Going Insane

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

            Reading this memoir will make you feel like you’re going slightly insane.  Not the type of insane where you fall in love with a sibling and want to kill your parents, but rather, the type of insane that stems from the monotony of everyday life.  The type of insanity that you feel when you do the same things day in and day out.  Seeing the same people but with different faces.  Doing the same activities, just in different places, and so on.  Through his vivid, albeit unique, imagery, Eggers gives us a glimpse of the world through his eyes.  A world in which his peers have no idea about how to deal with death because they have not encountered it.  A world where everyone is simple, plain, boring, when compared with his own richly tragic past.

            After the loss of both of his parents within a few short weeks of each other, 32 days to be precise, to cancer ( John Eggers from brain cancer, and Heidi Eggers from stomach cancer), Eggers inherits the responsibility of raising his eight year old brother, Christopher (Toph), at the age of only 21.  Eggers had been hoping to complete a degree in journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, yet his goals were put on hold due to his family’s misfortune.

            As soon as all of the arrangements for his parents were attended to, mostly by his older sister Beth and older brother Bill, he takes Toph to the healing sunshine of California, where Beth and Bill both aid in the parental responsibilities.  In California, Eggers transforms himself into all of the personalities he feels Toph needs in his life, as well as fulfilling some of the stereotypes that a young 20 something “should be.”  He attends parent teacher conferences, attempts at family meals, waits with the “other mothers” at games, has mock father-son heart to hearts, on top of being the slacker, living in near squalor, who founds a satirical magazine (Might) which mocks the stereotypical assessment of 20 something’s, particularly by the media.

            Thusly, it would not be unreasonable to say that Eggers is one of the most capable cynical authors of “Generation-X.”  The entire piece is a self deprecating, and yet freeing experience that culminates into one particularly powerful and emotional scene.  Throughout the book, Eggers occasionally mentions that they had not given his parents a proper burial.  His parents had decided (to the great surprise of their children) to donate their bodies to science.  Once picked up, Eggers had no inclination to keep track of their cremains.  As chance would have it, a few years after the move to California, he returns  to Illinois. 

“This trip is about the fact that things have been much too calm in San Francisco- I am making enough money, Toph is doing well in school- and thus completely intolerable.  I will return home and look for ugly things and chaos.  I want to be shot at, want to fall into a hole, want to be dragged from my car and beaten.  Also, I have a wedding to go to.”

            While there he confronts all of the troubles that he neglected to acknowledge in California.  He visits his house, finds old friends, and tracks down his mother’s cremains, though albeit, by accident.  The pinnacle of his heartbreak and ultimate revelation through utter honesty is the moment when he decides how best to honor his mother with a proper good-bye.

“How lame this is, how small, terrible.  Or maybe it is beautiful and glorious.  I can’t decide if what I am doing is beautiful and noble and right, or small and disgusting.  I want to be doing something beautiful, but am afraid that this is too small, too small, that this gesture, this end is too small-  Is this white trash?  That’s what it is! We were always so oddly white-trashy for our town, with our gruesome problems, and our ugly used cars, our Pintos and Malibus and Cameros, and our ‘70s wallpaper and plaid couches and acne and state schools- and now this tossing of cremains from a gold tin box into a lake?  Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic-  Or beautiful and loving and glorious!  Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!”