Like a ghost
At one point in the memoir, the narrator describes how he got involved with the wrong crowd and was surrounded by people who would regularly use drugs. Those people are compared here with ghosts, moving without a purpose from one place to the other and without really knowing what they want in life. This comparison has the purpose of showing just how difficult life was for those people and how hard it was for them to escape from that lifestyle.
Law school
Beth enrolls in law school as soon as she can and from that point on, she distances herself from her brothers. Beth takes a completely different path in life when compared to her siblings and she seems to be the only one who has the biggest chances of succeeding in life. Because of this, education is used here as a metaphor to represent an opportunity.
Like an alien
The first time the main character goes to a parent-teacher conference for his brother Toph he feels extremely weird and out of place. At that moment, Eggers compares himself to an alien, looking from the outside in a group of people he has nothing in common with. This comparison is extremely important because it highlights just how strange and unqualified Eggers was feeling when it came to raising his younger brother.
Sex
The narrator describes how after his father’s funeral, he hurried home so he could have sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. For the narrator, the act of having sex was more important than honoring his father’s memory. As such, sex is used here as a metaphor that represents the main character’s disdain for his father.
Cancer
The narrator’s mother and father both died of cancer, and relatively close to one another. The parents died quickly, leaving three children behind with no support system in place. The cancer is often mentioned by the children and it even becomes a metaphor used to represent the vulnerable situation the children had.
