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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Dave Eggers talks, with some reluctance, about the staggering work of being a genius parent.
Feb 22, 2000 | Let it be known that Dave Eggers does not want to be interviewed.
In the past month, the editor of McSweeney's, a literary quarterly that even Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham thinks is hip, and the author of a "memoir-y kind of thing" called "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Village Voice, Time magazine and assorted publications too numerous to mention.
Michiko Kakutani, the famously cantankerous New York Times book reviewer, has agreed that Eggers' talent is "staggering," as have writers David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, David Sedaris and David Remnick (who published an excerpt of his book in the New Yorker under the title of "Here Come the Orphans!" earlier this year.) His readings are standing room only, the new issue of McSweeney's sells out as soon as it arrives (shipping is rather slow, as Eggers decided to have them printed in Iceland), and even his publisher ran out of review copies of the book a week before its publication date.
The book in question, Eggers' first, is about a boy (Dave Eggers) raising another boy (his brother, Christopher, called "Toph"). The Eggers' parents died of cancer within 32 days of each other, leaving Dave, then 21, as the surrogate parent of Toph, then 8. They leave their home in the wealthy suburb of Lake Forest (outside Chicago) and follow sister Beth, then 23, to Berkeley, where she attends law school.
The story is, as one might expect, "heartbreaking," tragic and inspirational, but as Eggers tells it, it is also funny, lyrical and liberating, full of madcap escapades and slapstick humor. In Eggers' telling, this story of orphans making their way in the world resembles a Pippi Longstocking fantasy gone wild. He acknowledges that along with the sense of being hard-done-to comes the existential freedom to redefine the entire notion of family: Life assumes a "sense of mobility, of infinite possibility, having suddenly found oneself in a world with neither floor nor ceiling."
It's a true story, more or less, and Eggers is relentless in detailing which parts are more true than others: In his preface he walks the reader through the various changes he's made in dialogue, characters, location and time. He even finagled a highly idiosyncratic copyright page out of Simon & Schuster: After claiming that the book is a work of fiction, mostly due to the limits of memory, he acknowledges that most things, people and incidents described are real "because, at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for these things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters -- it felt like driving a car in a clown suit."
The relationship between Dave and Toph, now 29 and 16, pivots around a self-conscious declaration of their unique status -- "We are pathetic. We are stars." -- and the sort of workaday banalities and love found in any parent-child relationship. Their house is messy and they spend a lot of time sock-sliding (Dave provides diagrams of the best routes) and playing Frisbee. Dave threatens to pick up women at parent-teacher conferences and worries that Toph will fail because he is always late for school. Dave goes out drinking with friends and spends the entire evening terrified that Toph will be murdered by the babysitter.
In between, Dave and his friends -- many of them old friends from Lake Forest who moved to California for various reasons -- start a magazine called "Might." And Dave tries -- and fails -- to become a character on MTV's "The Real World."
Eggers hemmed and hawed, but he finally agreed to be interviewed for Mothers Who Think, on the grounds that Salon is "family" -- he was once the editor of the Media Circus site -- and on the condition that we both talk about being young parents. (I am the 26-year-old mother of a 10-year-old.)
So, you don't want to do this interview.
I thought I reached a point where I could never do it again, maybe a month ago. I've had a couple of ridiculous interviews. People who just want to ask me about "The Real World," stuff like that.
So what about "The Real World"? Were they up for having you and Toph? Would you have allowed Toph to move into the Real World house?
I don't know. I'm just lucky that we all came to our senses before something bad happened. I was never that serious about it. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week, probably.
But I fantasize about a lot of things. On the way here, I was thinking about going to Mars, but it didn't mean much. There is a lot of time during the day to think about a lot of things. In the book, I think that some people are misinterpreting my idle thinking as serious thinking. But I'm thinking about 12 things at once, a hundred- thousand times a day. Most people do, I would imagine. But you just choose to write certain things down. I picture my death 20 times a day. But doesn't everybody briefly picture things like that? You have to be true to how active your brain is.
