![]() ''We were always so oddly white-trashy for our town,'' he writes, ''with our gruesome problems, and our ugly used cars, our PintosĪnd Malibus and Camaros, and our 70's wallpaper and plaid couches and acne.'' In his eyes, the tragedy turns him into a kind of darkly comic superhero: the ''mild-mannered person transformed But as it was in the movie so it was in real life: beneath the town's glassy surface, he writes, ''people were dying in dark and bewildering ways.''Īs Richard Ford once put it, ''Life-forever is a lie of the suburbs.'' And in reticent, white-bread Lake Forest, where nothing is ever supposed to go wrong, the death of Eggers's parents renders his family unpresentable, as ifīy dying they had somehow failed to keep up appearances. He and his two older siblings, Beth and Bill, went to public schools, worked from the time they were teenagers cutting lawns or scooping ice cream, attended The suburb, in other words, is so ordinary it's a joke. The interview, Eggers concedes, is really just ''a catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that would be too awkward to force together otherwise,''Ī way of conjuring a world ''that will be familiar to many people, especially those who've had the privilege of seeing 'Ordinary People,' with Timothy Hutton in a breakthrough role.'' Raise his 8-year-old brother, Christopher, or Toph, on his own. First Chapter: 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'Ī HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUSīout halfway through Dave Eggers's exhilarating memoir, ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' he interviews toīe on MTV's ''Real World,'' and in the process describes what it was like to grow up in Lake Forest, Ill., before both his parents died of cancer in a span of 32 days, leaving him, at 21, to.A Wry Survivor of a World That Fell Apart Finds a Quick Celebrity (Feb.Michiko Kakutani Reviews Dave Eggers's 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' (Feb. ![]() ![]() A young man's offbeat account of raising his 8-year-old sibling after both their parents die suddenly.
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