It Was Staggering: Confessions From Dave's Jealous Friend

In the spirit of Dave's book, let me say straight up front that I am shamelessly trading on my personal acquaintance with the author to do two things: 1) draw some more attention to this review, and 2) make me look cooler by association. More likely, I will succeed at neither and draw the ire of fawning Eggers fans to boot (screw you all in advance). But I have something to say here, both about the book and the peculiar conceit of watching someone you've been friends turn overnight into the darling of the New York literati scene.

To forewarn you, this is pretty long and I don't talk much about the book until the end (skip to "THE BOOK STUFF" if this makes you angry). But right here, I will acknowledge the inevitable David Foster Wallace comparisons. And I will dismiss them.

THE PERSONAL STUFF
Dave and I were friends all through college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Not best-buddy, spill-your- guts, call-each-other on the phone type of friends. But we ran with the same Scooby gang. He was my boyfriend's roommate for a year and I slept over a lot. He dated one of my best friends, before she quit school to become a New Kids on the Block groupie, dating Donnie Wahlberg (a time that she doesn't like to be reminded of). We were all beautiful, we were all glamorous, we were all really f*&%ing cool; everybody wanted to be our friends. They knew we were all destined for greatness.

When we were juniors, I lived in a grubby yellow house with two of his friends and a bunch of girls; he lived in a slovenly rat-trap a few doors down with two of my other girl friends. (We all called my house the Banana Hammock and his house Rancho Destructo). When we all graduated and went our seperate ways, I heard about the terrible tragedy of losing both of his parents to cancer within weeks of each other, and learned that he was going to be raising his younger brother alone. I didn't feel that I was a close enough friend to go to either of the funerals.

I broke up with my college boyfriend, and the last I'd heard of Dave he'd moved out to San Francisco. I didn't think about him at all for a few years, unless I'd hear a snippet from a mutual friend. I heard that he'd started up a magazine called Might. I immediately subscribed to support him even though I was convinced it would suck, and was floored to find out that it was actually a hoot. I noticed he published pieces written by some of our other friends (a paean to guns by Markus stuck in my mind, because the politics of the view seemed so oddly un-Dave-like), and I exchanged a few emails with him while I tried to think of something I could write that would be of interest to the readers of Might. (he never asked me to do this, I thought I could use our friendship as leverage). Before I could do that, I got a cryptic postcard that said something to the effect that Might had closed up shop and by the way, pretty please don't try to get a refund on the subscription because there ain't no more money.

I had auditioned for the San Francisco Real World show on MTV. After getting a second-round call-back from an assistant producer requesting that I send in a videotape, I was dropped like a bad habit. I later saw Dave in a few Real World cameos. At the time, I thought that the magazine, and the show appearances, jived perfectly with what Dave was about: being subversive, but in a mainstream kind of way.

After the magazine postcard, I lost touch with him again, hearing from a friend that he'd moved to New York. My husband began occasionally noticing his byline in magazines like Esquire, and we also saw that ESPN Magazine had picked up the little "What's Cheesy" graphic from Might for a while. I saw a tiny article in the Entertainment Weekly 'It' issue which profiled his website, and checked it out. I fired off an email to say hi and we corresponded for a while.

I read his website regularly and subscribed to McSweeneys; he even had the decency to check my website out and complimented it (while also telling me that he couldn't figure out what the hell it was supposed to be about). He knew I was getting married (I hadn't invited him to the wedding) but wanted to have a barbecue for us over this past Labor Day weekend, when many of our mutual friends would be in town. In typical Dave fashion, he completely flaked on the fact that he had mixed up Labor Day and Memorial Day and had already scheduled a trip somewhere else. At no time did he mention that he had a book coming out.

I heard about the book from a friend, and thought I would feature it on my website to give him a little extra publicity. I bought it through my associate link to Amazon and settled in for a read, thinking that it would be pleasantly average. Wasn't that nice of me? Look what I started.

