There are forty possible afterlives and David Eagleman has been there and back enough times to tell us what they are. In Sum (Forty tales from the afterlife), his first book, we visit each briefly, and the result is an addictive little gem of thoughtfulness, humour, poetry and paradox, reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, (though less pithy, and marred, only occasionally, by a kind of colloquial casualness that seems unsuitable to the theme).

One of the most inspired pieces, Metamorphosis begins like this:

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The Third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

In this version of events, we (the dead) find ourselves, in an infinite waiting room, not dissimilar to an airport and lit too brightly by fluorescent beams. We talk and eat biscuits and get used to the dreary wakefulness. At regular intervals, the name of one amongst those waiting will be broadcast over the loudspeakers “to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the earth.” Only once you have been well and truly forgotten will you be admitted to the next place, about which nothing can be told.

Needless to say, there are many amongst the waiting who resent the infamy of their earthly identity, which keeps them trapped in this lobby indefinitely. Particular amongst these are the ones who feel falsely remembered, whose enduring fame has stripped all reality from their name such as “the grey haired man at the vending machine who was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord then finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall.” And though Eagleman doesn’t mention him there’s a long haired man shifting uncomfortably in a chair, and trying to get comfortable in anticipation of a very long wait. His name is David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace, the much admired author and journalist and notorious footnoter, who killed himself in September last year is being remembered, indeed mythologised, in ways, which I would suggest are veering dangerously toward the cynical. Chief amongst these excesses is the publication (re-publication that is, since The Guardian has already published it), in hardback, of a speech he gave in 2005, This is Water. Firstly, it’s a great speech, mostly for the fact that it’s so ordinary. And although it's slow to start, a fact exasperatingly magnified by this recent edition, it builds slowly toward a startling and unexpected climax that is real enough to make it recommended reading for pretty much the entire population of the Western World, or at least those of us who have cars.

The problem, the biggest problem, is the publishers pretentious decision to isolate each sentence on its own page as if this were some sort of Delphic prophecy. Apart from anything else you get sick of turning the pages so often. Also, hardly any of these sentences sound like aphorisms, no matter how hard you try and ponder them as if they were. Their effect is cumulative; because that’s how they were intended to work, as part of an essay.

And then of course, there’s the irony, a mode of disingenuousness against which Foster Wallace himself railed and upon which this publication trades. The irony that is, of publishing a speech by an author who suicided at the age of 46, which addresses explicitly the job of “making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.”

And so, David Foster Wallace has become, in death, a self help guru and you can take your little prepackaged doses of him, after pilates perhaps, but not all at once.

And that is the curse of this room: end’s Eagleman's Metamorphosis: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.