Dave Eggers
Powell's Books 7:30 pm Wednesday, March 1
1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651 Free
A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster,
375 pages, $23)
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2000 9:30:10 AM
FROM: CBROOKS@WWEEK.COM
SUBJECT: FYI, DAVE EGGERS
TO: MZUSMAN@WWEEK.COM
Mark,
FYI, I'm thinking of running a story on Dave Eggers. Remember
Might magazine in the early 1990s? They nailed the media
to the wall and sifted the zeitgeist of those insanely disaffected
Gen-Xers. They ran cover stories about whether black people
are cooler than white people, started this hilarious column
rating people's gayness, and in one memorable issue colluded
with Adam Rich, of Eight Is Enough fame, to fake his death
and write an over-the-top memorial that was picked up by
many, many news sources as fact.
Might fell victim to the thing that claims most energetic
projects started by people in their 20s (lack of funds),
and Eggers went to work at Esquire magazine. Of course he
didn't like it there. Too much t&a and q&a and r&d
etc. He then started a web site and literary mag called
McSweeney's (bookmark this baby: www.mcsweeneys.net) that
takes on some of the same issues as Might, but in a more
composed, literary and altogether mature and interesting
way (he gets people like Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace
to contribute to the quarterly, but even the letters on
the web site are compelling). One of my favorite features
on the site is this series they did called The Service Industry
that is just a recounting of dialogue and scenarios from
various jobs, mostly media-related. There's also the series
called The Top 10 Most Censored Press Releases and, of course,
Interviews with Drivers of Lunch Trucks.
Now he's just released a book called A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius. It's a memoir of sorts. When Eggers
was 21, both of his parents died of unrelated cancers within
a five-week period, and he took over custody of his 8-year-old
brother, Toph. But wait, there's more. Yes, you've got your
loss, your love, your hope, your career, your family, as
most of these tell-all books do. But Eggers is able to zoom
in on the orphan in us all. He uses a lot of unconventional
writing styles to engage you (he offers "rules and suggestions
for enjoyment of this book" and often breaks out of a scene
to speak directly to the reader). I know it sounds gimmicky,
but it's effective in drawing you in. I haven't been this
seduced by a book in quite a while. He's coming to Powell's.
I am trying to get an interview, but apparently he's no
longer doing phoners. I can get an e-mail interview, though;
I'll let you know how it goes.
Caryn
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2000 11:53:30 AM
FROM: CBROOKS@WWEEK.COM
SUBJECT: CALLING DAVE EGGERS
TO: MCSWEENEYS@EARTHLINK.NET
Hello Dave Eggers,
I was set up for a phone interview with you, but then I
was told by your harried publicist that "Dave doesn't do
phone interviews anymore," and that our only way to communicate
was via e-mail.
I am pushing aside my fears that:
1) I am not really communicating with Dave but most likely
a stand-in and the result of this media "experiment" might
run on the McSweeney's site. Ha ha, hee hee.
2) You will not respond to my e-mail by the God-demanded
time of 5 pm Pacific Standard Time this Saturday, Feb. 19,
and I will be left with a huge, gaping hole in the paper
where the interview was supposed to go.
3) Your refusal to answer my questions will make me not
like you. I really want to like you because I think your
book is fucking amazing.
Attached are the questions:
Thanks for your time, Dave.
Caryn
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2000 6:51:12 AM
MESSAGE FROM:
MCSWEENEYS@EARTHLINK.NET
SUBJECT: RE: CALLING DAVE EGGERS
TO: CBROOKS@WWEEK.COM
Caryn,
A few questions I skipped. Hope this is all okay.
DE
In AHWOSG you do a lot of McSweeney's-style antics. You
include a list of "rules and suggestions" for reading the
book (for example, you tell readers they might want to skip
a chunk of the middle of the book because it concerns "the
lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives
are very difficult to make interesting..."). On the copyright
page you list your physical attributes and rate your gayness.
But the meat of the book is not really antic-filled; it's
as if the antics were a moat to keep certain kinds of people
away. Because really, most anyone could grab onto your book.
This could be an Oprah book club selection. Maybe you didn't
want that. Your thoughts?
