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Chapter 5
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Self-Consciousness and Meta-Narration
Coming of Age, Parenthood, and Responsibility
Death, Humor, and the Worst-Case Scenario
Identity
Guilt and Poetic License
Summary
Analysis
MTV’s show The Real World announces that its next season will take place in San Francisco, and puts out a call for cast members. Eggers and his friends make fun of the show, though they’re all secretly “morbidly curious” about it. In the first issue of Might magazine, they run a short joke letter to the producers, a letter in which one of their contributors acts like he desperately wants to be on the show. Eggers laughs with everyone else, but worries that this joke is “making fun of [him] in particular.”
Part of the identity Eggers has cultivated as a young person in San Francisco includes a certain anti-establishment, subversive mentality. As such, he feels obligated to scoff at something as mainstream as The Real World. However, it makes perfect sense that he also would be “morbidly curious” about it—after all, The Real World is a show that claims to depict reality while actually presenting a strange, hyper-aware version of life that is more performative than honest. This aligns with Eggers’s interest in self-examination as an act that can include overblown, hyperbolic, and even fictive elements of storytelling.
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The Might team consists of Eggers and Moodie—the founding editors—as well as Marny and a handful of other old friends. Their office is in “a filthy corner of a shaky warehouse” that costs $250 per month. The rest of the building is full of like-minded young people putting out publications like Wired, which started on the same floor as Might and has now moved two floors up. Also on Might’s floor is a woman named Shalini, who works for an “ecotravel magazine” while also producing her own publication, Hum, which is “dedicated to uniting and speaking for/to/from twentysomethings of the South Asian American persuasion.” There are also several other magazines in the building, all of them devoted to documenting and changing the way young people live.
When Eggers starts working on Might in an environment swarming with people his age, it becomes clear that he and his contemporaries are interested in mining the experience of being young. Even the language they use to describe their endeavors speaks to this sense of youthful excitement. For instance, Shalini’s magazine is intended to reach “twentysomethings,” a word that Eggers himself will use in the coming years as a way of describing the purpose of Might.
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Might positions itself as a publication that isn’t part of a particular scene, despite the fact that Eggers and his team are thoroughly entrenched in their generation’s anti-consumerist, contrarian, independent spirit. They put ads in other magazines declaring what they “are” and what they’re “not” about, declaring that Might “will be created by and for us twentysomethings.” They write this “listing-manifesto,” and within days of putting it into the world, they receive an onslaught of applications from interns and contributors willing to work for free because the concept of the magazine appeals to them.
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In the first issue, Might runs an opening essay that says: “Could a bunch of people under twenty-five put out a national magazine with no corporate backing and no clue about marketing? With actual views about actual issues? With a sense of purpose and a sense of humor? With guts and goals and hope? Who would read a magazine like that? You might.” They align themselves with causes, though mainly to access the organizations’ mailing lists. In essence, they try as hard as they can to establish themselves as a fresh, new presence in the media world. They even choose a picture of a man running naked on the beach as the first issue’s cover, and decide that the inside cover should show a huge group frolicking in the nude, too. When they photograph this, though, only four people agree to pose, including Eggers, Moodie, and Marny.
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Meanwhile, Eggers and Moodie do freelance design work for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Marny waitresses four nights per week. Eggers and Moodie feel as if working for the Chronicle is a flagrant “misuse of [their] creative powers,” but they have no choice but to keep producing work for the publication. Still, they feel strapped for money and desperate to get the word out about Might, so they decide to apply to be on The Real World, thinking that being on the show will give the magazine fantastic exposure. After sending in a strange but oddly captivating audition tape, Eggers receives a call from a producer named Laura, who invites him to come do a videotaped interview.
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When Eggers arrives at MTV’s San Francisco headquarters, Laura sits him down and asks him questions. Reproducing their conversation in the form of an interview transcript, Eggers talks about growing up in Lake Forest, which Laura points out is “one of the wealthiest towns in America.” Eggers acknowledges this but insists he wasn’t rich. He talks about his parents, explaining that his mother was a teacher and his father a lawyer, and when Laura asks if their family had much money when he was growing up, he reiterates that they weren’t rich, though he also makes it clear that they weren’t necessarily poor, either.
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Laura asks if Eggers felt like Lake Forest was divided based on wealth, wondering if he felt different from the rest of the town. As he answers, he tells her that he and his friends used to call the rich private high school “Country Gay” instead of “Country Day.” “This was a fairly intolerant town,” Laura replies. “Homogenous, yes; intolerant, no,” Eggers says. “It was overwhelmingly white, of course, but racism of any kind—at least outwardly expressed—is kind of gauche, so we basically grew up without a sense of prejudice, firsthand or even in the abstract.” He then tells a long story about a kid in his neighborhood who hung a Confederate flag in his window and convinced a bunch of other students to become bigots like him.
