Memoir and the Aesthetics of Employability in Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

This paper examines the ways the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHBWOSG) represents the author Dave Eggers’ experience of middle-class downward mobility during a moment of economic upheaval. It considers how downward mobility forces Eggers to engage with a new culture of white collar work characterised by precarity and employability. Beyond narrative content, I argue, these themes determine the book’s formal and stylistic investments. Scholarship on the book has tended to treat these formal investments as the result of Eggers’ psychological trauma following the loss of his parents. Instead, this article suggests that the loss is also material, pushing Eggers briefly into financial hardship, at a moment in US history when Social Security was being replaced by employability programmes. On the one hand, AHBWOSG reveals how the logics of employability have imbued the contemporary memoir form. On the other, the text demonstrates how work in the twenty-first century has itself become increasingly autobiographical, with the worker expected to craft a life narrative for their ‘self-brand’.