{"id":537326,"date":"2026-07-12T05:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T05:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/537326\/"},"modified":"2026-07-12T05:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T05:53:09","slug":"author-dave-eggers-on-ai-staying-creative-and-the-daily-role-of-sinead-oconnor-in-his-life-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/537326\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Dave Eggers on AI, staying creative and the daily role of Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor in his life \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Eggers is not a man hemmed in by an undue adherence to convention. Over the phone from his book tour in England (current stop: London), Eggers explains how he keeps things creatively stimulating at McSweeney\u2019s, the small independent publishing company he founded in San Francisco<\/a> in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hire life drawing models to pose at the offices for us, all of us art<\/a> school refugees that work there, and they\u2019re naked in our office while we draw,\u201d Eggers says cheerfully. \u201cOnce a week we hire models and it\u2019s always the most interesting people.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t see HR departments in Ireland embracing the idea any time soon. No matter. It makes perfect sense for Eggers, a novelist and non-fiction author who is also a painter, editor, curator, non-profit founder, children\u2019s books author, and more. <\/p>\n

Since he burst on to the literary scene in 2000 with his genre-bending memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius<\/a>, Eggers has been a restless spirit. A former Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has founded several non-profit organisations, many aimed at stretching out a helping hand to young artists, and he has plans for a new venture, Art + Water, to assist emerging visual artists in San Francisco. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s had several books made into movies, including A Hologram for the King, starring Tom Hanks<\/a>, and 2013\u2019s The Circle with Hanks and Emma Watson<\/a>. Keeping up with him even on paper feels like a stretch. <\/p>\n

Helpfully for Eggers\u2019 time-management skills, life drawing is the subject of his new novel, Contrapposto. Its name refers to the technical stance a model might take, leaning back on one foot like Michelangelo\u2019s David when posing for artists. Eggers spent 20 years scribbling notes and observations for the story, shoving them into drawers, then assembling them into a captivating, deeply alive novel of ideas about a shy artist called Cricket and his friend, the sexy, self-assured but not terribly stable Olympia.<\/p>\n

Cricket is a gifted painter, but his talents aren\u2019t appreciated at college where professors rate only conceptual art, in a postmodern market where patrons buy investments rather than paintings, and old-fashioned skills with turps and canvas smack of the second-rate. Olympia, a budding curator and Cricket\u2019s sometime lover, is enraged. Cricket is indifferent: he just wants to paint, not report to anyone, and not \u2013 like a Warhol<\/a> or a Lichtenstein<\/a> or a Pollock \u2013 be forced to repeat himself, to heap gold coins on a pile and relive old glories.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Indiana, Cricket realises that graft matters. \u201cMuch of the rightness of any drawing came through time and diligence and discernment. It came from work and humility \u2013 being able to recognise if something is wrong, and knowing how to address it. There was room for talent, yes, talent was much of it, but he was surprised by the role of sheer doggedness \u2013 the determination to get it right.\u201d<\/p>\n

A traditional novel that makes the case for traditional artisan skills might not have seemed on the cards in 2026 from the form-bending, genre-ducking author of The Circle and The Parade, who grew up inspired by postmodernists such as Samuel Beckett<\/a>. (A vaguely shocked New York Times reviewer declared they saw something of The Thorn Birds in its earthy, warmly charismatic prose. Ripping through the 400-plus pages, I thought of Charles Dickens.)<\/p>\n

\"DaveDave Eggers at Pier 29, which will house Art + Water, a teaching and community organisation, in San Francisco. Photograph: Poppy Lynch\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

But it makes sense to Eggers. He says the philosophy underpinning the novel has a lot to do with his years on earth, and how he wants to spend his remaining ones. What\u2019s a good way to live one\u2019s life as a working artist? The question lingers with him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 56 and it\u2019s on my mind every day,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to do that?\u2019 How do you balance things so there\u2019s devotion to your art, but there\u2019s life as art? I think the latter is more important. I didn\u2019t do a book tour for the last 15 years because I wanted to be home and present with my kids. It\u2019s something you think about and you make little adjustments every week, every month.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the adjustments are to his writing circumstances. Eggers writes for 250 days a year on a boat docked in a slip beneath the Golden Gate Bridge where he can look out at pelicans, sea lions and passing fishermen. He has to bike around the bay to a porta-potty if he needs the facilities. He types on a 1998 MacBook Pro with original software, a cracked screen and no internet. He listens to Sin\u00e9ad O\u2019Connor<\/a> every day before he begins, always her folk standards album, Sean-N\u00f3s Nua, so he can \u2013 he sighs at the jadedness of the phrase \u2013 \u201ccentre\u201d himself. \u201cI started working on this boat five or six years ago because I was tired of being indoors all my life and that helped me a lot to have a different equilibrium.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lifestyle that would not have been possible when Eggers was a young man in his 20s, forced to beat the corporate drum to make a buck. His salad years were famously hard. His parents died of cancer within weeks of each other when Eggers was 21 and he helped raise his brother Toph, aged just eight, in Berkeley, California<\/a>, where they moved to be with his sister Beth. <\/p>\n

