Lipsky: "Writing The Broom of the System, I felt like I was using 97 percent of me, whereas philosophy was using 50 percent." Wallace completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Arizona in 1987. He moved to Massachusetts to attend graduate school in philosophy at Harvard University, but soon left the program. Later life In the early 1990s, Wallace was in a relationship with writer Mary Karr. She later described Wallace as obsessive about her and said the relationship was volatile, with Wallace once throwing a coffee table at her and once forcing her out of a car, leaving her to walk home. Years later, she said that Wallace's biographer D. T. Max underreported Wallace's abuse. Of Max's account of their relationship, she tweeted, "That's about 2% of what happened." She said that Wallace kicked her, climbed up the side of her house at night, and followed her 5-year-old son home from school. Several scholars and writers noted that Max's biography did cover the abuse and did not ignore the allegations Karr later reiterated on Twitter. In 2002, Wallace met the painter Karen L. Green, whom he married on December 27, 2004. Wallace struggled with depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicidal tendencies, and was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric care. In 1989, he spent four weeks at McLean Hospital — a psychiatric institute in Belmont, Massachusetts, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School — where he successfully completed a drug and alcohol detoxification program. He later said his time there changed his life. Dogs were important to Wallace, and he spoke of opening a shelter for stray canines. According to his friend Jonathan Franzen, he "had a predilection for dogs who'd been abused, and [were] unlikely to find other owners who were going to be patient enough for them". Work Career The Broom of the System (1987) garnered national attention and critical praise. In The New York Times, Caryn James called it a "manic, human, flawed extravaganza … emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser, Thomas Pynchon's V., [and] John Irving's World According to Garp". In 1991, Wallace began teaching literature as an adjunct professor at Emerson College in Boston. The next year, at the suggestion of colleague and supporter Steven Moore, Wallace obtained a position in the English department at Illinois State University. He had begun work on his second