A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Having been blown away by two of his non-fiction works that I’ve read this year, I went back to the start of Mr Eggers writing – the modestly but completely tongue-in-cheek named AHWOSG. It’s a confusing, angry, loving and tender soup of a book that sometimes loses itself by being a bit too clever for its own good. Eggers’ struggle with the fact that he’s writing this book at all is palpable; each chapter a self-flagellating exercise. Obviously a very smart kid from a working class family that has an extremely shit run of luck, I wonder if his parents both hadn’t of died, leaving him to look after his younger brother Toph, would he have had that cataclysmic anger and misfortune to propel this book? Had they lived to a ripe old age, would he have been happier and had a more carefree life, playing Frisbee and getting drunk and stoned with his college buddies, without this burning sense of injustice? And there might be the crux: I think Eggers knows that he has “used” the experience of his parents dying as fuel for this novel’s fire, and he hates himself for it, with some chapters pummelling himself and his motivation for writing the book in the first place.

But you know what man? It’s your experience, it’s one that not much good can come of whichever way you slice and dice it, so I think your parents would be more than proud.

*Note: I read in a profile on Eggers that his sister Beth killed herself at 33. The answer to the question ‘How much heartbreak can one person take?” is still being tested. And I hope Toph is ok.