2024: THE EYES & THE IMPOSSIBLE by Dave Eggers
To be a hero is to go forth. So we went forth.
“My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.”
- David Mamet1
“I am somewhere on some stupid rickety scaffolding and I’m trying to get your stupid fucking attention I’ve been trying to show you this, just been trying to show you this - What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I’ll stand before you and I’ll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I’ve been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me - Oh do it, do it, you motherfuckers, do it do it you fuckers finally, finally, finally.”
- Dave Eggers, final lines of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
At the end of 2023, as I started looking through my shrinking list of Newbery winners, I had to start thinking through what I wanted my next writing project to be. I think what I've landed on is “nothing” - I've been very busy for the past several years, and it will be nice to have one fewer newsletter to worry about - but there were a few ideas I batted around. I scribbled down some notes for two novels that will never see the light of day. G.O.T.H.S. will continue at whatever pace makes the most sense to me based on whatever mood I'm in at a randomly selected moment in time (the system works great for me). And I did, I'm ashamed to say, consider starting a third newsletter on an even narrower topic than my previous two.
Yes, another one! I had wrestled with Catholicism AND WON, I had wrestled with a list of 103 children's books AND WON, and there would be a new third newsletter focused on ONLY ONE BOOK. A yearlong series of essays, spread throughout 2025, on a single book celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025:
Yes, 2025 marks a full quarter-century since the publication of one of the most influential pieces of English-language writing of the 2000s, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Dave Eggers was a college dropout whose main early professional accomplishment was creating the short-lived cult Gen X magazine Might, but in 2000 he published a kind-of memoir that became a national bestseller and Pulitzer finalist; out of this initial success, Eggers has built a storied and prolific career as both a novelist and essayist, created the tutoring nonprofit 826 Valencia along with other philanthropic pursuits, and built up2 his own highly respected independent publishing house, McSweeney’s, which also spun off a comedy blog that was popular with the pre-social-media Millennial set. I first read AHWOSG in 2001, after graduating eighth grade, in the car during a family vacation to Yellowstone, and it had an immeasurable impact on my adolescent view of the world and of writing. I hadn’t read a lot of books for adults before, but even the books for adults that a precocious thirteen-year-old would crack were nothing like AHWOSG, with its manic blending of tragedy and comedy and its stream-of-consciousness descriptions of early-nineties Berkeley and its thorough exploration of the neuroses of a guilty Catholic Midwesterner who had seen too much death in his short life and its weird surreal digressions and in-universe meta commentary and writerly asides to the reader, like the foreword explaining that you don’t really have to read past the fourth chapter if you don’t want to, or the countless edits and additions that got added into each printing of the book, including the hundred-plus page appendix of deleted passages added back in to the paperback version, subtitled Mistakes We Knew We Were Making. It blew my middle school mind.
So the idea for 2025 was to start the newsletter AHWOSG25. Twenty-five full-length essays in 2025 - so roughly one every two weeks - on the book, what was in it, the other Eggers works, the other works of 2000s culture that clearly drew their influence from or occupied the same psychic space as AHWOSG, the legacy of McSweeneys, the things I wrote when I was trying to be like Dave. I call Dave Eggers, truthfully, “the writer who has influenced me the most that I’m most ashamed to say has influenced me at all”. The project would be part funny essay collection, part literary analysis, part history of the awful pop culture of the 2000s, part mortifying memoir of Aspiring Writer Tony. I still think AHWOSG25 would have been a great project, and I think I would have been a good person to attempt it. But, for reasons mainly of time, I’m not going to make it happen. There are other things for me to work on, and the world will not be forced to learn about my heavily conflicted feelings on Dave Eggers.
Except that this motherfucker went and won himself a Newbery.
