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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: PRETTY UGLY
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WEBSITE: http://davidsedarisbooks.com/
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COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 339
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PERSONAL
Born December 26, 1956, in Johnson City, NY; son of Louis Harry (a computer engineer) and Sharon Elizabeth Sedaris; partner of Hugh Hamrick (an artist and set designer).
EDUCATION:Attended Western Carolina University and Kent State University; graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Humorist, writer, and radio commentator. School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, writing instructor; guest appearances on Milly’s Orchid Show, Chicago, The Wild Room, WBEZ radio, Chicago, CBS Sunday Morning, and This American Life, National Public Radio. Has worked variously as a performance artist, moving company worker, office worker, elf in Macy’s SantaLand, house painter, apple picker, and apartment cleaner; volunteer with the English Language Library for the Blind in Paris, France, and Age Concern in London, England.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Letters.
AWARDS:Obie Award, Village Voice, 1995, for One Woman Shoe; named “Humorist of the Year,” Time, 2001; Thurber Prize for American Humor, for Me Talk Pretty One Day; Grammy Award nomination for Best Spoken Word Album, 2005, for Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim; Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album, 2005, for David Sedaris: Live at Carnegie Hall; named “one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years,” New York public Library, 2020, for Me Talk Pretty One Day.
WRITINGS
Author of commentaries for This American Life and other National Public Radio programs, 1992–. This American Life commentaries represented in anthologies, including Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art, Independent Curators International (New York, NY), 2005, and Committed: Men Tell Stories of Love, Commitment and Marriage, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2005, and audio collections, including This American Life: Lies, Sissies, and Fiascos, Rhino Records, 1999, and Crimebusters and Crossed Wires: Stories from This American Life, Sony, 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker, London Guardian, and Esquire. Author of stage plays, including Jamboree, 1991, and Stump the Host, 1993; coauthor of stage plays with sister, Amy Sedaris, under the joint pseudonym The Talent Family, including One Woman Shoe, 1995, Little Freida Mysteries, 1997, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, 1997, and The Book of Liz, 2002; also coauthor with Joe Mantello of the stage play The SantaLand Diaries, 1996; creator of comedy albums, including Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays, Time Warner Audio, 2001; (with Amy Sedaris and Ann Magnuson) The David Sedaris Box Set, Time Warner Audio, 2002; and David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall, Time Warner Audio, 2003.
“Diary of a Smoker,” an essay from Barrel Fever, was adapted by Matthew Modine into a thirteen-minute film shown at the Sundance Film Festival and on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 1994. His story “C.O.G.” was adapted for a film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
David Sedaris is an American humor writer. He writes essay collections, memoirs, and also books for children, having sold millions of copies around the world in around three dozen languages. Sedaris is a frequent contributor on National Public Radio’s This American Life. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim offers essays that were previously published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and National Public Radio’s This American Life. In the collection, he talks about a parrot with a unique impression, a memorable game of strip poker game, and an odd kid he met. He also talks about his family. Writing in USA Today, Allison Block claimed that Sedaris “exhibits his knack for spinning unsettling experiences into pure comic gold.”
In the collection When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris discusses the three months he abstained from smoking while living in Tokyo. He also touches on popular topics he has often used in his comedy pieces. In a review in Lambda Book Report, Jim Gladstone noted that “there’s been great pleasure in witnessing Sedaris feast upon the mundane dysfunctions of his childhood and earlier adulthood, but reading this new book, it feels as if he’s combing the tablecloth for stray crumbs.”
With Holidays on Ice, Sedaris mingles with Santa and his elves at Macy’s during Christmas time. He covers mock family bulletins of important news, as well as the lengths some people will go to out-do their neighbors. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Alexandra Jacobs reasoned that “it’s not that there isn’t much to enjoy in this fortified parade of sad sacks; though there’s a certain irony in a New and Improved makeover for a book sending up American shopping habits. The classic stories are still relevant and funny…. But the other added material — the stuffing, if you will — undermines rather than improves the book.”
In Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, Sedaris uses animal characters to comedic effect in this children’s book. A motherless bear self isolates and mopes, while a potbellied pig can’t lose weight despite regular dieting. And a squirrel and chipmunk potentially find love. Booklist contributor Annie Bostrom remarked that “Sedaris’ name creates its own buzz and will continue to do so even with this quirky little book.”
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc. presents twenty-six essays on a range of topics. He targets his father, who has been highly critical of his life. Sedaris also comments on common frustrations in his every day experiences. Reviewing the book in Spectator, Wynn Wheldon commented that the author’s “principal target is his father, whom he seems intent on punishing in print in the way the boy David was punished with spoken word and occasional deed. And while a desire for vengeance is not a likeable quality, it does seem justified, and what it produces is often very funny.”
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) is the first publication that Sedaris draws heavily from his personal diaries. In it he recalls notable discussions with strangers and siblings and overheard conversations in public. He also reflects on the death of his mother and his sister’s own decline. In a review in BookPage, Kelly Blewett insisted that “this is a diary that shows us how Sedaris’ powers of observation and his intense investment in his own perspective have enriched his life and, by extension, ours.”
In Calypso, Sedaris shares a range of essays that often cover family vacations at their North Carolina beach house. At age sixty-one at the time of publication, Sedaris also reflects on aging. Reviewing Calypso in BookPage, Alice Cary noted that “while Sedaris is laugh-out-loud funny in his brilliant, meandering way, it’s his personal reflections that will stay with you.”
With the essay collection The Best of Me, Sedaris shares his struggles with speaking French. He also discusses the odd nature of his family, arguing that it is, in fact, not dysfunctional. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “one of the funniest–and truest–books in recent memory and a must-have for fans of the poet laureate of human foibles.”
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020) is the second publication that is drawn from his diaries. From them he relates his views on Donald Trump, the war in Iraq, and Covid-19. He also considers peculiarities from different cultures that he finds odd. Sedaris also reminisces about his sister’s death by suicide and the strained relationship he had with his father. A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “a rich trove for hardcore Sedaris fans, though no more personally revealing than his well-shaped essays.”
In the essay collection Happy-Go-Lucky, Sedaris frequently discusses the death of his ninety-six-year-old father. He shares his interactions with nursing home staff, how his comedy routines changed during this period, and how Covid-19 shaped his view of death and the world around him. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described it as being “a sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.”
With the children’s book, Pretty Ugly, an ogre family is very proud of just how ugly each one of them is. The parents praise their daughter Anna for how ugly she is and how poor her manners are. One day, her face gets stuck in a cute pose and must come to terms with the moniker that true beauty lies within. Writing in School Library Journal, Emilia Packard called it “a slightly freaky fable for young readers eager and ready to leave the usually safe world of pictures books behind.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Advocate, February 25, 1992, Sarah Schulman, review of Origins of the Underclass, and Other Stories, pp. 82-84; December 10, 1996, Robert L. Pela, review of The SantaLand Diaries, p. 54; March 18, 1997, Robert L. Pela, review of Naked, pp. 76-77; June 20, 2000, Robert L. Pela, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 133.
Back Stage, June 23, 1995, David Sheward, review of One Woman Shoe, p. 29; November 29, 1996, Eric Grode, review of The SantaLand Diaries, p. 28; February 28, 1997, Robert Simonson, review of Little Freida Mysteries, p. 60; July 18, 1997, Robert Simonson, review of Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, p. 40.
Book, September 2, 2000, Rochelle O’Gorman, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 85; March 2, 2003, review of The David Sedaris Box Set, p. 78, and interview with Sedaris, p. 78.
Booklist, June 1, 1994, Benjamin Segedin, review of Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays, p. 1762; February 15, 1997, Donna Seaman, review of Naked, p. 996; May 1, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 1482; May 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Children Playing before a Statue of Hercules, p. 1568; April 15, 2008, Jerry Eberle, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 5; October 1, 2010, Annie Bostrom, review of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, p. 14; April 15, 2013, Donna Seaman, review of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, p. 15; March 15, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, p. 16.
BookPage, June 1, 2017, Kelly Blewett, review of Theft by Finding, p. 26; June 1, 2018, Alice Cary, review of Life’s a Beach and Then You Die, p. 23.
