Hollywood writing partnerships dissolve for many reasons. There may be creative disagreements, personality conflicts, workload imbalances. For the celebrated author Dave Eggers and his younger brother Toph, who’d had a run of collaborations, the rupture in their bond could perhaps be attributed to all these things. But, mainly, to far deeper, darker troubles.
“For so many years I was locked in a certain relationship with Dave, and I just couldn’t see fault in him — and then, once I did, it flipped,” says Toph over one of several long meals at diners and delis across L.A.’s Eastside.
Dave emerged as a literary phenomenon a quarter-century ago with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his memoir about raising Toph after both of their parents died of cancer within weeks of each other. The book became a generational touchstone for its joking-but-not, manic-expressive style — evidenced in the title itself, as well as the stream-of-consciousness prose — along with its wry exploration of ’90s youth culture, elevating Eggers to the rare pantheon of young writers, from Jack Kerouac and Bret Easton Ellis to, more recently, Sally Rooney, whose work transformed them into bona fide celebrities. One passage recalled how Dave, who then worked as an illustrator, narrowly lost out on being cast for The Real World: San Francisco to cartoonist Judd Winick.
In the book, Dave depicted Toph (short for Christopher) as a guileless kid, the personification of hope. Now, at 41, Toph is wearied and aggrieved. Fair or not, he places some of the blame on Dave. Toph’s narrative is informed by years of therapy, his own as well as his more recent studies toward becoming a licensed practitioner. “I’ve kind of covered every bucket there is in my life,” he says of therapy, “between dealing with family dynamics and job chaos and grief and suicide.”
After A Heartbreaking Work‘s publication, the pair were darlings among Hollywood development executives who saw in the Eggers brothers an alluring blend of raw talent, sheer poignance and commodifiable inventiveness. In-demand Dave often tapped Toph, with whom he shared a creative sensibility and a brotherly shorthand, to collaborate. “We were the same person for 30 years,” Toph says.
While Dave, now 54, has remained in the Bay Area, after college Toph moved to the Eastside, where he discovered that his brother’s memoir had turned him into a micro-celebrity — at least with a specific set. “If you shopped at Skylight [Books], there was a very high chance you knew my name,” he observes, “and if you were anywhere else, there was a .0003 percent chance.” (In the late 2000s, his dating life was even chronicled on media gossip site Gawker; he’s currently single with no children.)
In the past decade, Toph has chosen mostly to avoid talking to his brother and is resigned to the notion that he may not speak to him again. Business is, in part, to blame, what Toph — a mild-mannered personality who’s a dead ringer for a younger Dave and has long operated in his shadow — describes as “some weird work issues between us.” Yet their rift, he believes, ultimately arcs back to the memoir and its aftermath.
Dave’s book was noted and often heralded for its radical acts of confession: revealing its own inconsistencies, referencing friends’ real phone numbers. But according to Toph, for all this ostentatious adherence to truth-telling, his brother kept from his readers a telling decision — to conceal in plain sight his portrait of their suicidally struggling sister, Beth. Toph believes this hidden portrayal wounded her. It’s also haunted him in the years since, as he’s gone on his own difficult mental health journey and emerged on the other side as a therapist-in-training, now in the final months of his academic education, who expects to specialize in grief counseling. “He had his life publicized in a way that he didn’t choose,” explains Lauren Steury, a friend and member of Toph’s grad school cohort for clinical psychology. “That’s hard.”
A Heartbreaking Work famously anticipated its possible detractors with elaborate displays of self-deprecation and meta-awareness. It also emphasized the seemingly unbreakable bond of the brothers amid their tragedy as its own armor — which Toph now views with skepticism. “He critic-proofed his life, except for me,” he says. “I’m the missing thread.” Toph, who came forward to The Hollywood Reporter after years of feeling silenced, adds, “I think me speaking publicly, since he hit ‘send’ on Heartbreaking Work, has been his greatest fear.”
***
Dave’s memoir, published when the author was 30 years old, turned him into an icon of an ironic age, while his hyperfixation on realness and compulsive self-disclosure marked him as ahead of his time. The book topped The New York Times‘ best-sellers list. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Critics declared him a generational talent. “Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger,” wrote a reviewer at The Washington Post.