A former journalism student at the University of Illinois, Eggers had ambitions but few opportunities to make them a reality. \u201cI struggled,\u201d he says. \u201cI was a temp at companies throughout my 20s while trying to put out magazines and do illustrations. I had no real idea where I would end up or if I\u2019d ever be able to make a living doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Insecurity ripples through the early part of Eggers\u2019 new novel. Growing up, Cricket is the sensitive boy who watches on as his single mother attaches herself to a bad man, burying his face in the pillow to avoid hearing the thud of fists, the screams. There are chem trails of Eggers\u2019 old life in the heart-rending early scenes \u2013 Eggers\u2019 father was a violent alcoholic and, like Cricket, the young Dave also used creativity as an escape hatch. <\/p>\n

\u2018I don\u2019t think the Trump administration reads, so, outside of The New York Times, all of us writers are safe\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the \u201970s it was quite regular to have that level of chaos at home,\u201d he says. \u201cCricket has what he can do on the page, which is to order the world. I spent all my free time drawing because it gave me that sense of like, okay, this is mine, this I control. This is peace and even a kind of bliss.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eggers has devoted a significant portion of his life to fostering creativity in young people. His non-profit centre 826 Valencia, founded in 2002, helps children and young adults keen to grow their writing skills. Roddy Doyle<\/a>, whom Eggers idolised when he began writing novels, visited in the early days, watching classes and taking notes so he could create his own initiative, Fighting Words, in Dublin. \u201cWe\u2019ve been in each other\u2019s lives ever since,\u201d says Eggers. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0The Beautiful Death of Ozzy Osbourne: Sympathy for the metalOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The centre is based in San Francisco, a city where hippies still puff on joints clustered on the sidewalks but where \u201chalf the cars are robot-driven and trillions of dollars are flowing through the city\u201d. It\u2019s near Sam Altman\u2019s OpenAI<\/a>, a company altering the landscape of modern life in every area of industry, not least writing and education. <\/p>\n

Eggers accepted an invitation from Altman to speak at OpenAI and used the forum to make his voice heard. \u201cI said, \u2018You\u2019re adding 20 hours a week to the workload of every public school teacher in this country and the effect is apocalyptic on young people being able to develop their own voice. There is no safe amount of AI<\/a> in humanities for kids under 22, at least in writing. If a young person decides to shop out their voice to a machine, then they become voiceless.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Eggers and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, have two children, aged 17 and 20. He says their \u201cfierce and innovative\u201d teachers are increasingly making their students hand-write essays in class under their supervision, recognising it is the only way to foster creativity and beget fairness. \u201cThose kids end up being much more effective writers than those that go home and cut and paste or shop part of it out,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In his non-fiction work Eggers has written about the Trump administration<\/a>. He plans to again. \u201cI\u2019ve been working on something for 18 years now that\u2019s so dark I have to take breaks from it, but a lot of it is about police violence in the US and how much gun violence we tolerate.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0The German-Russian Century by Stefan Creuzberger: Impressive account of an age-old enmityOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He tries to balance the competing urges within himself. \u201cAs a journalist, you do certain things out of a sense of outrage,\u201d he says. \u201cI spent a lot of time on Trump during the first administration and I thought, \u2018I\u2019m not going to give this person 12 years of my life.\u2019 There has to be room for the stories and projects you do that will outlast this one maniac.\u201d<\/p>\n

That language \u2013 you wonder if it\u2019s dangerous. Has he ever felt the Eye of Sauron upon him? \u201cThe old way was that you got audited by the IRS if you were too critical of a certain administration, but that hasn\u2019t happened yet,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think the Trump administration reads, so, outside of The New York Times, all of us writers are safe. If we were on TV, it\u2019s something different.\u201d <\/p>\n

He tries to inspire students to speak the truth of their lives. \u201cPeople have been fearful,\u201d he says. \u201cIn the first administration, when I would write op-eds, students of mine would say, \u2018Are you sure you can say that? Don\u2019t you worry he\u2019s going to sue you or threaten you?\u2019 They have to understand that one of their purposes as writers is to speak truth to power.\u201d <\/p>\n

Community matters to Eggers. Among the proliferation of screens in our lives, there can be great loneliness and vulnerability. He believes in the power of the group, to foster ideas and create uplift. People, he says, need to get out of the house. \u201cI think we have to be more intentional,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s what Saul Bellow called taking a \u2018humanity bath\u2019, where you just immerse yourself in people, even with that little bit of risk that something might not be as perfect as sitting in your house or talking to a machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome things are worth the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrapposto by Dave Eggers is published by Canongate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dave Eggers is not a man hemmed in by an undue adherence to convention. Over the phone from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[343,4670,54,146,85,46,1748,244865,58136,95936,2747],"class_list":["post-537326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-california","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-openai","tag-roddy-doyle","tag-samuel-beckett","tag-sinead-oconnor","tag-tom-hanks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}