Christian Science Monitor, June 25, 2008, Heller McAlpin, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 25.
Commonweal, June 15, 2001, Francis DeBernardo, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 24.
Denver Post, June 29, 2008, John Broening, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. E11.
Detroit Free Press, June 23, 2004, Marta Salij, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
Entertainment Weekly, July 29, 1994, Margot Mifflin, review of Barrel Fever, p. 55; March 21, 1997, Margot Mifflin, review of Naked, p. 68; May 10, 2002, review of Holidays on Ice, p. 74; June 2, 2000, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 72; January 23, 2004, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 68; June 4, 2004, Augusten Burroughs, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 84; June 6, 2008, Whitney Pastorek, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 122, Steve Daly, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
Esquire, June 1, 2000, Ira Glass, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 38.
Fortune, June 12, 2000, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 358.
Gay and Lesbian Review, January 1, 2001, Lewis Whittington, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 46.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 1994, review of Barrel Fever, p. 430; April 15, 2004, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 384; April 15, 2008, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames; April 1, 2013, review of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls; February 15, 2017, review of Theft by Finding; December 1, 2020, review of The Best of Me; August 15, 2021, review of A Carnival of Snackery; April 1, 2022, review of Happy-Go-Lucky; January 1, 2024, review of Pretty Ugly.
Lambda Book Report, September 1, 1997, David Tedhams, review of Naked, pp. 37-38; May 1, 2004, Jason Rowan, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 8; March 22, 2008, Jim Gladstone, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 13.
Library Journal, May 1, 1994, Thomas Wiener, review of Barrel Fever, p. 104; April 1, 1997, Mary Paumier, review of Naked, p. 93; May 15, 2000, A.J. Anderson, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 95; June 15, 2004, Robin Imhof, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 72.
Maclean’s, October 18, 2010, Joanne Latimer, review of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, p. 84; May 6, 2013, Joanne Latimer, review of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, p. 67.
Miami Herald, June 13, 2004, Hannah Sampson, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
Nation, September 8, 1997, Laurie Stone, review of Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, pp. 32-33.
New Statesman, July 28, 2008, Alyssa McDonald, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 49.
New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1997, Craig Seligman, review of Naked, p. 10; June 16, 2000, Michiko Kakutani, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day; June 20, 2004, Stephen Metcalf, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 7; June 15, 2008, Vanessa Grigoriadis, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 5; December 7, 2008, Alexandra Jacobs, review of Holidays on Ice, p. 43L; December 13, 2020, Andrew Greer, review of The Best of Me, p. 12L; June 5, 2022, Henry Alford, review of Happy-Go-Lucky, p. 36L.
Publishers Weekly, April 25, 1994, review of Barrel Fever, p. 58; January 27, 1997, review of Naked, p. 88; November 24, 1997, review of Holidays on Ice, p. 55; May 8, 2000, review of Me Talk Pretty One Day, p. 212; December 1, 2003, review of David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall, p. 21; May 24, 2004, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 56; June 6, 2005, review of Children Playing before a Statue of Hercules, p. 60; April 28, 2008, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 128; March 13, 2017, review of Theft by Finding, p. 76; February 22, 2024, Emma Kantor, “Q&A with David Sedaris.”
School Library Journal, March 1, 2024, Emilia Packard, review of Pretty Ugly.
Spectator, April 27, 2013, Wynn Wheldon, review of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, p. 40; May 27, 2017, Peter Bradshaw, review of Theft by Finding; July 28, 2018, Steven Poole, review of Calypso, p. 30; October 2, 2021, review of A Carnival of Snackery, p. 38.
Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 2022, Lynne Murphy, review of Happy-Go-Lucky, p. 12.
USA Today, June 15, 2004, review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, p. 5D; May 22, 2008, Craig Wilson, review of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, p. 7D.
World Literature Today, July 1, 2013, Michelle Johnson, review of Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, p. 4.
ONLINE
David Sedaris website, http://davidsedarisbooks.com (August 18, 2024).
Fresh Air, http://www.npr.org/ (May 31, 2017), Terry Gross, “David Sedaris on the Life-Altering and Mundane Pages of His Old Diaries.”