You pretty well got it. Obviously, the preface and acknowledgments
sections are a sort of stalling. That sort of thing, where
you inhabit some safe, even if unusual, context--like a
copyright page or whatever--is easier than writing a straight-ahead
linear narrative about your mother's slow death. So I stall
with the gimmickry until I can't stall any more. But everything
I do is about or as a result of stalling. McSweeney's came
about as I was stalling on the book proposal (which I never
actually completed). While I stall on McSweeney's I draw
a lot. While I stall on the drawing I write silly things
under pseudonyms. While I'm stalling on these things, usually
very very late at night, I call friends in San Francisco
and L.A.; anyone who's still awake. I pity my friends on
your coast.
Might magazine tried to invert the media machine, often
by using media celebs to make fun of themselves. I get a
sense from your book that you now kind of regret some of
those things, that eviscerating these people was the result
of envy and bitterness. What made you change your mind?
Has your own little bit of fame given you some clarity on
the proceedings?
That's exactly it. The world of journalism is inhabited
by both the good-hearted sort, who feel no need to bring
down anyone simply because they're enjoying some success,
and the bitter sort, who wish *they* were acting in movies
or running for Senate or whatever, and thus sublimate their
bitterness through cheap shots and sniping. We were definitely
the latter type. We tore into famous people simply because
they were famous and we were not. And that's what a lot
of journalists do: they seek to even the playing field between
themselves and whatever famous person du jour with little
jabs and supposedly telling observations meant to embarrass
their subject. No one wants to be an acolyte, or part of
the chorus, so the writer who has something to prove must
stand apart and say mean or speculative things, to make
clear that they are apart from the pack, that they think
independently.
For example, a while back, an interviewer from a daily
newspaper talked to me, and we got along, and she very much
liked my book, and all seemed well with the world. Well,
she then talked to her editor there, and that editor, in
the wake of some of the publicity the book had gotten, wanted
to slant the piece in a new way; he no longer wanted the
piece he had agreed upon, a normal piece about the book
and McSweeney's. He now wanted coverage of the coverage,
and he wanted it to be contrarian. Which is unsettling,
because now editors are dictating the content, and the writer's
interpretation of her subject, not according to the truth,
but in reaction to whatever else is out there. Again, all
things I've done as an editor and a writer, but hard to
take being the subject.
What was the soundtrack for writing this book?
I'll talk about one song I listened to.
Every so often, I leave Brooklyn and rent a room in
whatever motel I can find in central Connecticut--the usual
*no phones, no e-mail, get some work done goddamnit* motivation.
When I was really needing to finish this book, I stayed
out there, at a motel on the highway frequented by prostitutes
and their men, for about a week. Shortly after getting there,
I realized that I had forgotten any kind of music-playing
device, and my CDs. Which is a problem, because I listen
to music every second I work, all played on a little Sony
portable thing a friend left at my house a few years ago.
So after a day of losing my mind with the silence and
sounds of porno playing in adjoining rooms--it came standard
at this motel--I finally remembered that my computer has
a built-in CD player. (I am always slow to come to such
realizations). So I went out to the Wiz off the highway
to buy a CD or two, and ended up getting Beth Orton's Central
Reservation. Then I did what I always do, I latched onto
a particular song, in this case "Sweetest Decline," and
listened to that one song, on a continuous loop, for the
next six days. No joke. I tend to try to wear a song out,
to rid myself of it. But that song, I still haven't solved.
I still listen to it for days on end.
I see that you reviewed Lorrie Moore's Birds of America
for Salon. I see that you are a Lorrie Moore fan. I see
some similarities between yourself and Moore, the way you
both are able to plumb the souls of your "characters" and
you both are (in your words) "funny and mean." Your thoughts?
Lorrie Moore was my first huge infatuation, writer-wise.
I was in college when someone gave me Anagrams, and after
that I devoured everything she wrote. For a while I was
writing a lot like her, but soon enough realized that I
couldn't write as carefully as she does--I'm too hyper and
messy, I guess.
But the main thing I like about her is that she has,
in interviews, made the case that any book without humor--and
I'm paraphrasing horribly here--isn't really accurately
reflecting human experience, because everyone laughs, all
the time. Try going to the store to buy a newspaper without
the clerk bantering with you. Or even in the saddest relationships,
when someone slams a door and gets in her car, it's as likely
as not that she's going to come back, because she forgot
her keys, and you're both going to laugh, even when you
want to kill each other. It's always there.
So when people point out Moore's sense of humor, and
how very funny things happen in her very sad stories, it's
not so much that she does what she does, but why don't others
do it more often?
