The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative

8. Sudden Memoir (2)

8 Sudden Memoir (2) Dave Eggers: A Trauma (Kind of) Resolved Though the sudden memoir is still a fledgling, the best one I know of, a thematic kin to The Mother Knot, is Dave Eggers’s A HeartbreakingWork of Staggering Genius (2000). Eggers’s memoir is about the coterminous deaths of his parents and the abrupt change the author faces in his tidy life because he now must raise his eightyear -old brother. While Harrison’s ultrathin volume is unidimensionally intense and directionally certain, Eggers’s bardic yawp is self-indulgent and artful as well as confused and conflicted about what he thinks his story is or should or might be but can’t quite figure out, despite himself. Both stories share an ending: the dispersal of a parent’s cremains. Both stories also take on the great parental attachment adult children suffer, which directs them to ultimately purge that attachment. How Eggers deconstructs the suddenness of his trauma is wholly original. I think I can explain it (or, as Eggers’s Gen-Xers would  larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 89 say-ask, I think I can kind of explain it?). He begins (but not before he mocks the memoir form with forty-plus pages of rules, suggestions, acknowledgments, flowchart, a financial reckoning of his advance, a drawing of a stapler—the whole desultory feat, he instructs us, we can skip) with the cancer deaths of his parents, his father predeceasing his mother by five weeks. Their departures are portrayed differently: the mother’s anguish during her final days is dramatized while the father’s is shown piecemeal, distant and unfelt. The twenty-one-year-old Eggers fits their dying into the quotidian regime he, his older sister Beth, and his eight-year-old brother Christopher, or Toph, are living. Unlike parents who lose their children, children don’t stop their lives to mourn when parents die. They go on, comically, blindly—unfazed by grief, so it seems. Months later, Toph says he’s starting to forget them. Eggers gets out the photo albums to make sure his brother doesn’t. “Unfazed by grief” may be too pat. For the young, grief has not possessed them yet. It is festering in the subconscious, as Eggers will learn many station stops down the road. Thus, it’s no surprise to find sudden death sidelined by a sudden new life once the siblings move from Chicago to Berkeley. There, while his sister studies law, Eggers manages Toph. (The action of the memoir—it all feels sudden, feels yesterday—takes place mostly in the Bay Area and covers Eggers’s early twenties and Toph’s adolescence.) As the go-to parent, wisenheimer Eggers must get Toph to school, be at home when he comes back, get him to eat decent food and not just junk (which both crave and consume), live on a budget, and find the right sitter (the biggest hassle for the gonadal author). Most of what Eggers wants is to partake of things his age—goof off with his buddies, spend time at a magazine for which he adds his graphic-design talent, start a cultural stir with his ideas, whose sybaritic proportions remind us of Andy Warhol’s Factory. To be a parent when biology and all temptation are telling him to socialize and stay out at night makes  The Memoir and the Memoirist larson.1-99 3/20/07 9:18 AM Page 90 for much paternalistic comedy. Eggers is a libertine dad. He and Toph are moonwalkers: they play Frisbee, spend hours sock-sliding in their new house, go wild at a beach picnic. For the first half of the book Eggers freewheels. He follows tangents in the life and in the narrative; he riffs on the Berkeley-ness of Berkeley; he fantasizes about single moms he meets at PTA. We sense his resisting the notion that a memoir—like his and his brother’s lives—have a goal. We also sense his goallessness cannot be sustained. As loose as he is, Eggers is also paranoid. Eggers (kind of ) realizes that what he’s doing to/for Toph is misguided and selfish: bad things may result. He doesn’t just wake up to this fact or start acting more responsibly (though he does report real and imagined social pressures that insist he shape up). Once the predictability of parenting and...