Pajiba, https://www.pajiba.com/ (November 25, 2023), Nate Parker, “David Sedaris’s Writing Has Taken a Turn, and Not for the Better.”
Steven Barclay Agency, Inc. website, https://www.barclayagency.com/ (August 18, 2024), author profile.
With sardonic wit and incisive social critiques, David Sedaris has become one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. The great skill with which he slices through cultural euphemisms and political correctness proves that Sedaris is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today.
David, photo credit - Ingrid ChristieDavid Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice, as well as collections of personal essays, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and his most recent book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, each of which became an immediate bestseller. The audio version of Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls is a 56th Annual GRAMMY Awards Nominee for Best Spoken Word Album. He is the author of the NYT-bestselling collection of fables entitled Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (with illustrations by Ian Falconer). He was also the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. Sedaris’ pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and have twice been included in “The Best American Essays.” There are over ten million copies of his books in print and they have been translated into 25 languages.
He and his sister, Amy Sedaris, have collaborated under the name “The Talent Family” and have written half-a-dozen plays which have been produced at La Mama, Lincoln Center, and The Drama Department in New York City. These plays include Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz, which was published in book form by Dramatists Play Service. David Sedaris’ original radio pieces can often be heard on the public radio show This American Life. David Sedaris has been nominated for three Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. His latest audio recording of new stories (recorded live) is “David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure” (November 2009). A feature film adaptation of his story C.O.G. was released after a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (2013). Since 2011, he can be heard annually on a series of live recordings on BBC Radio 4 entitled “Meet David Sedaris.” David Sedaris’ new book is a collection of his diaries, entitled Theft By Finding, Diaries (1977-2002) (May 2017). An art book, about David Sedaris’ diary covers was also just published and edited by Jeffrey Jenkins, entitled: David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium (October 2017, Little, Brown and Company). The nationally bestselling essay collection Calypso was published in June 2018, and a second volume of his diaries is expected for summer 2021.
FAQ
Q: How can I contact David Sedaris?
A: Mail for David Sedaris can be sent c/o his publisher, Little, Brown and Company 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.
Q: I would like to book David Sedaris for a speaking engagement, whom should I contact?
A: Please address speaking inquiries to Steven Barclay at the Steven Barclay Agency. See Contact Page for full details.
Q: I would like to interview David Sedaris, whom should I contact?
A: Please address media, press, and publicity inquiries to Catherine Cullen at Little, Brown and Company. See Contact Page for full details.
Q: I would like to republish a portion of one of David Sedaris’s stories, whom should I contact?
A: For North American reprint rights to stories in books published by Little, Brown and Company, contact the Hachette Book Group c/o Frederick T. Courtright and The Permissions Company. For all other territories and other works, contact David’s literary agent. See Contact Page for full details.
Q: I would like to adapt one of David Sedaris’s stories as a film, whom should I contact?
A: Please address film inquiries to Cristina Concepcion, David’s Literary Agent.
Q: I wish to translate one of David Sedaris’s books or stories, whom should I contact?
A: Please address translation inquiries to Cristina Concepcion, David’s Literary Agent.
Q: When will David Sedaris visit my city?
A: Please visit the Tour Page for the most up-to-date information. New dates are added frequently!
Q: Will David blurb my upcoming new book?
A: Apologies, but David is observing a “blurbatorium.”
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Sedaris
A bust photograph of a white man in spectacles; he is wearing a white patterned shirt, blue jacket, and a jaw-mounted microphone. He is facing the camera, looking to its left.
Sedaris at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2018
Born David Raymond Sedaris
December 26, 1956 (age 67)
Johnson City, New York, U.S.
Education School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BA)
Genre Humor, essays
Notable awards Thurber Prize for American Humor
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Partner Hugh Hamrick
Relatives Amy Sedaris (sister)
Signature
David Raymond Sedaris (/sɪˈdɛərɪs/; born December 26, 1956)[1][2] is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next book, Naked (1997), became his first of a series of New York Times Bestsellers, and his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Much of Sedaris's humor is ostensibly autobiographical and self-deprecating and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviors, as well as his life in France, London, New York, and the South Downs in England. He is the brother and writing collaborator of actress Amy Sedaris.
