‘Plain old untrendy troubles and emotions’

David Foster Wallace, who died last week, was the most brilliant American writer of his generation. In a speech, published here for the first time, he reflects on the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head'

Escape from self-help hell

Review: Self-help books roundupSupposedly enlightened writers are queueing up to tell us how to live our lives and earning a fortune in the process. Reader beware ... says Stephanie Merritt

Battle of the boatmen

Review: The Last Amateurs by Mark de RondDaniel Topolski relives the intense pressure of the varsity race that strives for Olympian levels

Scenes from cancer’s theatre of the absurd

Review: Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting by Meredith Norton and My Diary by Mio MatsumotoTwo books provide wry insights into what it is like to live with breast cancer, says Geraldine Bedell, and why humour often seems the only rational response

The survival specialist

After a difficult upbringing, Martha Beck went on to have a child with Down's syndrome, marry a gay man and realise that she, too, was gay. As she tells Emine Saner, who better to write self-help books?

‘I was never about boo hoo hoo’

Dave Pelzer, who single-handedly launched the 'misery lit' genre with his horrific memoir of childhood abuse, is now publishing his fourth self-help book. In it, he insists that happiness is all about 'moving on'. So why does he continue to obsessively trawl through his own past? Decca Aitkenhead meets him

Love’s alchemy

Rebecca Abrams delights in the psychologist Charles Fernyhough's tender account of his daughter's first three years, The Baby in the Mirror