David Foster Wallace enters Lipsky's room late at night to offer a raw, vulnerable confession regarding his past mental breakdown. He struggles to explain the existential dread of a 'spiritual crisis' while Lipsky listens intently, eventually recording the moment to serve his journalistic ambitions.
DAVID: You awake?
LIPSKY: Yeah.
DAVID: I was just thinking... It wasn't a chemical imbalance, and it wasn't drugs and alcohol. It was much more that I had lived an incredibly American life. That, “If I could just achieve X and Y and Z, everything would be OK.”
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