A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Publishers, Death, Journalists, Family, Terminally ill parents, Bereavement, Editors, Grief, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Young men
ISBN: 9780330456715
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

sneer. We quote a professor summing up: “A study of Teach for America tells us more about the ideological, even psychological needs of today’s middle-class white and minority youth than it does about the underclass to whom the project is targeted.”

Kaboom!

And because the general public will not believe that we have been chosen to articulate the hopes and fears of a people, to speak for them and everyone and make history, we set out to see what they will believe. The cover of the second issue celebrates the magazine’s “First Fifty Years,” with a grid of twenty or so past covers—October 1964: “The Beatles Are Reds!”; November 1948: “Death: The Hidden Killer”—to prove it. The opening essay, written a month or so after Kurt Cobain’s death, touches on a death that touched us all:

It’s so hard to believe you’re gone. Even now, I wake with a sense of disbelief. You’re gone. Each morning, I rise reluctantly, wondering whether to live the day or just let it wash over me. I walk numbly, listlessly, drifting like a phantom. I feel apart from my body. I am half a person. You’re gone.

From the start, everyone knew you were different. There was something more there. A mysterious glow, a strange, unfamiliar beauty. But, somehow, I felt like I’d known you all my life. Maybe I did. Could it be?

I always believed in you. And I believe you always believed in me. You spoke to me, about me, for me. During some of my most trying times, you shone like a beacon of guidance and strength. A rock. Someone real! I idolized you. I wanted to be you.

Some said you were messed up, disturbed—a bad role model. Some said power changed you, that you couldn’t handle it. They said your style was scandalous, your conduct immoral. And that’s true. You were abrasive, gritty, and tough. You were reckless. A loner. And sometimes you just made me mad. But that’s because I loved you and because, despite everything, I always trusted you. And then it happened. But it wasn’t your fault. It was our fault. My fault.

For everything we put you through, that life put you through, that you put yourself through, I’m sorry. Your struggles with fame, with success, with the press—I know you really never meant to hurt anyone. How can a butterfly cause harm? It is with high hopes and a full heart that I say: Richard Milhous Nixon, beautiful butterfly, fly free, fly strong, live forever. I love you.

We seek out those who, like us, had ideas but have run aground. We publish an interview with Philip Paley, a former child actor who played Chakka the Pakuni on Land of the Lost, in which he excoriates his parents, blaming their divorce for his semi-indigent state, living in a humble apartment in Hollywood.

Trouble in paradise?

Yeah...My parents divorced when I was sixteen and subsequently all my money got tied up in that divorce. I lost it all. To this day I’m STILL FUCKING PISSED OFF ABOUT IT.

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