Must Read Autobiographies - XXVI

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, written by Dave Eggers, was published in 2000. It is his memoir of his days of mentoring and bringing up his younger brother, Christopher  chronicles following the cancer-related deaths of his parents.

Mentioned by Times magazine and other newspaper as the best book of the year, this book won critical acclaim and became a commercial hit. The Times selected the book as the 12 th best book of the decade.

In Lake Forest, Illinois, Dave and his siblings, Bill, Beth and Christopher endure the sudden death of their father due to lung cancer. Their mother dies a month later from stomach cancer after a long struggle.

Afterwards, Dave, Beth and Christopher move to California. Bill eventually moves to Los Angeles. Beth lives on her own at first, and Toph becomes Dave's responsibility. Dave, a man only in his early 20s, has to raise a child as if he were his own. Dave's life can no longer involve things many 20-year-olds would like to do. For example, Dave can not stay out of the house all night at the bar and bring home a different girl every week, something which he talks about wanting to do in his book in detail.

With the help of an inheritance and Social Security, Dave and Toph rent apartments in neighborhoods where Toph can go to private schools and Dave can work on his magazine venture. Dave is occasionally self-conscious about the cleanliness of their various homes and worries that other people will mistakenly find him unfit to parent Toph, but counterbalances these images with recollections of including Toph in fun activities and cooking, laundering, and driving for Toph.

Dave struggles between moments of feeling that his approach to parenting is calculated and brilliantly designed to make Toph well-adjusted, to worrying that his hands-off approach and commitment to personal projects will make Toph maladjusted. Dave's own attempts to lead a normal life as a young adult often involve fairly ordinary encounters with women and alcohol. Due to his parents' death and his duty to take care of Toph, he feels robbed of his youth, and this fuels his pursuit of sex and irresponsibility.

Dave and his friends organize an independent magazine called Might in San Fransico and become engrossed in the alienated youth subculture. Much of the magazine's history is portrayed in the book. 

About halfway through Dave Eggers's memoir, he interviews to be on MTV's ''Real World,'' and in the process describes what it was like to grow up in Lake Forest, Illinois., before both his parents died of cancer in a span of 32 days, leaving him, at 21, to raise his 8-year-old brother, Christopher, or Toph, on his own. 

Namaste

Prabir

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