Why People Hate Dave Eggers

Posted on March 5, 2010

The Awl wants to know why so many people hate Dave Eggers. Maria Bustillos did a Google search for the most hated authors and what she found was surprising. While there were only two results for "I Hate Jonathan Franzen" (which is amazing, considering how annoying he is), there are 3888 results for "I Hate Dave Eggers."

Part of the hate accruing to Dave Eggers is undoubtedly due to crab-bucket syndrome, which is when there are a lot of rivals, e.g., writers who are struggling after success in the form of TED prizes and screenplay commissions, and then one of them actually succeeds, and the rest of his fellow-strivers and former comrades attempt to yank him back down again. In the case of Eggers this is commonly depicted as not just envy, but more like a sense that the litterati just ought to have a better representative. Better, somehow, in some way, than this seemingly self-promoting impresario.
As well, a great divide opened between youngs and olds on the issue of Eggers when Where the Wild Things Are finally emerged. Us olds don't just detest twee, childish sentimentality. We would douse it in kerosene and throw a match on it, if we could.

So who else inspires true hatred on the Internet? Well, there's Elizabeth Wurtzel (89 results of online hatred) and David Sedaris, who clocks in at 774.