After both of his parents die within five weeks of each other, twenty-something Dave Eggers becomes the guardian of his eight-year-old brother, Toph, and moves with him from Chicago to Berkeley to start over. Blending raw memoir with self-aware, formally inventive digressions, the book follows Eggers's improvised attempts at parenting and grief-stricken reinvention while he co-founds a scrappy San Francisco magazine. It is as much a restless meditation on the vanity and impossibility of memoir-writing itself as it is the story it sets out to tell.
Books mentioned in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (4)
Hiroshima by John Hersey: “long enough to provide Toph with a degree of comfort, stability, of peace and well-being before drifting off to his child's slumberland — We're reading John Hersey's Hiroshima.”
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: “Before that was Catch-22, though we didn't finish that—with the obscure (for him) references and all the characters, it was taking us an hour to get through each page.”
Mindblowing Sex in the Real World by Sari Locker: “even though you would never have any real interest in the twenty-four-year-old author of Mindblowing Sex in the '90s—" "Mindblowing Sex in the Real World." "Fine.”
The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard: “At the moment they're called The Gods Hate Kansas, after a '60s science fiction novel, but that name has been held for almost six months, and it's time for moving on.”