THE BOOK STUFF
When I read the book, I was blown away. Even with Might and McSweeneys, I-HAD-NO-IDEA-HE-WAS-SO-TALENTED. I remember his paintings in college: tortured, gummy oils that all seemed to feature the same frightening, screaming man, who looked like the lead singer from Midnight Oil. I had always thought he was interesting and quirky, but a genius? Sorry, just couldn't have predicted it. It's been quite unsettling to see him become the toast of the hipster scene. I mean, my god, even MR. SCROOBY gave a positively gushing review. If you can bring Scrooby to his knees you've got the world by the balls.

The book is a semi-fictional memoir of the death of his parents and his move to the West Coast with his 8-year old brother Toph. I have a hard time seeing which part is fictional; he gives names, dates, phone numbers, and other details that would suddenly shock me out of the story. --Oh my God, I'd think. --I remember him/her/them/the smell from the South Farms in college. Most of this stuff is probably truer than your average cover story in Time Magazine.

The writing is a brilliant, wrenching, stream-of-consciousness narrative that highlights Dave's conflicted nature: he thinks he's some freaky-hip guy, but deep down he's a corn-fed, suburban, Midwestern boy who has the potential to be shocked by people who flout convention (witness his discomfort at his sister's non-traditional wedding, or his outrage with a parent of one of Toph's friends who allows their son to smoke pot).

He has covered his ass well in the long, rambling foreword: he acknowledges that the book is probably too knowing, ironic, and self-referential; then he acknowledges that by acknowledging that he is shamelessly trying to manipulate us into forgiving that knowing irony; and he acknowledges that he has acknowledged the acknowledgement...and so on. He flouts convention in structure and style, even listing how he spent the publisher's advance. Sometimes it's a little too precious, but to his credit, he manages to pull it back just when it's about to go over the brink. I took three Advils when I finished the preamble; the tiny print and constant style changes made my brain feel like scrambled Eggers.

The book works best in the straightforward narrative: his mother's illness and death, the journey to the West Coast, Dave's determination to forge a new style of parenting for his brother. Particularly appealing and universal is his desire to remake Toph into an idea lab, a collection of Dave's personal philosophies, thoughts, and way of doing things. Every parent must feel the same starting out. Admirably, he's not afraid to make himself look like an @sshole once in a while. (In real life he can be, occasionally, quite mean-spirited.) And he brings to light the formerly taboo wish that every child in America has probably had at one point: what if my parents DIED, and we were on our own? (I remember when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I kept a journal, and I must have thought that it would make a great story. She recovered (thank goodness), and I realized that our little trauma was a sadly inconsequential story, just one more domino in a long line. No book here, nothing to see, people, please move on!)

He chronicles the sense of entitlement he and his brothers and sister feel; how they vacillate between pain and glory, grunge and glamour. His use of language is clear and descriptive with a melancholy beauty. The book becomes a bit labored during the Real World interview device, but he again disarms you by pointing this out early on in the segment.

His parents are portrayed as flawed, quirky people. Is it morbid to think that their death was a gift to him? That it freed him to unleash all of his hopes and dreams and talent, to break free from the crappy, boring existence that the rest of the college gang has slipped into? Nobody grows up to think that they'll be ordinary, but everybody IS ordinary. The bell curve has a large surface area. Dave is one of the few outliers. I am happy for him. I am angry at him. I am jealous as all hell. It is utterly, indescribably weird to explain what it's like when someone you know achieves a level of success you've dreamed about your whole life.

I've been watching the press roll in: cover of the Sunday New York Times book review. 2-page spread in Time. "Talk 10" Book of the Month. More in Entertainment Weekly. I've been cutting them out; my husband said last night, "What, are you starting a Dave Eggers scrapbook?" I said, "Maybe. Either that or a dartboard.". Unfortunately, it's not entirely pleasant to face up to your own jealousy.

And dammit, don't think I'm not trying to come up with something appropriately hip for McSweeneys. Dave, if you ever do read this, I am not above using our past friendship to try to make you publish my crappy writings. But most of all, now that I'm a boring suburbanite who will probably squeeze out a few kids and never, ever be a hipster again, I thank you for giving me something that I can always use to prove that I was. I thank you for the gift of a book that will always remind me of a certain time in my life, even though I have grudgingly accepted who I am now.