The things that leap out at you on the second time of reading

It’s funny how different a book can seem when you go back to it, especially if it’s some years later. I have been re-reading Eggers’ experimental memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I loved the first time (although I’ve never been sure about the title – it’s so awkward to actually say, it makes the speaker sound like a bit of an idiot). This time, I’m enjoying it equally, but I’m also discovering all kinds of things that I didn’t notice before, or at least, that did not stick in my memory. The context in which you read something can affect how it strikes you, can change, if only in small ways, the meaning of the book.


While still at college, Eggers lost both of his parents to cancer, in a stroke of horrible coincidence, in the space of a single winter. He was left to raise his seven-year-old brother, and this book is, among other things, an oddly touching account of their unconventional life together. I’d remembered the book’s brutal honesty about bereavement and the author’s fallibility, the experimental style, with characters breaking out of their roles to discuss the book itself, the yearning descriptions of being young and idealistic in San Francisco and the author’s sense that his strange and tragic life has made him somehow chosen, that extraordinary things, for better or worse, will keep on happening to him.

But it came as a complete surprise to me how insightfully, almost prophetically, he writes about the confessional culture fostered by reality TV and its like. Unlike other writers of ‘misery memoirs’, Eggers is sharply analytical about the need for self-revelation that drove him to write the book. He describes the feeling that by exposing his problems to a huge audience, he can somehow dilute his suffering, that his generation should purge where the previous one repressed.

This theme is most apparent in the section of the book where Eggers applies to be on reality TV show The Real World, a forerunner of Big Brother in which a group of ordinary people were filmed living in a house together, although they were free to go in and out as they pleased. What starts as a record of his interview with the producer morphs into a direct plea to the audience, a self-conscious but heartfelt attempt to explain his desperate need for self-exposure. His words should be seen as the voice of the god-knows how many ordinary people who have thrust themselves recklessly into the spotlight and opened themselves up to public mockery:

“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me on television. Let me share this with millions…Everyone must know. I deserve this. I have this coming. Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough?”

“I need community, I need feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take – I will bleed if they will love.”