This is an extremely self-conscious memoir in which Dave Eggers writes about pain in the only honest way available to him - with finite jest and fictionalisation.
When he was twenty-one, Dave Eggers' parents died of cancer within weeks of each other, and he became a sibling-parent to his eight-year-old brother. The two lived together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worried obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swung between making his brother's upbringing maniacally fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him.
This book is the story of that time: an inventive and heartfelt memoir about love and loss of a most terrible kind.
