The little m devours everything in flames. Both are highly energetic processes and thus Dave Eggers seems to be burning on both ends in his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He uses the cremation of his parents to fuel his life and writing process, infused with their ashes. And what he does seems a pretty good waste of my time. I don't find this work heartbreaking at all but often emotionally true in it's plain and accurate descriptions of Eggers's cognitive processes. And there, what many seem to recognize as his genius, is the place where his meta-meta-reflections tell us about the feedback and repercussions between his heart and brain which are so good because everyone can easily relate to them. But it gets a bit tiresome after a while. The effect of his paranoid episodes - both with the worst and best outcomes -, while true and thus amusing and comforting, easily wears off after a couple of hundred pages and leaves little more than the stale aftertaste of show-offy writing techniques. But nevertheless this is a pretty good read.
Back to the ashes: Bret Easton Ellis did a similar thing with his own memoir, which is what I like to call Lunar Park. It is all about rising from the ashes of his father and creating his beautiful art out of the remains of this cremation. The next to last paragraph of Lunar Park is all about the ashes and how they form and seep into his life, his childhood memories, his anxieties, his desires, moods and, of course, his writing. The ashes going through the very pages of this book, creating new words and thus worlds and his life, which is, after all, a literary one.
I wonder if there's any other book or work of art that deals that explicitly with the process of its creation through the process of cremation of life. I mean literally. Because it's a nice and beautiful image that the ashes fall onto the white (or black) page and produce the letters which constitute its texture and meaning.
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