Trying to take care of a younger brother in Chicagoland and graduating from the University can be difficult to do, especially when one’s steed of choice is the venerable Volkswagen Rabbit, which happens to habitually run out of gas.

It doesn’t get any easier for a best-selling author returning to his alma mater. On Feb. 7, en route to Champaign, Dave Eggers ran out of gas yet again.

He was accompanied by Valentino Achak Deng, Sudanese refugee and subject of his new book, “What is the What.” The book is the story of Deng’s journey from southern Sudan all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, as told by Eggers. Deng is in the beginnings of a spring tour of the country to support the book and in turn to raise awareness of Sudan. Or the other way around; it works both ways.

Nevertheless, the pair eventually made it to Champaign where they visited the Illini Media Company and the Illini Union Bookstore. There a crowd of people, eyes over bookshelves, saw them give a reading of the new book.

Eggers grew up in Lake Forest, just north of Chicago. He attended the University in the early 90s. He originally was an art major. He confessed to having spent all of his “free” time drawing, editing, writing and designing The Daily Illini.

“I was a painter, that’s what I wanted to do,” he said.

However, he was forced to leave college life his senior year, with only three classes to go.

Both of his parents had died of unrelated cancers, and he was now responsible for his little brother, Topher. They moved to San Francisco.

The death of his parents and the raising of his younger brother became the inspiration for his circumlocutorily titled best seller, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” The book chronicled, quite postmodernly, his cross-country coming of age. Cremains, Frisbees and MTV’s “The Real World” were to not be untouched, nor was tremendous loss.

“It’s strange what comes out when you begin writing. You’re never quite sure what needs to get worked out on the page, as opposed to things you talk about with friends or subjects that go unexplored entirely,” Eggers said.

“Because I’ve experienced a fair share of loss personally, it’s probably no great surprise that a lot of my work involves, directly or tangentially, experiences with death,” he added.

Much of Eggers’ work, and indeed his early writing style, has a certain anxiousness.

“You Shall Know our Velocity!” his first novel, is a globe-trotting affair. Escapism is a motivating force in “A Heartbreaking Work.” He visited Sudan with Deng because he couldn’t write about a place that he hasn’t been to.

He had to see it for himself, he said. He added that his wanderlust was perhaps born from being raised in the Midwest.

“I’d say the first three books I wrote all dealt with characters who had lived relatively sheltered Midwestern lives suddenly being thrust into the larger world and how they sink or swim there,” he said.

To Eggers, the goal of his writing has been to make the personal universal and to make the universal personal.

“That was my hope with the first book – though it’s a memoir in one sense, the novelistic side of it sought to connect one person’s life with millions of others, illuminate what was common, emblematic, et cetera,” he said.

“It was personal in a lot of ways,” he continued, “but I also wanted it to say something about class in this country, about the ridiculous but necessary dreams of youth, and about twenty other themes I thought were big.”

For Deng, “What is the What” is a personal narrative with global goals.

The title of the book comes from an ancient Sudanese creation myth, differing from much of his earlier work. Deng’s journey took more than two years to fully relate to Eggers, for a total of three and a half years to write.

Some of the memories included in the book were extremely difficult for Deng to approach again.

“Children make very poor soldiers,” he laments.

He and Eggers investigated his past and the difficult story of Sudan, so that more people would have access.

“I wanted to document it in a story or a book so that generations of people will have access to it,” Deng said.

This is perhaps the universal, and the personal, for which Eggers has been looking.

“When I set out on a novel, which can take years, I think I’d like to get at something universal or something very new or something that I (and the reader) would find crucial to my, and their, understanding of the world,” Eggers said.

With his new book, many readers across the country, and across this campus, will have access to an understanding previously unavailable.

“The book is changing lives,” Deng said, “and that’s the point.”