Growing Up in Public

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story

By Dave Eggers

Simon & Schuster, 375 pp., $23

Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America

By Ann Powers

Simon & Schuster, 287 pp., $23

Details

RELATED LINKS

Smarter Feller Archive
Dave Egger's cartoon appeared in SF Weekly from 11/6/96 - 8/20/97

Modern Humorist Presents the Publishing Phenomenon of the Year
An excerpt from Harry Potter and the Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by J.R. Eggers

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More About

• Dave Eggers
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In interviewing her old friends and acquaintances from those heady days, Powers uncovers the not-terribly-shocking fact that as people hit their 30s, they start to settle down and look for stability, though they do retain some of their countercultural ideologies. And some, the writerly types, sit down and write books that could've been titled Stuff I Did in My 20s, except nobody would buy a book with that title, however well written.

Perhaps in the future Eggers and Powers will write more books and tell more stories -- and this time, settled down and stable, they won't feel any particular need to apologize for who they are, which is a sign of maturity, in writers and anybody else.