David Lipsky accompanied DFW on his book tour for his breakout success Infinite Jest. On an assignment to profile the man for Rolling Stone, the article fell through. This book is a full transcript of that six-day interview.

This book is the second link in the hopefully-short chain of cash-ins on David Foster Wallace’s suicide. The first, This is Water, was a despicable little book reprinting the transcript of a brief graduation address Wallace made (available for free online), filling a small book by printing the speech one sentence per page. Lipsky’s book isn’t as useless and infuriating as This is Water, but it’s close.

Any devoted Wallace fan knows that his interviews are fantastic—he displays a humanity and a refusal to talk the same self-aggrandizing literary bullshit as everyone else. But these transcripts are taken from the time in Wallace’s life where he gave more interviews than he ever would again, and most of Wallace’s remarks will be familiar to serious devotees—the only audience that would be interested in this book.

There are a few things Wallace discusses here that he doesn’t anywhere else, which makes this book a worthwhile read for serious obsessers: he talks about his career and its trajectory in some detail, he deals with his depression and suicide attempts (though he isn’t entirely truthful about either), he describes the process of writing and revising Infinite Jest, and he gives his opinion about music and movies. Now imagine all of that narrated by a smarmy jackass and you’ll get an idea of how truly irritating this book is.