few members (none of whom were famous indie-rock musicians), they didn’t involve Twitter, and they were certainly never featured in *sniff* the Times or Newsweek. So yeah, I grumbled a little when I heard about Infinite Summer, and continue to be a bit baffled and, yes, jealous, when I hear about all the high-profile attention it’s getting.

But then I shake it off and try to take the long view—the mature, reasonable attitude that this can only be a good thing. That all us bereft DFW readers are in this together. And then I concede—much like the well-adjusted, non-insecure TV On The Radio fan who realizes that the band’s appearance on SNL neither invalidates the W-A,N-ITVotRF’s prior appreciation for the band nor lowers the band’s music’s intrinsic artistic value one jot—that Infinite Summer neither invalidates my own minor foray into online book club administration nor the deep, abiding love I’ve had for DFW and Infinite Jest since they both knocked me off my ass twelve years ago.

At the same time, however, the existence of Infinite Summer doesn’t automatically mean I’ll be fully participating in its endeavors. I just read Infinite Jest last summer, for the fourth time, and while I love the book and will probably read it every few years for the rest of my life, I just don’t think I have the stamina to do it again this summer, for a lot of reasons.

Chief among them is that right now, thinking about Infinite Jest and DFW still makes me really sad. In much the same way that I didn’t listen to Jeff Buckley or Elliott Smith for years after their deaths, I can’t read any of DFW’s writing—or any of the writing about him, which will only grow with time until its pagination far surpasses its the primary sources—without getting sad, and sometimes depressed. It is an unfortunate but by no means unique quirk of my human nature that I sometimes avoid the things I love because it hurts too much to indulge them. This is why I don’t listen to Bowerbirds as often as I should, because I miss making music with those folks. It’s why I sometimes dodge Neil’s calls because he moved to California seven years ago and I miss him and I’m always sad and nostalgic after I get off the phone with him.

David Foster Wallace’s suicide last September fucked me up in surprising ways I still don’t really understand. I expected to be sad, but I didn’t expect to be that sad—to grieve, to actually get depressed, to cry every few days when I thought about it.

But I did. And it became insidious and colored everything I did for at least a month last autumn. Friends emailed or called to express their condolences as if DFW was someone I’d known personally. I think I got at least as many such emails and phone calls as I did after my father died. Which was just weird, but also comforting.

But whereas my grief concerning the death of someone close to me would be fully understandable and tolerated by those around me, I felt inappropriate expressing my feelings about DFW to others. I would preempt any discussion of him or his death with an apology for whatever maudlin ruminations were to follow. If I seemed like I was in a funk, and someone asked me hey, why are you in such a funk? I would feel sheepish admitting that it was because a man I’d never known personally and only met once, in a book-signing queue, hanged himself in his garage in California.

Things eventually got better, of course, but I still cringe whenever I see new writing about him emerge, or learn that not just one, but two biographies are planned, and that of course, next year we’ll get his last unfinished novel—the Long Thing, his very own Cage IV, in the midst of whose creation he, like Jim Incandenza, killed himself. I cringe because I know that 1) I will devour every last word, and 2) it will be difficult. Not the fun kind of difficulty in which his fiction occasionally reveled, but the sad kind of difficulty with which one looks at pictures of dead people.

After September 12, I attempted one more installment of my Infinite Jest book club before disbanding it. I added my own timid tribute to the swelling media eulogies. I finished the book and moved on to other things. I read DT Max’s New Yorker profile in February and rejoiced at the Pale King news and re-read the Kenyon commencement speech when it was published as This is Water (I know, I still owe you a review, Minnesota Reads—soon, soon).

And I’m lurking on Infinite Summer. I’ve subscribed to the Twitter feed. I’ll make the occasional in-joke and quote famous scenes. I’m thrilled that so many people are going to experience the exquisite thrill that is reading Inifnite Jest for the first time. Reading it a fifth time this summer, in the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment, would be timely and appropriate. But it’s Too Much Fun, too soon. An already sad book now acquires even more grim resonance and is much, much sadder.