"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)
The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. A respected magazine editor and founder, a onetime spokesman for Generation X, offers a satiric, eloquent, and thoroughly tradition shattering memoir that discusses deaths of his parents from cancer, his raising of his younger brother, and more. Seller Inventory # DADAX0684863472
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Fine. First Edition - First Printing. Very fine in a very fine dust jacket, which is now Brodart protected. When Dave Eggers was 21 years old, both of his parents died of unrelated cancers within five weeks of each other. In addition to some furniture and an old house in the Chicago suburbs, Dave inherited his 8 year old brother, Toph, and had to deal with becoming an orphan and a parent almost overnight.This is his story of how he dealt with his parents' deaths, moved with Toph to Berkeley, started a magazine, and managed to be young and single and young and a parent. This book ".self-consciously examines the story it is telling and knowingly deconstructs the memoir genre.". Seller Inventory # 012419
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