Leaving his father's funeral
This memoir features one of the most tragic and strange confessions of the genre: Dave Eggers confesses that he left the funeral of his own father to have sex with his girlfriend at the time. The irony is poignant. In addition to the social irony of him doing such a crazy thing, there is the existential irony of his juxtaposing death and sex so obviously. Sex makes new life, and death takes life away, and he saw both sides of the spectrum in the same moment.
Partying to cope
Although Toph and Eggers are very close, they can only support each other in certain ways. Their parents were the ones who would typically urge them to be responsible and sane, but to provide that to each other is terribly painful because it draws their attention to the deaths of their parents, so instead, they support one another as partiers. They party to cope, and their good times are ironic and dark, because they party to distract themselves from pain.
Almost getting fame
For a young guy like Dave, it was painful to get so close to fame and then to lose it. He almost became a reality television star, but instead, he lived in obscurity before eventually becoming a fantastic writer with fame of a different kind. The MTV sequence shows the reader that in some ways, he was actually spared from getting what he wanted. The Heartbreaking pain was organized in a Genius way that helped to understand himself in a way that translates into his art later in life.
John's suicide and Eggers' crisis
There is a painful irony about the suicide of Eggers' friend, John. Although John's suicide was about his own pain and suffering, the weight of his hopelessness is transferred to Eggers himself, as if his own life had not had enough pain already. John's decision is discouraging in many ways, but perhaps the most ironic of these is that John sought to escape his emotional torture, but inadvertently, he made his friends more hopeless.
Physical pain and suffering
During his episode with kidney stones, Eggers learns that, just when you think it can't get worse, it can get very much worse. He is faced first with crippling emotional pain, and then, he realizes he is passing a kidney stone, which is an excruciating condition that hurts in an intimate way. The pain reveals something about reality to him that he can't unlearn later. He is simply amazed by the gravity and extremeness of physical suffering. This comes as a shock, because the emotional suffering was already so wracking to him following the death of his friend John.
