Dave Eggers and Reality Television Sara Miner College

Dave Eggers’s satirical and self-referential memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius documents his external and internal life. While the book is technically a work of nonfiction, Eggers externalizes and exposes much of his personal life through internal thoughts and ideas that were not necessarily represented in real-time, as they are in the book. Eggers seems to be attempting to create an environment in which the performance and charade of social interaction and the act of writing a book are both combined with actual experiences and emotions, highlighting dramatic portions and exaggerating issues. Simultaneously, he normalizes these extreme experiences that are highlighted, creating so many that the overview of his life seems to be part of a specific theme. In my experience, this seems to be what reality television aims to do. Eggers’s interaction with the ideas of exploitation, created stories and dialogue, and satire around celebrity, fame, and other elements gives him a close relationship with the concept of reality television – something that is almost real, but not quite (in a very intentional way).

Firstly, Eggers comments on his own tendency to treat people as usable characters for his own benefit, much as...