Understanding Dave Eggers' "What Is What"
The book is exactly what the title suggests — a collection of questions paired with other questions instead of straightforward answers. Eggers started posting these on Twitter around 2020, where he would ask something like "What do you do when you're lost?" and respond with "Where are you?" The format caught on fast, and the book collected hundreds of these exchanges across several years. Each one is short, usually two or three lines at most, and the pairings range from the genuinely useful to the absurdly philosophical to the outright weird. Reading it feels different from a normal nonfiction book because there's no argument being built across chapters. You open to any page and read a single exchange. Some of them are genuinely helpful — there's a section on grief that asks "What do you do when someone you love dies?" and answers with "You don't." That one landed for me because it was honest in a way most self-help books aren't. Others are just playful, like the one about whether dogs understand the word no, answered with a question about what the word even means to a dog. The structure is deceptively simple. Eggers organizes the Q&As into rough thematic groups — relationships, work, grief, money, politics, nature — but you don't need to read them in order. I found myself flipping around randomly, which is kind of the point. This isn't a book you consume linearly. It's more like a deck of cards you shuffle through.
One thing beginners miss about the format is that the second question isn't always a deflection. Sometimes it's a reframing that actually gets at the real problem. Take the exchange about "What should you do if you're stuck in traffic?" answered with "Are you late for something important?" The answer implies that if you're not late for something important, the stress is pointless. That's a useful insight wrapped in a question, and it took me a minute to realize that's what was happening. Eggers trusts the reader to connect the dots. I ran into an edge case myself while recommending this to a friend who wanted something more structured. She got frustrated about halfway through because the book never actually resolves anything. There's no conclusion to the grief section, no wrap-up on relationships. The Q&As just end. I told her that's the whole point — life doesn't have clean endings, and Eggers is mimicking that. She still didn't love it, which is fair. This book isn't for everyone. The format does have limitations. Because each exchange stands alone, there's no deep exploration of any single topic. If you want to really understand, say, how grief works psychologically, this book won't give you that. It's a starting point, not a destination. For that I'd recommend pairing it with something like "When Something Terrible Happens" by Ann Patchett or "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk, depending on what you're looking for. Eggers himself is a novelist and essayist, so he clearly has other works that go deeper on specific subjects. This book is more of a mood piece than a textbook.
Another counter-intuitive thing about the book: the shorter the exchange, the more it tends to land. The really long ones — where Eggers stacks three or four question pairs in a row — lose their punch. The best ones are the two-line stingers that hit you with a single unexpected pivot. I'd guess those are the ones he spent the most time on, even though they look effortless. If you want to get the book, it was published by McSweeney's in 2023 and is available wherever books are sold — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores. It's also occasionally available as an ebook. I wouldn't recommend waiting for a free PDF rip because the formatting matters here. The spacing between each Q&A is part of the rhythm, and pirated copies tend to crush that into dense blocks of text that ruin the experience. The ISBN is 9781950565998 for the hardcover edition. Paperback is also available. The ebook runs about the same price as other McSweeney's titles, which tends to be slightly below industry average. Nothing fancy about the cover design — it's basically the title in a clean sans-serif font on a solid background, which fits the no-nonsense tone of the content.
Get the Full Details
I keep it on my nightstand and pull it out when I can't sleep. It's not something I read cover to cover anymore — more like I thumb through it for five minutes, pick a few exchanges that resonate with whatever I'm feeling, and put it down. That's probably the best way to use it. Treat it like a conversation starter rather than a lecture.