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius is framed as a memoir, although Eggers states up front that large parts of the memoir have been adjusted or fictionalized, and all of that is reinforced throughout the work, as a recurring feature of the dialogue are characters - who are real people or based on real people - pointing out the discrepancies between what they’re saying and doing and what actually got said and done in Dave’s real life. There are a ton of metatextual comments and stylistic messes, all of which were extremely innovative at the time and imitated by everyone for the next twenty-five years. But here’s the rough gist of what happens: Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, and was in his early twenties when he lost both of his parents to cancer, within a month of each other. He inherited custody of his eight-year-old brother, Toph, and moved out to Berkeley, where they both lived as foul bachelors while Eggers lived a Gen-X-slacker life and tried to get a magazine off the ground with his friends in the bay area. Through it all, he has awkward sexual encounters with high school friends, and other high school friends die unexpectedly, and he fails to fit in with the parents at his brother’s school, and generally wrestles with the death surrounding him and everyone he knows, sort-of oscillating between two poles of “all of this death makes my life important and means I’ve been chosen for something” and “all of this death means that I myself am going to die any minute now”.
Eggers was correct in his original foreword that the strongest part of the book is the first four chapters; the center that holds the book together is the relationship between Dave and Toph, two brothers thirteen years apart, as they build an extremely messy and chaotic life together. I still remember laughing out loud the first time I read through Dave’s extremely limited menu of the regular weekly meal plan. The second half of AHWOSG, though, is mostly about the attempt to get Might magazine off the ground and is generally made up of long passages of Dave and his friends dicking around. All of these friends - Moodie, Marny, Flagg, Meredith - are kind of interchangeable and not really developed as characters, likely by design. It’s hard to care about anything that happens in the second half of AHWOSG, because so much of it focuses on things that happen outside of Dave’s household and outside of Dave’s head, but the story doesn’t really exist outside of Dave’s head either. It’s his extremely idiosyncratic structure, his run-on sentences, his feelings and reactions, and everyone else is just a prop in an extremely solipsistic story. Now, this isn’t to say that Eggers is this self-centered asshole incapable of empathy - he’s written plenty of other fiction and nonfiction works that required deep compassion and understanding of others3 - and in fact, he’s well-aware of the self-centeredness of AHWOSG and calls it out repeatedly in the text of the book, and clearly considers it inescapable and also an important reflection of the general prevailing attitude held by him and his friends at the time, and so he’s going to just grit his teeth and write this thing even if it makes it clear to everyone that he’s an asshole, because at least he knows he’s an asshole. This technique - and Eggers isn’t the only writer to have done this in a memoir - feels like a cheat every time you see it. I did stuff like this before I grew into the revered children’s book blogger that you see in front of you today. He only pulled it off part of the time in AHWOSG, and his other early work - like the short stories about fictional selfish idiots that eventually got collected in How We Are Hungry, or the novel You Shall Know Our Velocity!, which included a bizarre and lengthy post-publication addendum, dropped into the middle of the paperback version, narrated by another character in the novel explaining that the original narrator of the first edition of the novel had made most of the story up entirely - has the same relatively low hit rate against a very high level of ambition.
But oh man, when it hits…there’s so much here that eighth-grade Tony never would have known would map onto his own life so closely. Eggers moved from the midwest to California basically on a whim in hopes of resetting his life, which is what I did when I was twenty-two, and when he spends pages gleefully describing his first drive around the mountains and concludes “I mean, have you fucking been to California?”, that’s something I would feel myself, a decade later. When he and his friend are brainstorming ideas for an artist collective, and things get so out of whack that he starts proposing “every day a world-clearing sort of revolution, a bloodless one, one more interested in regeneration than any sort of destruction. Every day we start with a fresh world - or, better yet, each day we start with this world, the one we know, and by nine, ten a.m., we’ve destroyed it,” he’s speaking to my own stupid tendencies to chase crazy ideas for my own creative outlets and crumple half of them up before even attempting them and then come up with crazier ones the next day. William T. Vollmann makes an appearance because Might did an interview with him in the early nineties; this was the first time I had heard about the man who has probably influenced my own understanding of the purpose of writing, and my own understanding of, like, human morality, more than anyone else. When Dave complains to Toph that “it’s maddening, actually, when you sit down, as I will once I put you to bed, to try to render something like this, a time or place and ending up with only this kind of feebleness - one, two dimensions of twenty,” he’s accurately capturing the madness of not being able to keep pace with your own thoughts, of wanting to write and explore so much more but just never having enough time, of just always having something else to do, or not even really do, but you just waste time instead of writing, instead of capturing more, why aren’t you capturing more? When Dave and Toph move to New York in the final chapter because Dave is tired of the bay area with “Everything weirder, the extremes more pronounced, the contrasts too strong,”...I’m probably going to think about that phrase a lot when I think about how my life feels harder every single day. Anyways, the guy missed on his Newbery medalist.
