After reading his The Circle and then his latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They…?, I decided it was high time to go back to Egger’s first major work and see what all the fuss was about. Written when he was a mere twenty-two, this memoir/novel describes a difficult life starting with the death of both his parents from cancer within a month or two of each other, when Eggers is just 21, his younger brother Toph is just eight, his sister Beth is in law school and their older brother Bill works for a Washington DC think tank. Unable to stay in their house and in an upscale community that has long viewed the family as outcasts and now as pitiable outcasts, they sell the family home and move to California where it is agreed that Eggers will live with and raise his little brother, with Beth’s help.
If you can make it through the first few chapters which describe in painfully intimate and yet unsentimental detail his mother’s slow and ugly death from stomach cancer on the heels of his father’s sudden demise from lung and brain cancer, the story takes off with Eggers’ discovery of the pain, frustration and joy of raising his little brother with as little emotional scarring as possible, while raising himself to adulthood at the same time. There is a tremendous amount of (often self-deprecating) humor, stream of consciousness chatter, and potent insight here as young Eggers must learn to cope with all the challenges and hypocrisies of the adult world while seeking an outlet for his anger and sense of abandonment through an “anti-Establishment” magazine designed for 20-somethings with lots of questions but few answers to why the world is the way it is.
Along the way, we are treated to hilarious moments of parental angst over leaving his brother with a baby-sitter (serial killer?) for the first time, or trying to organize his friends to do a naked group photo on the beach for his magazine’s cover, with unexpectedly painful results; poignant moments of having to face back-to-school nights as his brother’s guardian, attend the bedside of a colleague in a coma, deal with the mental illness and repeated suicide threats of a friend; sad moments like trying to make sense of his parents’ deaths. ….
As a “sixty-something,” I found myself occasionally losing patience with what felt like adolescent self-indulgence on the author’s part, until I realized that this was young Eggers in survival mode. And in that mode, he draws some profound conclusions about living life and about the world we live in, presented in his own inimitable style. It takes a certain determination to make it through Egger’s “coming-of-age” memoir, but it’s a trip well worth taking.