Would you ever want your book to be turned into a movie
under any circumstances? If so, what would those circumstances
be?
It's a really hard thing, that notion.
As you may know, there are people in Los Angeles willing
to pay a great deal of money for this story. Enough money
to make real a lot of McSweeney's's [how weird does that
look?] dreams, chiefly the hope that we could make McSweeney's
into a publishing company, producing a dozen or so books
a year, on top of the quarterly. Beautiful, odd, uncommercial
books that otherwise will never see the light of day. But
then I'd have to live with this movie, and even if it's
a good movie--and I am pretty sure, given who has expressed
interest, that those making it would be good-movie-making
people--Toph and I still have to walk around, forever, having
been characters in a movie. It would be endlessly surreal,
and I'm not sure it would be worth it.
But I haven't ruled it out. But I would hope, desperately,
that they wouldn't try to make a faithful adaptation. There
wouldn't be a way to do that well. So if someone made sort
of a corollary work of art, taking the book as a starting-off
point for something more strange and structurally odd, that
might be good.
What are you reading right now?
Right now I'm doing a lot of research into the history
of the fetus in medical drawings, so I have a lot of old
books and anatomy manuals around.
Actual-book-wise, I'm in the middle of something called
Chang and Eng, by Darin Strauss, due out in the summer.
It's a novel about the lives of the famous Siamese twins
of the nineteenth century, and so far it's really great.
Extremely vivid and evocative, but very funny, too. I mean,
these men, who were repeatedly almost killed because of
their freakdom, ended up living in North Carolina, married
to sisters. The story gets weirder and weirder.
I love historical fiction, though I read too little
of it. You know what else is great? Gore Vidal's 1876. I
also recommend to everyone George Saunders's new book, Pastoralia.
And Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli.
Does your social life revolve around McSweeney's?
No. My social life revolves around the same friends
I've had since fifth grade, most of whom live out here or
in San Francisco. I almost never do media-oriented events,
because I get incredibly tired of talking about magazines
and publishing. I like hearing about babies and football,
which is what my longer-term friends like talking about.
Very few of my best friends have any interest in any of
this stuff. They roll their eyes.
Do you think boys will like your book more than girls,
or do you think it might be an even draw?
So far it seems like a draw. The odd thing is that anyone
likes it at all, I think. Older people, who I figured would
hate it, have been very kind. It's all really confusing.
I tried to make something ugly and I guess I failed.
Are you happy?
Yes. No. Yes.
What has been the response at readings you've done so far?
I've read that you're kind of uncomfortable reading in public.
Is that going away?
I had never read aloud before last week, in San Francisco,
where I started the book tour. I don't come from that tradition,
the creative-writing-class/seminar/school tradition, where
you write and read aloud and are critiqued. So all this
is new. But I have been to a ton of readings, and always
found them a little unnecessarily boring, even when I've
really liked the author reading. So I try to entertain a
little, with guest speakers and audience participation.
For the first New York reading I had two go-go dancers,
male and female, who danced on a table behind me while I
read. I think that went over pretty well. Afterward, we
chartered a bus and took about 50 attendees to a bar near
the Newark airport. Everyone got blitzed, and some of the
people, strangers before the bus, ended up hooking up at
the bar. It was pretty great.
In San Francisco I had a fireman open the show, Lt.
Fernando Juarez of the SFFD, who spoke for about ten minutes
about fire safety in the home. When he said 'stop, drop
and roll' I almost fainted. Maybe I'm just trying distract
people from my own poor oratory skills. But he had brochures,
too, and everyone likes a good brochure.
Are you interested in writing fiction next?
Yes. Fiction will save me from myself.
Some people kind of get off on creating a flurry of both
positive and negative press. You seem to be able to use
humor as a diversion for the rest of your life; why not
now?
When I was in San Francisco, I had a cartoon for about
five years that ran every week. I got lots of hate mail,
lots of nice mail. And the hate mail rarely affected me.
But for some reason--and I've talked to other writers who
say the same thing--with certain projects you can become
more sensitive, unwillingly. Maybe I'm just tired.
Anything special planned for your Portland visit? Should
we expect a straight reading or something a little more
riotous?
No plans yet. I tend to put the shows together the day
before, so we'll see. But I recommend everyone bring their
boots.
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 23,
2000
|
