Dave Eggers - Interviewed

He sat down with Huck Magazine, here.

From the piece...

Your first book was extremely close to home, but ever since your second, You Shall Know Our Velocity - about two friends travelling the world in one week to give away $80,000, a sum they feel was undeservedly inherited – you shot off, telling stories that span continents. Is something pulling you out into the world?

A lot of writers will spend their careers plumbing their lives in different ways or sublimating their experience through fiction. But if you start with a memoir, you’ve sort of blown that. From the beginning, I couldn’t find anything left to write about. And you also get a taste of that and it’s enough.

But ultimately my training was in journalism and that was my background for a long time. So I just developed an interest. I got hooked on the process of feeling like I could communicate a good story to an audience to maybe have an impact.

I’m always trying to educate the person I was too. I was just talking to a friend who grew up in the Bay Area and was saying, ‘You don’t understand the bubble we’re in sometimes.’ A lot of people like me in Illinois, or Wisconsin, we’re well-meaning people, but you would be surprised how ‘in the middle of nowhere’ we are in terms of our awareness. I didn’t have a passport until I was twenty-six.