Item: 1 copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
This book was a bestseller when it came out in 2000, but I just recently got around to reading it. The title itself was enough to suggest that it might be a work that encompasses many levels of seriousness, which it is.
It's a good book, and pretty easy to read for a heartbreaking work, etc. I also found it interesting because the author was born in the same year I was.
By the age of 21, the author had lost both of his parents to cancer, and this book is a memoir of the time following this while he was taking care of his younger brother and living in San Francisco. As in many good books, there's an indistinct line between what's "real" and what might not be.
This is not one of the key moments of the book, but there is at one point a mention of the concept of accumulating "experiences" as a sort of currency. I don't think broadly-defined generations can explain everything about a group of people, but I do think that many of my contemporaries and I have not been interested in accumulating houses and Mercedes, but rather we have been striving to have a lot of (unique, crazy, diverse) experiences.
I don't know why this is our particular way of thinking. I'm sure some of it is a rejection of some of the tendencies of the very large generation preceding ours, but that doesn't explain it totally, I don't think. I've had plenty of golden, hilarious, story-worthy experiences, and I don't think this is at all bad as a life orientation. But only in the last few years have I started to think that an objective to just have as many experiences as possible is not enough.
Life as endless resume-building can be, in a way, even more self-centered than life built around a desire for a pool and a restaurant-grade kitchen and a country-club membership. Even a big-screen TV can be shared with people. A life that is all about the collection of experiences (hiking in Nepal, building houses in New Guinea, learning sushi-making), even if some of them are altruistic, can still pretty much be exclusively about self-development. In the end, a lot of cool photo albums is probably not going to be enough to show for a person's life any more than an impressive financial portfolio is, if that's all she has, and if none of it went deep enough to touch her, or change her life.
The time this comes up in the book is when a friend is threatening suicide and the narrator is thinking about how he can write about it, plus "not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen." Anything can be turned into a competition; maybe that's just how we are made.
It's a good book, and pretty easy to read for a heartbreaking work, etc. I also found it interesting because the author was born in the same year I was.
By the age of 21, the author had lost both of his parents to cancer, and this book is a memoir of the time following this while he was taking care of his younger brother and living in San Francisco. As in many good books, there's an indistinct line between what's "real" and what might not be.
This is not one of the key moments of the book, but there is at one point a mention of the concept of accumulating "experiences" as a sort of currency. I don't think broadly-defined generations can explain everything about a group of people, but I do think that many of my contemporaries and I have not been interested in accumulating houses and Mercedes, but rather we have been striving to have a lot of (unique, crazy, diverse) experiences.
I don't know why this is our particular way of thinking. I'm sure some of it is a rejection of some of the tendencies of the very large generation preceding ours, but that doesn't explain it totally, I don't think. I've had plenty of golden, hilarious, story-worthy experiences, and I don't think this is at all bad as a life orientation. But only in the last few years have I started to think that an objective to just have as many experiences as possible is not enough.
Life as endless resume-building can be, in a way, even more self-centered than life built around a desire for a pool and a restaurant-grade kitchen and a country-club membership. Even a big-screen TV can be shared with people. A life that is all about the collection of experiences (hiking in Nepal, building houses in New Guinea, learning sushi-making), even if some of them are altruistic, can still pretty much be exclusively about self-development. In the end, a lot of cool photo albums is probably not going to be enough to show for a person's life any more than an impressive financial portfolio is, if that's all she has, and if none of it went deep enough to touch her, or change her life.
The time this comes up in the book is when a friend is threatening suicide and the narrator is thinking about how he can write about it, plus "not to mention more reason to feel experientially superior to others one's age, especially those who have not seen what I have seen, all the things I have seen." Anything can be turned into a competition; maybe that's just how we are made.
posted by Karen at 8:49 PM
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