A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

At Might, Eggers and Moodie decide to run a fake celebrity obituary. They want to find someone willing to go along with their idea, but the people they contact refuse. Finally, Adam Rich—the former child star of Eight is Enough—agrees, and Eggers is ecstatic to have the opportunity to satirize celebrity eulogies. Toph, on the other hand, isn’t so sure. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “I think it’s kind of sick.” He suggests that Eggers is using Adam Rich to make a point. “You think he’s vapid, dim-witted, with his stupidity arising, first and foremost, from the fact that he is famous and you guys are not,” Toph says. “You’re breaking out of character again,” Eggers replies. Ignoring this, Toph accuses him of not being able to “stand the fact that this silly person, this Adam Rich person,” “has the gall to be a household name.”

Toph reminds Eggers of the time he and the other Might editors went to New York to interview “budding celebrities” so that they could “make fun of them” in print. He also brings up what Eggers did to Sari Locker, the sexologist he interviewed about her book Mindblowing Sex in the Real World. Apparently, Eggers went to dinner with Sari and talked to her about her book, all the while planning to make fun of her, “recording her words to later use against her.” At the same time, he also found himself attracted to Sari and tried to “get invited back to her apartment.” As Toph recounts this story, Eggers chimes in, saying that he almost went home with her. “And then you still went back and wrote a bitchy little thing about her,” Toph says.

Eggers insists that Sari wasn’t offended by what he wrote, and Toph suggests that she’s probably just used to such things. “But don’t you see this is a kind of cannibalism?” he says. “That you’re just grabbing at people, toys from a box, dressing them up, taking them apart, ripping their heads off, discarding them—” Before Toph can finish, Eggers tells him that Sari is coming back to town and that he’s going to get together with her.

Several days later, Toph comes home with school pictures. When he reveals them, Eggers is appalled—Toph is looking at the camera with a helpless, strange expression on his face, as if he’s desperately unhappy. To Eggers, the expression screams: “Look at my sad life, you people, you viewers of junior-high pictures! Class, teachers, see my eyes, which have seen too much! […] Save me from him because every night before dinner he’s asleep on the couch and so dead to the world, and when he can’t get up he tugs on my shirt and begs, he makes me cook for us and then later, once awake, he’s so tense, staring at the screen, writing something he won’t let me see, and he falls asleep in my bed and I have to push him out [...].”

Around the same time that Eggers sees Toph’s school picture, Marny calls and tells him Shalini has been in an accident. “You know that deck that collapsed in Pacific Heights?” she asks. “She’s in a coma. She fell four stories and landed on her head. They don’t know if she’s going to make it.” Eggers rushes out of the house, worrying someone will do something to Toph in his absence. He picks up Marny and meets Moodie at the hospital, where they sit in the hallway and watch Shalini’s family come and go. Over the next few days, they come to know her mother. Every time they visit, they make sure to follow the unspoken code of visiting the sick: “We are not to smile, not to laugh, at anything, unless the family smiles or laughs first,” Eggers notes. “Most important, we too must suffer.”

While Shalini is still in her coma, Eggers decides to bring her a teddy bear that he has kept in his car since his mother died. He believes “there is something of [his mother] in this bear,” and he can still hear the voice she used when she pretended to speak as the bear when he was a child. Taking it to Shalini, he wedges it between her arm and torso and steps back to look at her holding it, thinking that maybe this bear “will be magic” and “bring [her] back.”

On Sari Locker’s last night in town, Eggers drops Toph off at a bar mitzvah, then goes to the office to put the final touches on the Adam Rich story, which will include his “final interview” (an interview written by the Might staff). When he goes to pick up Toph from the downtown hotel—where the bar mitzvah was held—he can’t find him. He gets out of the car and runs inside, angry because he’s already late for his date with Sari. Apparently, Sari has to fly out later that night, so Eggers is extra frantic as he runs through the lobby and searches for Toph, going upstairs and downstairs multiple times before finally, after a long time, finding him in the lobby, of all places. Furious, he drops his little brother off at Beth’s and calls Sari from the lobby of her hotel.

Sari has to leave soon, but she agrees to meet Eggers in the lobby. As he waits for her, he feels bad about the fact that he “exploded” in the car, yelling at Toph and sounding like his parents used to when they were angry at him. When Sari arrives, they decide to go straight to Eggers’s house, where they start kissing and making their way to his bedroom. Just as they’re about to fall onto the bed, though, the door opens. “Oop,” Toph says, and backs out of the room. “What are you doing here?” Eggers asks, and Toph explains that Beth didn’t have any food, so she sent him back. In relative silence, Eggers drives Sari to the airport.

Eggers and the other Might editors continue working on the cover story about Adam Rich’s death. Meanwhile, Lance recruits a young actress named Skye Basset to represent the magazine in New York by taking meetings and planning east coast parties. Apparently, Skye was in the movie Dangerous Minds, though now she works almost full-time as a waitress while also going to auditions and—somehow—helping Might. “She is one of us, and with her, and with this Adam Rich thing, it really seems like we might be turning a corner here,” Eggers writes.

Around this time, Marny and Eggers visit Shalini in the hospital and find her sitting up with her eyes open. The doctors tell them that she’s still technically in a coma, but they don’t let this curtail their joy. Sitting in the parking lot after the visit, Eggers asks Marny if she’d like to have sex—he feels fantastic and alive and hopeful, and suddenly sex is the only thing he can think about. “I think we should get back to the office,” she says. “She is right,” Eggers notes. “She is good. She never gets upset when I do this. It was a dumb idea, a revolting idea. All wrong. Bad!” Instead, he asks for a hug, and as they hug, he again thinks that they should have sex, but she releases him after a moment and they drive back to the office.

Adam Rich agrees to visit San Francisco for the launch of his death story. The story has already attracted quite a lot of attention, since Eggers and Moodie sent a press release to the National Enquirer. Somehow, other publications got ahold of this press release, and Eggers and Moodie were unexpectedly flooded with media inquiries, reporters asking them about the specific details of Adam’s death (the cover story claims that he was murdered). Eventually, they have to admit to a producer that the story is a “hoax.” Still, the gossip spreads, and an AP reporter even visits Adam’s father. “Listen you guys,” Adam says. “This is way out of control. My relatives are fucking freaking out.” When the media discovers that it’s all a joke, they sink their teeth into Adam, accusing him of wanting attention.