Dave Eggers: From 'staggering genius' to America's conscience

Author, publisher and literary trendsetter: Dave Eggers is all those, and he's fast becoming the conscience of liberal America too. Here he tells how he went from 'staggering genius' to the man who gives a voice to the downtrodden and dispossessed

Rachel Cooke writing in The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010


Left - Dave Eggers photograped at 826 Valencia in San Francisco last week. Photograph: Barry J Holmes

I'm a little nervous of meeting Dave Eggers. On the way to San Francisco, where he lives and runs his groovy and influential publishing empire, McSweeney's, I consider his reputation. When Eggers published his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he mostly refused to do interviews except by email, and then his answers were spiky and oblique, and occasionally just a joke. He once railed against a journalist who he said had quoted him off the record with a fury that seems to me to have been just a touch disproportionate. Sure enough, before I leave London, I get an email from an assistant warning me that he will only talk about his new book, Zeitoun, and that it will drive him nuts if I ask him "what he had for dinner the night before last" (I reply that I have never asked anyone, ever, what they had for dinner the night before last and I certainly would not dream of flying half way round the world to pose such a question). As for his human rights work and many charitable projects, these things are so intimidating. Faced with such abundant goodness, I furtively examine my conscience and find it wanting.

As it turns out, though, I am wrong. Entirely wrong. Granted, he is not big on self-revelation. But he is neither difficult nor mean. McSweeney's is in the Mission district of the city: it's like Camden only with wider roads and more second-hand bookshops. When I arrive, I'm led past the desks of half-a-dozen bright young things and into his office, which is small and gloomy and womb-like. Time to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.

Anyway, he could not be more warm if he tried or more modest (given his prodigious talent, his energy and his general morality, he is so modest it's almost embarrassing). He talks softly, in long paragraphs that trail off, like the puff of smoke that follows the snuffing of a candle, and his answers, all of them, are tinged with anxiety, lest he make something that is white seem black or vice versa. His preferred form of full stop is to hop up and scrabble for books he thinks I should take home with me. By the time I leave I'm practically a mini-satellite of City Lights, San Francisco's most famous independent bookstore. All I need is a black T-shirt and a goatee and I could set up stall right outside.