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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in detail
Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature. The book's preface — which parodies both literary conventions and the reader's relationship to confessional memoir — set its tone: this is a work that insists on being both earnest and ironic simultaneously, that is as interested in the mechanics of autobiography as in its content.
The parents die in the first hundred pages. The rest of the book is about what comes after: Eggers at twenty-one, suddenly the guardian of an eight-year-old brother, moving from Lake Forest, Illinois to Berkeley with Toph, sharing a house with his older sister Beth, and trying to figure out what adult life is. He founds the literary magazine Might with friends. He appears on the Real World. He applies to Survivor. He attends parties where everyone is performing their youth. Through it all, he is raising a child while being, himself, barely past childhood.
The memoir's formal experiments — the preface's copyright notes that parody legal disclaimers, the occasional dialogue that breaks the fourth wall, the footnotes that interrogate the narration from outside it — were both celebrated and found annoying. The self-consciousness is the book's subject as much as it is its technique: Eggers is explicitly interested in what autobiography means, what it demands, what it costs the people in it who did not consent to be subjects.
Toph is rendered with genuine affection and also with the specific anxiety of a brother-turned-guardian who is never sure he is doing it right. The relationship is tender and often funny, and the book is most straightforwardly emotional in the scenes between them — at the beach, at school, arguing about bedtime. These sections have no ironic distance. Whatever the book's games elsewhere, Eggers is not performing here.
The big ideas
- 1.
Grief and irony are not mutually exclusive. Eggers uses postmodern self-consciousness as both a protective mechanism and a genuine formal argument — the book thinks about what books do while doing them.
- 2.
Young adulthood requires improvised parenthood. Eggers had no preparation for raising Toph and the memoir is essentially a record of figuring it out, including the parts he got wrong.
- 3.
The preface is not decorative. Its parody of legal and editorial conventions is the book's argument in miniature: memoir is a constructed document full of choices that are usually hidden.
