A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Eggers lost both parents to cancer within five weeks at twenty-one, then raised his eight-year-old brother in California. The memoir that resulted is relentlessly self-conscious about being a memoir. The preface annotates itself, the acknowledgements confess, and the irony keeps giving way to a grief it cannot hold off. Published in 2000, it fixed a register for a generation that distrusted sincerity and needed it anyway.