While Dave hasn’t quite captured the zeitgeist so powerfully since, he still regularly publishes works of reported nonfiction, illustrated children’s books and literary novels to commercial and critical acclaim, including the tech-dystopia satire The Circle, which became a Tom Hanks film of the same name and whose banning in some South Dakota schools begat an MSNBC documentary.
Dave has also netted screenwriting credits over the years for The Circle, as well as Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ dramedy starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph; director Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are; and Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land, starring Matt Damon. In addition, he’s launched a series of influential independent publishing outlets, among them the well-regarded McSweeney’s, and literary-focused nonprofit ventures. (Toph notes that this humanitarianism is its own force field: “You would have to be an asshole to come after him.”) He’s someone who turns up at Tribeca premieres and Vanity Fair Oscar parties or in conversation with Barack Obama onstage at a foundation summit.
Toph’s early forays into Hollywood were a consequence of his brother’s memoir, whose film rights were picked up by Universal for a reported $2 million. The project had started as a buzzy property, with Steven Soderbergh in the mix to direct and Jake Gyllenhaal circling to star as Dave. Writer Nick Hornby, hot off About a Boy, had taken an unsuccessful early pass at a draft. Toph, at the time a UC Berkeley student interested in film, suggested he collaborate with his brother on their own version. “In my head, I was like, ‘I’ll be able to exploit my exploitation,’ ” he recalls. Studio executives later passed on the siblings’ version and allowed the book’s option to lapse.
Still, Dave was in demand among creative executives, and he often enlisted Toph as a collaborator. They worked together on varied projects: a music video for the band Arcade Fire, a Cartoon Network pilot about talking animals on another planet, a Dave-directed experimental improv short in which James Franco destroyed a bedroom, breaking furniture and tearing into walls. That bedroom happened to be Toph’s own. “It’s hard to communicate how much I didn’t understand that I could be mad at Dave,” Toph says now.
He attempted to forge an entertainment career of his own. Over the years, Toph had the usual L.A. day jobs and rent-paying gigs — assisting, cater-delivery, Frisbee coach, rideshare driver, bowling alley employee, focus group participant — and once struggled as a PA assigned to gather behind-the-scenes footage on Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. (“John C. Reilly acted like I was a paparazzi that had snuck on the set,” he recalls with a laugh, “like, ‘Get that fucking camera out of my face.’ “) He made videos for Funny or Die and landed occasional writing gigs, some with the help of Dave’s connections, on projects like a short-lived FXX animated show and a Josh Schwartz web series.
Not much, though, worked out. Toph’s telling of his Hollywood story is heavy on absurdism and abasement — a millennial Barton Fink. “I was a finalist at one point to go to the Sundance Lab,” he says. “There was a big interview. I just answered everything wrong. ‘Why do you think this movie of yours has to be made?’ I was like, ‘It’s a comedy! It doesn’t have to be made.’ Just shooting myself in the foot.”
He decided he’d had enough of the business after several projects fizzled. One was a film adaptation for Paramount of a children’s book series he had co-created with Dave. Another was a buddy comedy at one point set up at Fox Searchlight and inspired by his real-life experience house-sitting for Jimmy Kimmel. (That one vanished after Toph had, at the urging of mentors in the business, based the script around David Copperfield, in the hope of landing the magician’s approval and securing financing that never materialized).
The most personal project, though, was a possible series based on his own life, which was briefly in development at Alcon, with Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz as a collaborator. This didn’t get far along, but it fictionalized the dynamic between Toph and Dave. “There was almost a There Will Be Blood relationship, this older guy with this younger figure,” he explains, noting that in the dramatization, his brother’s proxy was “more like a Tony Robbins figure,” peddling idealized notions about child rearing. (In A Heartbreaking Work, Dave had written of Toph: “His brain is my laboratory, my depository … He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience.”)
Even though the project died, Dave was displeased when he learned about it. “It was like a whole fucking to-do,” Toph says, his voice drained.
Dave declined to be interviewed for this story or respond to Toph’s assertions other than to have several proxies — including his lawyer, Jonathan Bass, and the publisher of McSweeney’s, Amanda Uhle — reach out to my editors in an attempt to kill it. In his correspondence with THR, Bass said that Toph’s feelings were “confused” and “distorted” and argued that a series of lengthy columns I had written for a blog while still in high school, 25 years ago, about Dave’s influence in the insular literary world of that era, disqualified me from writing about him now as it showcased a “disturbing intensity of interest” and “unhealthy obsession with Mr. Eggers.” Uhle made similar assertions about my past reporting.
