An Open Letter to Dave Eggers

Dear Dave,

Oh how our world has changed. A mere half-decade ago, we were living in pure bliss, bathing ourselves in the excess our existences had lent us-- needs for survival as humans more than met, we had advanced to the next level-- the search for self-realization. Steeping in the question of what it is to be human, allowed to focus on what makes us all so unique as humans, and striving to secure immortality, you were allowed to write a memoir.

AHWOSG was a lightning bolt. So painfully self-conscious, equally loathing of and reverential to the self and world, you did nothing less than peel back all the layers of the psyche of a human who is fully alive in the world right now.
You Shall Know Our Velocity is an equally revealing portrait of 21st Century American Man as prisoner of himself within the dying world we all inhabit. Less autobiographical but still as self-focused, Velocity delivers the same psychologically violent meditations on the self-in-world. Will is bleeding with a (justified(?)) hatred of himself and the world (we all are! or should be!), and the book is a piece of of terrible beauty.

Next came How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories that followed the lives of numerous disillusioned twenty-somethings; probably solid but not completely memorable. By this point, you were a bona fide literary rock-star and could do whatever you wanted, and did! although critics had shifted from falling over themselves to try to find the most imaginative superlatives to describe your art, to wondering if you really had the audacity to try and assume the voice of your entire unconscious generation. (Genius' title predicted its reviews; Hungry was "prankish".) (although you know critics don't really matter, are the soul-sucking flatworms of the artist.)

Then, the realization that things are naturally and culturally ending became too heavy to bear. You wanted to shed your skin, escape into someone else's. What Is The What was an insistent departure from the portraits of the young, white and privileged, and a very conscious effort to absolve yourself of the sins of the white male. A first person account of the Sudanese genocide, you assume the voice of refugee and orphan Valentino Achak Deng, telling his true story and doing your part to bring this modern holocaust further into public attention.

The reason I'm writing in the first place is that I read your Opinion piece last Sunday in the New York Times and it reminded me of how much I miss your art-- and I wanted to let you know that just because the world needs a lot of help right now, we need inspiration too. I understand your deep hatred of yourself and the world-- I feel the same way-- how else can we feel?!?! Why did you give up on us? Is it because you're getting older? Because you're a dad? If that's the case, I want to thank you and wish you well. But if it's because you think the only way you can change things, help the world is by publicly taking a political stance and throwing money at politicians, that's depressing and dead. Your opinion piece was boring, quiet. Your contained disgust could've come from anyone.

Did you become angry at your success-- hate the world more? Was it the old Woody Allen thing-- you didn't want to belong to any club that would accept you? You wanted the world to love you, and then when it finally did, you decided it wasn't really that great. Are you pulling a Dylan-at-Newport? (you too were saddled with the "voice of a generation" curse.)

I'm only saying all this because I loved your work from the page I met you almost three years ago; sure I was young and clueless, probably more than a little self-involved. Your book was pained and beautiful; I saw in you both a brother and a mirror to the future, a courageous human who was figuring things out for the rest of us.

With Admiration,
Emily

(And if you think this is revenge for when you rejected my piece for McSweeney's a few years ago (it was about a boy. sorry.), I promise, it's not. I'm over it. I was just kidding-- I was drunk when I sent it. (Actually, I really hope you didn't read it, and that the name on the rejection email was not your alias.) Also, I stopped reading McSweeney's about two years ago because it's so damn boring. But Valencia 826 sounds great. I would love to help.)