In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Early life and education
Sedaris was born in Johnson City, New York,[3] to Sharon Elizabeth (née Leonard) and Louis Harry "Lou" Sedaris (1923–2021), an IBM engineer.[4][5][6] His mother was Anglo-American.[7] His father was born in the U.S. to immigrants from Apidea in Greece.[8] His mother was Protestant, and his father was Greek Orthodox,[9] which was the faith in which David was raised.[10][11]
The Sedaris family moved when David was young, and he grew up in a suburban area of Raleigh, the second oldest child of six. His siblings, from oldest to youngest, are Lisa, Gretchen, Amy,[12] Tiffany,[13] and Paul ("the Rooster").[14] Tiffany died by suicide in 2013, a subject David discusses in the essay "Now We Are Five", which was published in The New Yorker and included in his 2018 essay collection Calypso.[15]
After graduating from Jesse O. Sanderson High School in Raleigh, Sedaris briefly attended Western Carolina University[16] before transferring to, and dropping out of, Kent State University in 1977. In his teens and twenties, David dabbled in visual and performance art. He describes his lack of success in several of his essays.
He moved to Chicago in 1983, and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. He did not attend Princeton University, although he spoke fondly of doing so in "What I Learned", a comic baccalaureate address delivered at Princeton in June 2006.
Career
David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008.
David Sedaris at WBUR studios in June 2008.
While working odd jobs in Raleigh, Chicago, and New York City, Sedaris was discovered in a Chicago club by radio host Ira Glass. Sedaris was reading a diary he had kept since 1977. Impressed with his work, Glass asked him to appear on his weekly local program, The Wild Room.[17] Referring to the opportunity, Sedaris said, "I owe everything to Ira... My life just changed completely, like someone waved a magic wand."[18] Sedaris's success on The Wild Room led to his National Public Radio debut on December 23, 1992, when he read a radio essay on Morning Edition titled "Santaland Diaries," which described his purported experiences as an elf at Macy's department store during Christmas in New York.
"Santaland Diaries" was a success with listeners[19] and made Sedaris what The New York Times called "a minor phenomenon." He began recording a monthly segment for NPR, which was based on his diary entries and was edited and produced by Glass, and he also signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company.[17] In 1993, Sedaris told The New York Times he was publishing his first book, a collection of stories and essays, and he had 70 pages written of his second book, a novel "about a man who keeps a diary and whom Mr. Sedaris described as 'not me, but a lot like me'."[17]
Collections and mainstream success
In 1994, Sedaris published Barrel Fever, a collection of stories and essays. He became a frequent contributor when Ira Glass began a weekly hour-long PRI/Chicago Public Radio show, This American Life, in 1995. Sedaris began writing essays for Esquire and The New Yorker. In 1997, he published another collection of essays, Naked, which won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from Publishing Triangle in 1998.[20]
Naked and his subsequent four essay collections, Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), became New York Times Best Sellers.[21]
Me Talk Pretty One Day was written mostly in France, over seven months, and it was published in 2000 to "practically unanimous rave reviews."[22] For that book, Sedaris won the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor.[23]
In April 2001, Variety reported Sedaris had sold the Me Talk Pretty One Day film rights to director Wayne Wang, who was adapting four stories from the book for Columbia Pictures.[12][24] Wang had completed the script and begun casting when Sedaris asked to "get out of it," after he and his sister worried how their family might be portrayed. He wrote about the conversation and its aftermath in the essay "Repeat After Me." Sedaris recounted that Wang was "a real prince... I didn't want him to be mad at me, but he was so grown up about it. I never saw how it could be turned into a movie anyway."[25]
In 2004, Sedaris published Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which reached number 1 on The New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List in June of that year.[26] The audiobook of Dress Your Family, read by Sedaris, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. The same year, Sedaris was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his recording Live at Carnegie Hall. In March 2006, Ira Glass said that Sedaris's next book would be a collection of animal fables;[27] during that year, Sedaris included several animal fables in his US book tour, and three of his fables were broadcast on This American Life.[28][29][30]
In September 2007, a new Sedaris collection was announced for publication the following year.[31] The collection's working title was All the Beauty You Will Ever Need, but Sedaris retitled it Indefinite Leave to Remain and finally settled on the title When You Are Engulfed in Flames.[32][33] Although at least one news source assumed the book would be fables,[citation needed] Sedaris said in October 2007 that the collection might include a "surprisingly brief story about [his] decision to quit smoking," along with other stories about various topics, including chimpanzees at a typing school, and people visiting [him] in France.[32] The book was described as his darkest, as it dealt with themes of death and dying.[34][35]
In December 2008, Sedaris received an honorary doctorate from Binghamton University.[36]
In April 2010, BBC Radio 4 aired Meet David Sedaris, a four-part series of essays, which Sedaris read before a live audience.[37] A second series of six programs began airing on BBC Radio 4 Extra in June 2011, with a third series beginning in September 2012.[38] In July 2017, the sixth series was aired on BBC Radio 4 Extra. In 2010, he released a collection of stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.[31][32][39] Sedaris released a collection of essays, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, in 2013 and, in 2017, published a collection of his 1977–2002 diaries, Theft By Finding. Also in 2013, the film adaptation of an essay from Naked was released as a feature-length movie, C.O.G.
