Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest was in his early 20s when both his parents died within a year of each other,
leaving him to bring up his eight-year-old brother alone.
He wrote a memoir about it, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and it made him famous almost overnight.
He spent the next 25 years proving that that wasn't the only thing he could do.
He founded McSweeney's.
He opened a writing centre for children behind a pirate supply shop in San Francisco and a superhero shop in Brooklyn.
He's written about Sudan, about a man wrongly arrested after Hurricane Katrina,
about Silicon Valley, about Yemen, about Ukraine.
His new novel takes him somewhere he hasn't.
Been before deep inside the life of an artist.
Contrapposto follows two friends, cricket and Olympia, from a vandalised playground in Indiana through art school,
a Turkish coastline and a tourist shop in Phuket all the way to Paris over 65 years.
It's about talent, money, ambition and what it costs to keep making things that nobody's paying attention to.
Dave Eggers, welcome to Meet the Writers.
Thanks for having me.
It's really lovely to have you here.
And of course, we have a sort of background connection, which I think we'll come to a little bit later on.
But first of all, I just wanted