Dave Eggers · 2000 · coming-of-age

Dave Eggers's 2000 memoir. Both his parents died of cancer within five weeks of each other in his final year of college, leaving him at twenty-one to raise his eight-year-old brother Toph. They went west to Berkeley, and the book is what happened next - told by a narrator who cannot stop pointing out that he is telling it.

1. 1
   Lake Forest

   A suburb north of Chicago, and the first chapter: his father dies of lung cancer and his mother of stomach cancer five weeks later, in his final year of college - and a twenty-one-year-old is left with an eight-year-old brother.

2. 2
   Berkeley

   They sell the house and everything in it and go west to where his sister Beth is at law school - and set up as two bachelors in a run-down rental, living what Eggers calls a feral life and is in fact an entirely devoted one.

3. 3
   San Francisco

   Might magazine with his friend Moodie, a satirical thing aimed at people their own age - and the failed audition for MTV's The Real World, reprinted in full, which is the book showing you exactly what it is doing.

4. 4
   Lake Forest

   Back for a wedding years later, he walks his old streets and calls at the funeral home to ask about paperwork - and a young man goes downstairs and comes up carrying a cardboard box with his mother's ashes in it.

5. 5
   Lake Michigan

   He takes the box down to the shore and scatters her, questioning the whole time whether she would have wanted this - and the passage is both a genuine elegy and a slapstick account of his own ineptitude as a mourner.

6. 6
   New York

   He shuts down Might, collects Toph and moves east - and the boy, who has spent his childhood being carried around the country by his brother, says it is good to move around, see stuff, not get stuck.