These are but a few of the figures who fall into a special category in my mind -- a category of people I will never actually meet but with whom I'm still oddly infatuated. After reading "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," I added David Eggers to this list.
Along with having earned a reputation with this best-selling book, Eggers, who will appear at a book signing at 3 p.m. today at the Bull's Head Book Shop, was a founding editor of the now-defunct Might magazine and is presently editor of the quarterly journal McSweeney's.
And, as the caption below Eggers' book-jacket picture of himself (with a dog) states, "He lives in Brooklyn with his brother. This is not their dog."
"AHWOSG" is the story of how, after the death of both of his parents, Eggers moved to California and raised his younger brother, Toph. As Eggers himself describes the book in his acknowledgments, it's a "memoir-y kind of thing."
Conveniently for his writing career, Eggers has lived the sort of life most fiction writers dream about: surreal sudden-orphan status; hitting the open road, just you and your sibling eating french fries in your dirty house; trying to launch a smart, hip magazine with your buddies; almost getting a part in MTV's "The Real World."
Of course, the things that are a boon to one's writing career tend not to be so convenient to one's everyday life. Losing one's parents, for instance, seems good when you're one of the Boxcar Children, but once fiction meets reality, it's a little different. Eggers has lived his life at this intersection of convenient fictional circumstance and reality.
Thus, while the book is terrifically sharp, witty and sarcastic, it hits at real sadness. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Eggers describes his "Real World" interview only to launch into an exploration of both his Midwestern middle-class upbringing and his parents' battles with cancer. It is, as the tongue-in-cheek title suggests, a little heartbreaking.
It is also, as the title suggests, incredibly sassy and self-conscious. Eggers begins the book with "Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book," which includes the suggestion that readers skip pages 209-301 and only read the first three or four chapters.
Throughout the book, Eggers constantly licenses himself to make all sorts of claims by being extravagantly self-conscious about them. He epitomizes the sharp-tongued hipster, the self-deprecating yet pompous writer.
