Review: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Well folks, this memoir was recommeded by a sales associate at my local Barnes & Noble.  It is titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  It has taken me a while to read it since the paperback version is 437 pages.  This has been the most challenging memoir I have read recently.  It is about a young man and his siblings who interestingly live in an affluent suberb of Chicago.  There father is a lawyer who is also an alcoholic and smoker.  He can become violent when under the influence of alcohol especially toward his children.  He dies suddenly while out in the driveway getting ready to go to work one day.  Then, the mother develops stomach cancer and suffers through ongoing treatments.  It is left to the two middle children, Dave and Beth, to be at home and care for their mother as well as their young seven year old brother.  Eventually, the mother dies and interestingly, the bodies of both parents are donated to medical schools.  The siblings have a memorial service for the mother and then sell most everything within the homeplace.  They leave and go to California for a new start as their oldest brother lives there. 

After spending a summer vacationing, the two middle children move to Berkeley where the sister returns to college and Dave and the youngest sibling Toph rent a home in Berkeley.  They reside there and try to function in as normal a fashion as is possible with two siblings functioning as parents for a young seven year old sibling.  Dave, the middle brother, has the most reponsibility for Toph in that Toph lives with him and he is reponsible for Toph's schooling, insurance, having a place to live, food to eat, and ensuring that Toph does not fall victim to depression over the recent deaths of the mother and father.  Youth can be hard enough without the challenges of both parents dying; however, Dave becomes almost a magnet for chaos.  He is harassed on a beach one evening by teenagers who he thinks have stolen his wallet, he tries to make a magazine startup fly without a real staff or comfortable office quarters, he has a coworker who falls from a collapsed deck and lives in a coma, he has a friend who cannot help but continue to fall victim to depression and alchol as well as tranquilizers, and another coworker who dies without warning from an infection.  All the chaos and tragic events lead him to become extremely paranoid.

Dave finally returns to his hometown in the suberbs of Chicago for a wedding and discovers the family living in the house in which he used to live and he hunts down the remains of both his parents which were supposed to be cremated and returned to he and his sister, but were not.  His sister Beth had failed to inform him that she was offered the remains, but did not want to deal with them.  While he is visiting the funeral home that helped during his mother's death, the remains of his mother are located and he scatters them along the shores of Lake Michigan.  The magazine startup eventually folds and he and Toph decide to leave Caifornia as most of their friend are moving back East.  In the end, it is strange to see how much all of this tragedy has aged and matured both Dave and Toph, but you grow up fast when you are alone in the world, lose your parents, and must fend for yourself.