In July 2011, Sedaris's essay "Chicken Toenails, Anyone", published in The Guardian,[40] garnered some criticism over concerns that it was insensitive towards China and Chinese culture.[41][42]
A frequent guest of late-night US talk show host Craig Ferguson, in April 2012, Sedaris joined Ferguson and the cast of CBS's The Late, Late Show in Scotland for a theme week filmed in and around Cumbernauld and in Edinburgh. The five weeknight episodes aired in May 2012.[citation needed]
Sedaris's ninth book, Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, was released in April 2013.
In 2014, he participated in Do I Sound Gay?, a documentary film by David Thorpe about stereotypes of gay men's speech patterns.[43]
He appeared along with his sister Amy as special guest judges on season 8, episode 8, of RuPaul's Drag Race.[44] He also appeared as a guest in the Adult Swim television series FishCenter Live.[45]
Sedaris guest starred on the Netflix animated comedy-drama series BoJack Horseman as the mother of Princess Carolyn, voiced by Amy Sedaris.[46]
In 2019, Sedaris was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[47]
In 2022, he published Happy Go Lucky, where he reflected on his relationship with his recently deceased father.[48]
Truth of nonfiction work
In 2007, in an article in The New Republic, Alexander S. Heard stated that much of Sedaris's work is insufficiently factual to justify being marketed as nonfiction.[49] Several published responses to Heard's article argued that Sedaris's readers are aware that his descriptions and stories are intentionally exaggerated and manipulated to maximize comic effect,[50] while others used the controversy as a springboard for discussing the liberties publishers are willing to take when calling books "nonfiction".[51]
Subsequently, in the wake of a controversy involving Mike Daisey's dramatizing and embellishing his personal experiences at Chinese factories, during an excerpt from his theatrical monologue for This American Life, new attention has been paid to the veracity of Sedaris's nonfiction stories. NPR labels stories from Sedaris, such as "Santaland Diaries", as fiction, while This American Life fact checks stories, to the extent that memories and long-ago conversations can be checked.[52] The New Yorker already subjects nonfiction stories written for that magazine to its comprehensive fact-checking policy.[53]
The Talent Family
Sedaris has written several plays with his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, under the name "The Talent Family". These include Stump the Host (1993), Stitches (1994), One Woman Shoe, which co-starred David Rakoff (1995)[54] and The Little Frieda Mysteries (1997). All were produced and presented by Meryl Vladimer while she was the artistic director of "the CLUB" at La MaMa, E.T.C. The Book of Liz (2001) was written by Sedaris and his sister, Amy and produced by Drama Dept. at The Greenwich Theater in New York.[55]
The New Yorker
Sedaris has contributed over 40 essays to The New Yorker magazine and blog.[56]
Personal life
As of 2019, Sedaris lives in Rackham, West Sussex, England, with his longtime partner, painter and set designer Hugh Hamrick. Sedaris mentions Hamrick in a number of his stories,[57][58][59] and describes the two of them as the "sort of couple who wouldn't get married."[60][61]
Sedaris is known to regularly wear a headlamp at night and spend hours removing litter from roads and highways near Rackham.[58] Because of this hobby, he is known locally as "Pig Pen"; he also has a waste vehicle named after him.[62][63]
Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2016)
Story and essay collections
Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays. Boston: Little, Brown. 1994.