2024 medalist The Eyes And The Impossible is narrated by a dog. It is extremely not for me. I also don’t think it’s especially good as a novel; the story is disjointed, with multiple apparent head fakes before it becomes apparent what the main plot is actually going to be, and it’s narrated by a dog that talks like Dave Eggers, talking to other animals that all talk like Dave Eggers, who all live in some sort of animal preserve on an island and are trying to jailbreak out the three ancient buffalo and get them back to their ancestral homes on the mainland. I don't think it really works. But hey, sometimes it hits.
There’s a thirteen-year-old kid in a car in 2001, a kid who grew up reading a lot of Newbery winners, who’s working through A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius and having his mind blown, and realizing that even his own neuroses and weird habits and intrusive thoughts can be an interesting and compelling story that other people want to read, realizing that, as he is becoming kind-of-not-a-kid-anymore, he, too, can be the main character of a meaningful and funny and moving story, and that’s going to get him into all sorts of trouble as he tries out music and writing and standup and improv and other attention-grabbing hobbies.
And he’s wrong, is the thing, and he’s allowed to be wrong because he’s thirteen, but he’s still wrong. He’s not entitled to his own story. His story does not exist separately from the stories of the other people around him, there is no spotlight on him because there’s nobody operating a spotlight at all, there’s just him, and you, and them, and those people over there, and they’re all going to have to find a way to help each other through whatever this is as everything becomes weirder and the extremes become more pronounced and the contrasts become too strong.
He’s not going to be wrong about this particular thing forever; he’s going to get to somewhere a little bit better when he reads another book by the same author, twenty-four years later, that includes the line “Every reasonable creature knows that the worst thing any creature can do all day is think of themselves. If there are troubles in your mind, you should think first of the troubles of others; it is the essence of liberation. That is, freedom begins the moment we forget ourselves.” He’s going to have kids of his own when he reads this line, after spending two-plus years thinking through how to tell his children that the world is bigger than they think, that they’re not alone in it, that there are things we can all share with each other yes even stupid things, that even in this dark era there is hope to be found in community and radical action. And underneath all of those messages is the essence of liberation: the lesson that you do not have a life story beyond what you and the people around you share selflessly with each other. He hasn’t figured out how to tell his daughters that yet, and they’re not old enough to get it anyways, and, apparently, he has to teach them that very important lesson in a world that looks pretty dark and strange and that will try to teach them the exact opposite lesson. But he’s gotta start somewhere, so today, he’s just going to show them another story, just like he did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, and just like his parents did for him. He’ll just help them see one more part of this bigger world. He’ll introduce them to one more character who shows them that they’re not alone. He’ll show them one more person who resisted oppression. He’ll show them one more community that held together through the unthinkable. They’ll get a little closer to getting it today, and he will too. And until they all get there, he’s happy just knowing that he loves them, and they love him, and tomorrow’s library day.
David Mamet quotes or enjoyment of David Mamet’s work does not constitute an endorsement of David Mamet's personal or political views. Hey did you guys ever see The Spanish Prisoner? 1997, con game movie, Mamet wrote and directed, Steve Martin is the bad guy! I just rewatched it on Tubi, it’s pretty good! The wild thing is it’s rated PG, so even though all of the dialogue is unmistakably in Mamet-speak cadence and tempo, there are none of the characteristic curse words and it’s honestly kind of funny to witness.
I use this term instead of “founded” as the founding of McSweeney’s technically predates AHWOSG by two years, although it’s safe to say very few people - including, possibly, Eggers himself - gave a shit about it until Eggers was more established as a writer. In 2014, Eggers also restructured McSweeney’s into a nonprofit publisher.
And then he’s also written some dogshit books, like the aimless A Hologram For The King, or the Trump allegory The Captain And The Glory, the critical consensus of which appears to be “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read”.