The Last Page
Moore, Matt
IF YOU ASPIRE to write, calling yourself a writer doesn't make it so. You must first have written a book, compiled a few decent magazine clips, or have a mildly snarky and occasionally read blog...
...Writers," like "intellectuals," are a class in retreat, and the use of the category to describe oneself can sound anachronistic or arrogant (even to the ears of someone who wants to be a writer...
...The case of Dave Eggers, a writer from my hometown of San Francisco, is pertinent here...
...You must first have written a book, compiled a few decent magazine clips, or have a mildly snarky and occasionally read blog to make the leap into the rarefied world of the published author...
...We wondered what could come next...
...When my roommate published his first book this February, we were unsure what to expect...
...Of course, a young writer could draw the opposite lesson from Ishmael's success...
...Daum's essay is intended to poke fun at the American comingof-age memoir, a popular if frequently self-indulgent literary genre...
...And the guy can actually write...
...Ishmael, however, continued to write...
...Shortly before its release, we were told that the New York Times Magazine would excerpt the book and wanted him to appear on the cover of the magazine...
...The thin island of paper on our dorm room floor grew into a full-blown archipelago...
...In his most recent book, Eggers novelizes the life of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys of Sudan," a person whom Daum would describe as "someone with something to say...
...MATT MOORE 112 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...
...Since the publication of his book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, this amazement has become a familiar part of living in our apartment...
...And now the manuscript has become A Long Way Gone...
...design...
...In the article, she re-creates the encounter of a hypothetical first-year writing student with Ishmael, "someone who actually has something to say...
...A young writer can have many legitimate fears—the uncertainty of getting published, the ineluctable need to make rent, Dale Peck—but failure to have experienced the civil war in Sierra Leone should not be one of them (unless you plan to write about living through an African civil war...
...In our apartment, the Starbucks motto took on an unintended meaning: confirmed literary hope has a voice, and it is my roommate's...
...However, in Eggers's first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, dot-com era San Francisco is as exciting to read about as Achak Deng's Sudan...
...When Ishmael began his memoir in our dorm room, it seemed like a quixotic pursuit...
...Writing about the book in the Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum imagines "the aspiring young middle-class writer's worst-case scenario": "You get to college armed with pages of prose that capture the soul-sucking torpor of your suburban adolescence, only to find yourself in a writing class with a former child soldier who spent years fighting the Revolutionary United Front after his Sierra Leone village was torched and his entire family killed...
...This kind of talk could make an aspiring writer less than hopeful...
...Good writing depends less on the writer's extraordinary biography than on the ability to share his or her experience, whether mundane or fantastic, with others...
...Starbucks sold the book in its stores— all 5,668 of them—where it was accompanied by bookmarks and green magnets that announced, "Hope has a voice...
...This was amazing to us, two recent college graduates, sharing eight hundred square feet in Brooklyn, both wanting to write (he writing, I considering...
...It is a best seller on the New York Times nonfiction list...
...In his latest book, Eggers has given us the harrowing tale of another person's life, but his more interesting achievement may still be A Heartbreaking Work...
...It would be foolish to plan to write for a living, and if one ended up doing so it would probably be as much a result of luck, than any intentional (intelligent...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