Holidays on Ice. 1997.
Naked. Boston: Little, Brown. 1997.
Me Talk Pretty One Day. 2000.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. 2004.
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (editor, 2005)
When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (April 2013)
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002) (May 2017)
Calypso (May 2018)
The Best of Me (November 2020)
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003–2020) (October 2021)
Happy-Go-Lucky (May 2022)
Pretty Ugly (February 2024) -- with Ian Falconer
Articles
"Old Faithful"[64]
"What I Learned"[65] (delivered at Princeton in June 2006), a comic baccalaureate address
"Dentists Without Borders",[66] a humorous essay on socialized medicine in France
"I Brake for Traditional Marriage" (2010), a heterosexual perspective of California's repeal of Proposition 8[67]
"The Poo Corner" (2005), a piece addressing public defecation in department stores, hotels, and college dorm washing machines[68]
"Long way home: a journey made more difficult". Reflections. The New Yorker. 89 (7): 28–31. April 1, 2013. Retrieved January 1, 2016.
"Company man: guest-room gambits". Personal History. The New Yorker. 89 (16): 28–30. June 3, 2013.
"Now we are five: a big family at the beach". Reflections. The New Yorker. 89 (34): 26–30. October 28, 2013.
"Why aren't you laughing? Reckoning with addiction". Personal History. The New Yorker. 93 (17): 30–35. June 19, 2017.[69]
"Father Time: life at every age". Personal History. The New Yorker. 94 (43): 18–22. January 7, 2019.[70]
Plays
"Stump the Host" (1993)
"Stitches" (1994)
"One-Woman Shoe," by David Sedaris and Amy Sedaris (1995)
"The Little Frieda Mysteries" (1997).
Santaland Diaries and Seasons Greetings (1998)
The Book of Liz: A Play by David Sedaris and Amy Sedaris (2002)
Audio recordings
Barrel Fever and Other Stories (1994)
Naked (1997)
Holidays on Ice (1998)
Me Talk Pretty One Day (2001)
The David Sedaris Box Set (2002)
Live at Carnegie Hall (2003)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
Live for Your Listening Pleasure (2009)
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013)
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002) (2017)
Calypso (May 2018)
Themes and Variations - An Essay (April 2020)
The Best of Me (November 2020)
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries (2003-2020) (October 2021)
Happy-Go-Lucky (May 2022)
BIOGRAPHY
David Sedaris is one of America’s pre-eminent humor writers. He is a master of satire and one of today’s most observant writers.
Beloved for his personal essays and short stories, David Sedaris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Calypso. His book The Best of Me, collects 42 previously published stories and essays. Sedaris also wrote Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of fables with illustrations by Ian Falconer. He is the editor of Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories. His pieces regularly appear in The New Yorker and have twice been included in “The Best American Essays.” The two volumes of his diaries, Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) and A Carnival of Snackery, Diaries (2003-2020) were New York Times bestsellers. An art book of Sedaris’s diary covers, David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium, was edited by Jeffrey Jenkins. His most recent book, Happy-Go-Lucky, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. The audio version of Happy-Go-Lucky, written and narrated by Sedaris, won the 2023 Audie Award. His first children's book, Pretty Ugly (TOON Books, February 27, 2024), has illustrations by Ian Falconer and received a ‘star’ review from Kirkus.
Sedaris and his sister, Amy Sedaris, have collaborated under the name “The Talent Family” and have written half-a-dozen plays which have been produced at La Mama, Lincoln Center, and The Drama Department in New York City. These plays include Stump the Host, Stitches, One Woman Shoe, which received an Obie Award, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and The Book of Liz, which was published in book form by Dramatists Play Service.
