A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Acknowledgements Summary & Analysis

Eggers thanks the people who have allowed him to write about them, especially Beth and Toph. Moving on, he acknowledges that there are “perhaps too many memoir-sorts of books being written at this juncture.” These texts, he thinks, are “inherently vile and corrupt and wrong and evil and bad.” At the same time, he reminds people that “we could all do worse, as readers and writers.”

Eggers tells a story about running into a writer friend at a bar and telling him that he’s working on a memoir, to which his friend says, “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen into that trap!” This makes Eggers think that “maybe writing about actual events, in the first person, if not from Ireland and before you turned seventy, was Bad.” His friend, he thinks, has a “point.” However, when he asks this man what he’s working on, the critical man replies by saying that he’s writing a screenplay about William S. Burroughs and “the drug culture,” and this makes Eggers feel better. Indeed, he realizes that there are worse ideas than writing a memoir.

If, Eggers says, readers dislike the idea that this book is a memoir, they should feel free to “pretend it’s fiction.” He even makes them an offer: if readers send him their copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and a check for $10.00, he will send them back a floppy disk copy of the manuscript. All the names and places, he explains, will have been changed. What’s more, readers can even use their word processor’s “find and replace” function to change the manuscript themselves, turning the people and places to reflect anything or anyone they want. “This can be about you!” he writes. “You and your pals!”

Eggers establishes that the title of his memoir is intentionally grandiose, but suggests that it was the least ridiculous option of the handful of titles he came up with for the project. He also goes out of his way to describe himself in a way that he thinks will endear him to readers, since he knows that the “success of a memoir—of any book, really—has a lot to do with how appealing its narrator is.” As such, he assures readers that he is like them, that he “falls asleep shortly after he becomes drunk,” that he “sometimes has sex without condoms,” that he “never gave his parents a proper burial” or finished college, and that he “expects to die young” (among other descriptions).

Addressing the content of the memoir itself, Eggers identifies several themes that are woven throughout the text. The first is “The Unspoken Magic of Parental Disappearance,” which has to do with the seemingly “inconceivable” fact that he lost both his parents “in the space of 32 days.” This loss, he suggests, is “accompanied by an undeniable but then of course guilt-inducing sense of mobility, of infinite possibility, having suddenly found oneself in a world with neither floor nor ceiling.” Another salient theme, Eggers notes, is “The Brotherly / Weird Symbiosis Factor,” which has to do with his relationship with his little brother, Toph. Eggers doesn’t spend much time unpacking this in this section, though he does suggest that it runs throughout the book and that the love he has for his brother overshadows any kind of romantic love he might ever have.

The third theme that Eggers identifies is “The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect.” This, he posits, is “probably obvious enough already,” but the “point is” that Eggers doesn’t have “the energy” or “skill” to hide the fact that this book merely tells people things about his life in a way that isn’t “sublimated” or “narrative.” As made evident by the following theme, “The Knowingness About the Book’s Self-Consciousness Aspect,” Eggers makes sure readers know that he’s aware of his memoir’s use of self-consciousness. He says that he “plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality.” He knows that this is a “gimmick,” and as such intends to “preempt” any claim that this gimmick is “simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story.”

Part of the reason Eggers uses “gimmickry” is because he finds it useful to “caricature” the “rage and sorrow” that would otherwise be too intense to write about. What’s more, he feels the need to tell “as many people as possible” about these difficult things—“even in caricatured or condensed form”—because he thinks doing so will “dilute the pain and bitterness.” This idea dovetails with the next theme, entitled, “The Telling the World of Suffering as Means of Flushing or at Least Diluting of Pain Aspect.” From this point on, the themes he provides become increasingly absurd, with long titles and hardly any explanation. On the whole, they have to do either with his desire to tell his story or his feelings of “fatalism” that emerge after his parents die, an experience that makes him feel both “chosen” for greatness and doomed to misery.