![]() ![]() It quickly becomes clear that A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius doesn’t conform to the narrative conventions of most memoirs. As such, Eggers slyly uses his skepticism of memoir to fuel this autobiographical project. In turn, this authorial self-consciousness (or self-awareness) enables readers to come closer to Eggers’s experience, since they now have an understanding of his story itself and the critical thinking that has gone into telling that story. He then folds this meta-narrative back into the memoir, moving on with whatever story he’s in the middle of telling. By questioning his authorial decisions, Eggers invites readers to join him in his consideration of craft and form. ![]() This analysis of the text in real time is a meta-narrative technique, or a way of examining the act of narration by calling attention to the storytelling process itself. Playing with this tension, he often switches gears in the middle of a story to comment on how, exactly, he’s telling that story. He even points out that, although memoirs are perhaps “wrong and evil and bad we could all do worse, as readers and writers.” In this way, he criticizes autobiographical writing even as he ignores his own misgivings. As early as the “Acknowledgements” section, which precedes the book’s first chapter, he refers to memoir writing as “inherently vile.” Despite his distaste for the genre, though, he still indulges his impulse to examine his life. In A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers challenges the validity of his own autobiographical project. ![]()
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