When Laura asks about whether or not there were many African American people in Lake Forest—or in Eggers’s high school—Eggers says that everyone in his school except four or five kids were white. One of the black kids, he notes, was Mr. T’s daughter, since Mr. T moved to Lake Forest and bought a mansion. He then tells a story about how the town got extremely upset when Mr. T cut down the trees bordering his house because they cast too much shade onto his property. Eggers’s father, for his part, thought it was hilarious how angry all these white people got about a black celebrity coming into town and cutting down their precious trees.
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Eggers’s interview with Laura begins to spiral out into a vast overview of his entire childhood, tying in random stories like one time when his childhood best friend’s dad committed suicide by lighting himself on fire in his front yard. Eventually, Laura asks him why he’s telling her these stories, and he says, “These are the stories I tell. Isn’t that what you’re looking for? These terrible deaths tearing through this pristine community, all the more strange and tragic given the context, the incongruity—” Before he can finish, she interjects, saying, “So tell me something: This isn’t really a transcript of the interview, is it?” He admits that it’s not, and she suggests that it’s just a “device,” a “catchall for a bunch of anecdotes that would be too awkward to force together otherwise.”
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Eggers launches into an “anecdote” about Sarah, a girl two years older than him who was on his swim team. Eggers always admired her but never actually talked to until he saw her at a crowded bar shortly after his father died (but before his mother died). He and Sarah hit it off, and she took him back to her parents’ house, where they had sex and he slept in her bed. In the morning, she snuck him out and drove him home. Eggers wanted to tell her that what they’d done was a mistake because he was dating Kirsten, but when they got to his house he saw his mother through the window. Not wanting to tell her who Sarah was, he simply kissed Sarah and went inside.
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Laura asks Eggers what he thinks he can offer The Real World, and he says he can serve as the “Tragic Guy.” Plus, he says, he has Might, which makes him unique. When she asks about the magazine’s name, he tells her it’s a “double entendre,” since “might” can mean both “power and possibility.” Making his case for why he should be on the show, he points out that Laura will need to cast a diverse set of people. He says she’ll need to find one or two black people, a couple of “really great-looking” but rather stupid people, a homosexual person, an Asian, Latino, or Native American, and—finally—a “tragic” white guy. He suggests that once viewers get to know him, his “struggles” will become “universal and inspiring.”
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Laura asks Eggers why he wants to be on The Real World, and he says he wants people to “witness” his “youth.” He also says he wants to share his “suffering,” since “by sharing it [he] will dilute it,” though Laura says she thinks this will only “amplify” it. He disagrees, arguing that by going on the show he will add to his “lattice,” which is a term he uses to refer to “everyone else,” everyone in his life. “I see us as one, as a vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsible to one another, because no one else is,” he says. As he continues to speak, he talks about his various neuroses, and Laura asks him if he’s sure he wants to tell her this intimate information, but he maintains that telling his stories doesn’t do anything to deplete his experiences.
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Transitioning to a conversation about death, Laura asks about the concept of dying with dignity, and Eggers says, “You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of [dignity]. It’s never dignified, always brutal.” He then adds that dignity is nothing but “an affectation” that is “fleeting” and “mercurial.” He also reveals that he and Beth never gave their parents a “proper burial.” They were cremated, he explains, so he and Beth decided not to give them gravestones. In fact, they don’t even know where their parents’ remains are, since the company that cremated them hasn’t yet sent them their ashes, perhaps because the company doesn’t know where to send them. Eggers and Beth periodically discuss trying to track down the remains, but they never get around to doing so. Sometimes, he explains, it seems better this way.
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Eggers tells Laura that he rarely dreams of his parents. He has, however, dreamt about his father. In the dream, it occurred to him that perhaps his father is actually still alive, that his death was just “another deception.” When Laura asks what he means by “another deception,” he says, “Well, like all people who drink, and do so while successfully keeping a family and a job, he was an extraordinary magician.” He then explains that his father used to have AA meetings at the house even when he was drunk. Another trick he used to pull was drinking clear liquors out of tall water glasses because no one ever suspects that someone’s drinking alcohol out of a water glass. After a while, his mother stopped trying to get his father to quit, instead deciding to allow it as long as he stuck to beer or wine in the house.
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Eggers recalls his father chasing him through the house, drunkenly trying to hit him. Once, when he hid in his bedroom, he tried to fashion a rope out of a bedsheet, hoping to use it to rappel out the window. Before he could do this, though, his father broke the door off its hinges. “So this was a child abuse situation?” asks Laura, but Eggers claims that his father never spanked him very hard once he got ahold of him. In fact, it was his mother who used to hit them rather hard, often smacking them over the head. At some point, though, Bill started laughing when she did this, ducking away and turning it into a joke. The rest of the children followed suit, and this effectively calmed things down, such that even Eggers’s mother would laugh.
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Wrapping up their conversation, Eggers makes one more attempt to show Laura that he’s a “tragic” person who deserves to have his story told. “Can you not see that we’re extraordinary?” he asks her, referring to himself and Toph. “That we were meant for something else, something more?” He tells her he wants to be “the heart pumping blood to everyone.” “And will that heal you?” she asks. “Yes!” he replies. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
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