Later, just before deadline, Toph forwarded an email Dave sent him directly, calling my long-ago coverage “stalking” and alleging that my blog had prompted people to camp out on his doorstep, “tracking what I ate and what I wore every day,” eventually forcing him to briefly move abroad. He urged Toph to cease communications with me, claiming he’d notified law enforcement about my attempts to contact him for comment about this article and that a restraining order “will be issued imminently,” adding, “Toph, I cannot tell you how dangerous this situation is.”
Toph was unsurprised when he heard that Uhle claimed Dave had taken “extreme security and privacy measures for decades” over my long-ago coverage. “I couldn’t tell the Domino’s Pizza guy our full name when we lived together,” he says of his brother. “I don’t think [his reaction] was because of you. That’s just him.”
***
In 2014, Toph signed a deal for his own memoir. When Dave found out, he sent his brother a lengthy letter meditating on their sister Beth’s life and death. “It’s her laughing face I remember best,” Dave wrote in one passage, recalling her “phenomenal” sense of humor.
Toph regards the note, which he shared with THR, as primarily an attempt to retain control of the shared Eggers narrative. “Dave has to be the authoritative voice on any story or person in our family,” he says. “Since I was going to potentially have my own, he was like, ‘Actually, this is how it went down. Before you start telling your version, I’m reiterating: I know this better.’ ” For Toph, Dave’s effort to influence the project was a final straw. He would later abandon the memoir altogether.
As I was reporting on Dave and A Heartbreaking Work in 2000, Beth contacted me that spring to counter the book, and I wrote about her objections — primarily that her own significant care responsibilities for Toph in the Bay Area and, before their deaths, her terminally ill parents in Chicago, had been underplayed in what she considered Dave’s self-serving narrative. (When their parents died, Toph was 8 years old, while Dave was 21 and Beth was 23; eldest brother Bill, employed in another city and who still retains a warm and ongoing relationship with both brothers, declined to speak to THR.)
Several months later, Beth disavowed her complaints in a retraction posted to McSweeney’s. “I’ve never had a problem with the book,” she wrote, deriding her prior criticism as that of “the prototypical jealous sibling.” Underneath the note, Dave added a broad appeal, speaking on his and Toph’s behalf: “We are begging for less malice.” Toph now says he believes Dave heavily influenced Beth’s mea culpa, citing its linguistic style. “[Dave] has a very clear voice,” he says, pointing out a memorable self-deprecatory line in Beth’s retraction about “having a terrible La Toya Jackson moment”: “Beth wouldn’t have done a bit in an apology letter.”
The following year, Beth died in Northern California following a reported pill overdose. The coroner classified it a suicide. Dave later dedicated his debut novel to her.
Beth’s final years were spent in and out of treatment centers battling depression. Dave and Bill managed her care while Toph, away at boarding school on the East Coast, was shielded from her spiral. “So, it was a shock [when she died],” Toph says. He agrees with his sister’s original assessment that her role in his upbringing “was definitely underplayed.”
Toph believes Beth’s struggles may have been compounded by what he claims to have been his brother’s decision in the memoir to depict her spiral, and Dave’s frustration and at times fury with it, through a lightly fictionalized suicidal friend named “John.” (An anodyne rendering of Beth herself also appears in the book, mostly in passing.) Toph says the veiling was obvious to their innermost circle.
“I’m not saying the book contributed to her [death],” he says. But he thinks Beth was hurt by the portrayal: “To see your brother get huge success and hero points for talking about having to deal with you — and you’re already worried about taking too much space?”
Toph recalls reflecting on Dave’s writing about “John” when in his late 20s he, too, went through his own significant mental health trouble. “It was really, well, heartbreaking to me, just how he depicted that character, and then to be in a very similar spot,” he says. “Law of transitive property, that’s probably how he saw me then, too.” Toph adds, of Beth, “I think we would’ve been really good allies.”
***
Dave’s book felt fresh a quarter-century ago in part because of its candor and adamance about the limits to expressing truth through memoir. Yet in the years since, many of the most popular exemplars of the form have been, to one degree or another, debunked — or at least reframed: A Million Little Pieces, Running With Scissors, Three Cups of Tea. Documentaries and based-on-a-true-story narratives (memoir’s creative cousins) have also begun to face heightened scrutiny.
