Talk:Dave Eggers

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Contents 1 [Older material] 2 Sister's suicide 3 Fiction or non-? 4 What is the What? 5 Broken link 6 L[i]fe

[edit] [Older material]

Should add info about his monthly article for Spin and his serialized novel for Salon.com. I believe Eggers worked at Salon before AHWOSG was published. --Brooks 05:29, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wasn't he nominated for a Pulitzer but didn't win?

===>Yes. For A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This says so. And the Internet is never wrong. Justin (koavf) July 2, 2005 05:07 (UTC)

I believe he was born in March and not January. Someone should double check that.

[edit] Sister's suicide

Did that really happen? It looks suspicious to me, like stealth vandalism. Babajobu 22:22, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

-Agreed, I've removed it for now. --Oldy 22:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

-It did happen, and I've cited a reputable source. Please keep it in. Pagana 13:45, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Here's a quote from Eggars himself about it, http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/interview/readers_de.html: "A lot of people, total strangers, wrote extremely kind notes after my sister died last year, and that meant a lot to us. It was such a hard year. There are times when my brothers and I just look around and can't believe there's only three of us left."

I removed it. Is there a source for it? It needs a reliable inline source, and it shouldn't refer to "reports", it should refer to her suicide. Please re-add it if verification is found. Twinxor t 07:44, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fiction or non-?

In one section of the article his first book "Heartbreaking" is listed as a memoir with fictional elements; in another section it's listed as a nonfiction book. Which is correct?

Both. Seriously. Memoirs are generally regarded as non-fiction, but memoir, as a genre, is distinct from autobiography. The latter is, or is presumed to be, purely factual. In a memoir, however, the writer nearly always makes use of some poetic license in describing events--changing timelines, dialogue, etc. etc. The result is accurately described by the title of the appendix Eggers added to the paperback version of AHWOSG: "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making".--ShelfSkewed 05:05, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What is the What?

If you are going to list Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius as nonfiction, then you have to also list What is the What as nonfiction. It's a biography of the man. Although there may also be "fictional" aspects of it, I believe it should be listed as non-fiction. I gazed at Valentino Achak Deng with my own two eyes. He's a real person and this is his story. I know that semantically, this would be considered fiction since it's a novel but I seem to remember a little man named Truman Capote defining the art of the non-fiction novel. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Sclemmo2 (talk • contribs) 02:42, 10 February 2007 (UTC).

You might find the first few paragraphs of this article interesting: "Different worlds: The many lives -- novelist, social activist, literary innovator, teacher -- of Dave Eggers" by Susan Larson from The Times-Picayune [New Orleans], February 06, 2007. In the article, Eggers discusses the impossibility of crafting a believable factual narrative with so few provable details to work with—"[Deng's] memory had so many holes in it"—and how he felt "liberated" when he allowed himself to treat the story as a novel.

By contrast, Capote, in writing In Cold Blood, had access to all the things Eggers did not—facts, dates, details—and so could (and of necessity had to) hew closely to them. Capote may have called his book a novel, but it isn't. What it is is a superbly well written true-crime book --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 03:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

In his interview with Michael Silverblatt [1], Eggers describes how he "fictionalizes" Deng's life story. Anyways, it is awkward to consider a book called "The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng" written by someone other than that person a work of non-fiction. -- User:RWest 11:21 9 August 2007

[edit] Broken link

The link for reference #8 is broken. I don't know how to edit the reference part of the page, but someone should add this, the correct link: [2] Realbrvhrt 20:29, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Done. --ShelfSkewed Talk 22:15, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] L[i]fe

The Life section needs rewritten. It makes an assumption that people have read AHWOSG and know his life story already, and serves only to provide a couple of random anecdotes of his life, rather than fleshing it out the way an encyclopedia should. Sleepsong (talk) 19:12, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree - the section itself is rambling and awkward, and isn't, as sleepsong implies, an interesting or reasonable narrative.

I can help w/this but not immediately, and probably not in any great depth. And actually probably not anything remotely related to "immediately." However, I do agree about a better bio blurb being a good idea. (It's possible that people are scared to do this for various reasons, but I might be wrong. People might just be lazy, or bogged down with their foreign-diplomat duties in Austria.) Sugarbat (talk) 00:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)