A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius  
Author(s) Dave Eggers
Cover artist Komar and Melamid
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Memoir
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date 2000 (2000)
Media type Print (paperback)
Pages 375
ISBN ISBN 0684863472
OCLC Number 42667954
LC Classification CT275.E37 A3 2000

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents.

The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Time magazine and several newspapers dubbed it "The Best Book of the Year." Critics praised the book for its wild, vibrant prose, and it was described as "big, daring [and] manic-depressive" by The New York Times. The book was chosen as the 12th best book of the decade by The Times.[1]

Contents

Important characters

  • Heidi McSweeney Eggers – Dave's mother, a woman who has to deal with raising her children while suffering from stomach cancer. She dies in January 1992, relatively early in the book.
  • John K. Eggers – Dave's father was a heavy smoker and drinker. Dave remembers his father by being drunk and angry when Dave was a child, running around trying to find Dave, Beth, and Bill (Dave's other siblings) so he could spank them. Like Dave's mother, Dave's father has a minor role in the book, as he died November 1991, prior to Dave's mother.
  • William D. Eggers – Dave's oldest brother. He isn't mentioned much throughout the book, although we know he lives in Los Angeles.
  • Elizabeth Anne "Beth" Eggers – Dave's older sister. Beth was always the one to watch after her dying mother, and helped Dave raise Toph, their youngest brother, when both their parents died.
  • Christopher M. "Toph" Eggers – Dave's youngest brother and sibling, who he must raise after his parents' death. His name is pronounced "Tofe."
  • Shalini – In one part of the book Shalini falls from a building patio and must stay in the hospital until she has recovered from her coma. Dave stays with her most of the time to make sure she is okay. The remainder of the time he goes out to the pub to drink and 'check out' girls.
  • Sari – A sexologist, with whom Dave fantasizes about having sex.
  • Marny – After Dave creates a magazine titled Might, Dave becomes good friends with Marny, a girl who he works with. He sometimes imagines having sex with her, but Marny always gets Dave's mind off sex and back on focus with the magazine.
  • Kirsten – Dave's ex-girlfriend after a couple years who shares the same family backgrounds as he does (dead parents and little money). However, Dave and Kirsten still stay close friends after their relationship is over. Kirsten and Beth both help Dave raise Toph, even after Kirsten and Beth move 2 hours away from Dave and Toph.

Themes

The book's primary story is Dave's learning to be both brother and parent to Toph. It starts out with Dave, Toph, and Beth dealing with their mother and father's stomach and lung cancer sickness. After their parents' sickness, Dave, Toph, and Beth's lives become complicated. The three children move from Illinois to California.

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 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.

Dave learns how to cook for Toph, pick Toph up from school, help him with homework, tell him when to go to sleep, and all the things a parent would do to raise a child, including doing laundry. Dave's life suddenly becomes centered around Toph, instead of having a good job and having fun with his friends. Even though Dave's life becomes strained because of Toph, Dave does so willingly.

Dave talks thoroughly about how much he loves and cares for Toph. Dave says he would kill or severely hurt anyone who hurt Toph. In addition, all the times Dave leaves Toph at home with a babysitter, Dave is constantly wondering whether or not Toph is okay.

Plot synopsis

In Lake Forest, Illinois, Dave Eggers and his siblings, Bill, Beth and Toph (who is 13 years younger than his next-eldest sibling, Dave) 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 Toph move to California. Bill, who does not play a large role in the plot, eventually moves to Los Angeles. The rest of the family live in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dave and Toph begin living on their own in a dilapidated, untamed fashion. 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, but are depicted by the author as somewhat surreal. 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 Francisco and become engrossed in the Generation X subculture. Much of the magazine's history is portrayed in the book. Dave also auditions for MTV's The Real World in a development on the theme of exhibitionism.

Real-life aspects

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is usually classified as a memoir or autobiography, and its foundation is certainly laid in true events. However, Eggers takes great creative liberties. He often writes wild, tangential fantasy scenes. He occasionally "compresses" time, making events in the book closer in time to one another than they actually were to enhance the flow of the story. Thus, this work probably falls into the category of creative non-fiction.

Eggers sometimes has characters lapse into breaking the fourth wall by acknowledging their existence within the book at several points when talking to him. In these cases, the characters often abandon their typical real-life personalities and characteristics, becoming tools with which Eggers can express and analyze his own thoughts and feelings in an "internal" dialogue, or vehicles for self-criticism.

Eggers points out to his readers what parts of the book were fictionalized or exaggerated in the course of the book and the preface, and the shifts from actual conversations to mere dramatizations of Eggers' thought processes are dramatic enough to be quickly recognizable when they occur, though other fictionalized aspects of the book are not always as easy to spot.

It is even stated in the contents of the memoir that some parts of it are invariably fictitious as Eggers is unable to remember every single detail of each moment of his life. At the copyright page of the book, it says, "this is a work of fiction". The ambiguity of the real life aspects of the story helps blend the fictitious and bizarre parts that are introduced with the more rational and reasonable occurrences.

Preface and addenda

The book includes lengthy preface and acknowledgement sections, a list of tips to help better enjoy the book (including several tips not to bother reading large sections of the book), and a guide to its symbols and metaphors.

Later printings of the book also include an addendum called Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, which details some of the deliberate omissions and composite events that made the book flow more easily.

Film adaptation

In 2002, New Line Cinema bought the rights to adapt the book into a film. The screenplay was written by novelist Nick Hornby and screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis. In a 2007 interview, Eggers told Entertainment Weekly that a film version was unlikely to be seen, saying that the studio's option on the film had run out.[2]

References

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Vintage, 2001. Print.

External links


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