Over the years, Toph has wondered, rightly or wrongly, if “part of agreeing to take me on [after their parents died] was a larger scheme to have fodder for the book.” Toph has few factual objections of his own about his brother’s memoir, although he acknowledges annoyance with his identity being flattened into that of the sidekick, a device deployed for tender moments and comic asides. Some of the changes he says he requested, mostly to avoid embarrassment — like eliminating Dave’s sportive riff on how he’d once chickened out during an adolescent game of spin the bottle — were ignored.
Toph’s main critique, aside from Beth’s portrayal, is that he now sees the book — as an adult who’s undergone years of his own therapy unpacking the early deaths of his parents — advancing a false and harmful understanding of trauma and its reverberations. As he puts it, it’s “presentationally hopeful,” conveying a highbrow form of toxic positivity. He contends the memoir offers “the idea that if you run away from grief and pain fast enough, you’ll be OK.” He sees his own life, so shaped by Dave, as proving that, in fact, “no, it eventually catches up with you, and it’s really rough when it does — rougher than if you’d just dealt with things at the time.”
Toph says two Hollywood productions have been cathartic for him. One is the Oscar best picture-winning Ordinary People, the 1980 drama about how grief fractures familial bonds — set in suburban Lake Forest, Illinois, the Eggers’ hometown. “Dave’s the Mary Tyler Moore mom: a denialist about what’s happening while the kid is trying to express stuff,” he explains. The other is Netflix’s critically acclaimed 2018 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, in which a man becomes a successful author after writing a best-selling book that pains his siblings for what they believe is its flawed telling of their shared past trauma. “That one’s like a one-to-one [comparison],” says Toph. “Even just the way he acts so defiant and defensive about it.”
While Toph admires A Heartbreaking Work as a literary work, the real-life character turned soon-to-be-therapist is most compelled by it as a psychological document. “The whole book is a confession about the book,” he explains. ” ‘Why did I need to write this book? Why do I need attention and sympathy?’ It’s full of these confessions, but he’s not actually wrestling with them, even though it sounds like he’s wrestling with them. He never internalized them. They’re just put out there.”
***
Over the past decade, Dave, who at various times provided some financial assistance to Toph, has made numerous attempts to reconcile. In one letter Toph shared with THR, Dave posits that his brother, as a bereaved person going through “some uncovering,” may resent that “we are not at the exact emotional place” in the processing of grief. Dave says he suspected that Toph was “poring over Beth’s life, and your life, and our family in general,” and that he empathized with the intensity of those emotions, but adds, “You have to remember that I went through all this 15-20 years ago.” Dave observes that compared to Toph’s “emotional rawness,” his own distance may be perceived as “coldness.” He also emphasized that he knew what Toph has been going through; and that although he acknowledged they had “wide variation in which we’ve seen and heard,” their similarities were many, and he knew “as much as I could” what Toph was feeling.
Toph doesn’t agree. “Because he wrote the book, he thinks he processed the grief — but he didn’t,” he says. “[A Heartbreaking Work] is a how-to guide to bottling things up and pushing things down and ignoring them.”
Toph has rebuffed his brother’s entreaties, including a proposal that they meet with a family therapist: “What he wanted was a mediator. My counter-suggestion was that he should go do his own therapy first. He was aghast at the suggestion.” To Toph’s mind, Dave wants to mend the estrangement without fixing the problems that caused it. “He needs to actually acknowledge the impact of the book,” Toph says flatly, asserting that Dave has at times instead redirected blame for their rift to Toph’s friends, his therapist and the purportedly growing phenomenon of “no contact” disconnection. “Don’t try to deny my reality. It’s respecting my boundaries and not fighting my life experience.” Steury says of Toph: “He’s found his confidence.”
At one point, I inquired about Toph’s tattoos. He explained how one is a reference to something that Wild author Cheryl Strayed once wrote about the value of messiness in life, which moved him. “Our upbringing was that things have to be turned tidy as fast as possible — or ignored,” he said. Another tattoo is Beth’s initials, stylized as a lightning bolt.
The third is a depiction of the Buddhist concept of the second arrow. It teaches that how we process difficult, painful situations — the first arrow — is, in the end, up to us. “That’s been,” he explained, “important to me.”
This story appeared in the Nov. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
English (US) ·