Word: memoirs
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...safely assume that such a conversation has never been held in the offices of Vogue. But if this is not the stuff of big-time publishing, idiosyncrasy has been a theme of Eggers' career--and it's manifest as well in his unusual forthcoming memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Simon & Schuster; 375 pages; $23), whose playful, reflexive title and prose belie its painful family story...
Eggers, 29, is not the first person you'd expect to produce a touching memoir, perhaps the least cool thing a young editor could do. In the mid-'90s he edited the San Francisco magazine Might, known for satiric stunts like its hoax faking the demise of Eight Is Enough star Adam Rich. The shoestring operation went bust in 1997, but Eggers landed at Esquire (he also published a dispatch on Cuba in TIME last year). The job left him "burned out," he says, on cheesecake photos, service journalism and celebrity doings. His next project was so retro...
...even enlisted authors to design their own book covers. (A Denis Johnson play bears a cartoon by the author's son.) Because of the box and other doodads--heavy paper, color foldouts--the issue costs $22, but Eggers, who has worked as a designer (and insisted on designing his memoir), argues, "People don't go to a bookstore looking for a cheap and ugly thing." McSweeney's contributor Sarah Vowell says Eggers' art background shows in both the physical journal and its self-aware marginalia (for example, its website, mcsweeneys.net offers reviewers a list of phrases--"precious, inconsequential, pointless...
When Rosemary Clooney first heard Come On-a My House, she was underwhelmed. "I thought the lyric ranged from incoherent to just plain silly," she recalls in her engaging memoir Girl Singer: An Autobiography (Doubleday), written with Joan Barthel. But Clooney soon changed her mind when the playful song catapulted her to stardom. "I'd gone from being just another girl singer to a full-page photo in LIFE, from 'Rosemary who?' to a household word," she marvels...
...small but insignificant world of media chitchat was fluttered last week by Renata Adler's new memoir that takes a brilliant flamethrower to the New Yorker magazine. Adler is a scrupulous, usefully unsettling critic, not to be yoked with casual hit men. She eviscerates so elegantly that her corpses remain standing. But her book and its overheated reception invoke the whole delightful genre of vengeful, venomous, and ultimately purposeless, literary assaults...