From a Web Review of Eggers' book:

Part of the critical popularity of Eggers' book, no doubt, is that he is playing with the form — and especially the tone — typical of memoirs at a time when people are fed up with tear-jerking books on incest and miserable childhoods. Eggers claims never to have read a memoir before picking up Mary McCarthy's "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood," which a friend recommended because McCarthy did what Eggers had intended to do: write an appendix to the book, documenting fictional licenses. "Because McCarthy had already done it," says Eggers, "I scrapped the idea." (HIP MAMA)

You see, this is just wrong. "Because McCarthy had already done it I scrapped the idea." So I take it if McCarthy had jumped off a bridge, you would have jumped off a bridge too? Wait—anyway, so what if McCarthy already did it? Then you do it better. If you thought of it, you do it. You don't worry about who did it first. Everyone did everything first. I'm sure if you looked, you'd find that each aspect of your (or any other mod author's) book has been done before in some way or another, long ago.

Cave dwellers sketching on darkened cave walls
their own ironic memoirs.

But my invective continues. It's sad that you would abandon what was at once your own idea merely because you discovered something similar this way had already come.

Eggers      Writers