Sedaris has been nominated for five Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word and Best Comedy Album. His audio recordings include “David Sedaris: Live for Your Listening Pleasure” and “David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall.” A feature film adaptation of his story C.O.G. was released after a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (2013). Since 2011, he can be heard annually on a series of live recordings on BBC Radio 4 entitled “Meet David Sedaris.” In 2019 David Sedaris became a regular contributor to CBS Sunday Morning, and his Masterclass, David Sedaris Teaches Storytelling and Humor, was released.
There are over 16 million copies of his books in print and they have been translated into 32 languages. He has been awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor, Thurber Prize for American Humor, Jonathan Swift International Literature Prize for Satire and Humor, Time 2001 Humorist of the Year Award, as well as the Medal for Spoken Language from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2019 he was elected as a member into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2020 the New York Public Library voted Me Talk Pretty One Day one of the 125 most important books of the last 125 years.
David Sedaris
USA flag (b.1956)
David Sedaris is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, writer, comedian, and radio contributor. Sedaris came to prominence in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "SantaLand Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. Each of his five subsequent essay collections, Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), have become New York Times Best Sellers. As of 2008, his books had collectively sold 7 million copies. Much of Sedaris' humor is autobiographical and self-deprecating, and it often concerns his family life, his middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, Greek heritage, various jobs, education, drug use, homosexuality, and his life in France with his boyfriend, Hugh Hamrick.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Collections
Origins of the Underclass (1992)
Barrel Fever (1994)
Naked (1997)
Holidays on Ice (1997)
Santaland Diaries and Seasons Greetings (1998)
Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
Live at Carnegie Hall (2003)
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2007)
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010)
The Best of Me (2020)
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Anthologies edited
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005)
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Plays hide
The Santaland Diaries (1999)
The Book of Liz (2002) (with Amy Sedaris)
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Picture Books hide
Pretty Ugly (2024) (with Ian Falconer)
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Non fiction hide
Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (2013)
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) (2017)
Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977-2016) (2017)
David Sedaris Diaries (2017)
Calypso (2018)
Themes and Variations (2020)
A Carnival of Snackery (2021)
Happy-Go-Lucky (2022)
Q & A with David Sedaris
By Emma Kantor | Feb 22, 2024
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© Ingrid Christie
David Sedaris.
Thurber Prize–winning humorist and essayist David Sedaris makes his children’s book debut with Pretty Ugly—sort of. The story originated more than two decades ago as a short comic in the anthology Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids (HarperCollins/Cotler, 2001), and was illustrated by the late Ian Falconer. This month, it will appear in picture book format for the first time. Turning standard notions of beauty inside out, the book stars a young ogre with a talent for making “terrible faces." But one day, just as her family warned, her face gets stuck in the most hideous form of all: an adorable human girl. PW spoke with Sedaris about his friendship and collaboration with Falconer, the joy of grossing out loved ones and strangers alike, and the best kind of audience reaction.
What was it like pivoting to the picture book form?
Well, I think it was more than 20 years ago, and it never would have occurred to me to do. But Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly invited me to. They put out a book of comics for kids [Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids]. I was never really a comics reader. So, I guess I thought, it can’t be too hard, you know, children aren’t that bright. [Laughs sarcastically.] And a lot of people who read comics don’t seem to me all that bright. But then I realized, it’s a different way that you have to write. Karl Stevens does those cartoons for the New Yorker and he’s done graphic novels. And when I look at the way he does it... I mean, he does the drawings and the words. He’s fluent in both those kinds of languages.
© Tonia Barringer
Ian Falconer.
Your friendship and collaboration with Ian Falconer dates back to before this story, though?
Yes, he did the Santaland Diaries production that was in New York. And so I think we met when he was hired to do those sets, or we might have met at a New Yorker Christmas party. And then I would see him over the years from time to time. He did the illustrations for a book of mine called Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I have to tell you, I didn’t really consider anyone but Ian, and I was so grateful that he was allowed to do it. I didn’t want to tell him what to draw for each story, because I knew he would be so much better at it.
What was it about your creative partnership that made it special?
We didn’t interfere with each other. Really, I mean, if he had said, like, “Oh, we need to do this, instead,” I would have listened to him, and I would have done it. But we both respected each other and let each other do what we did.
And how does it feel to be bringing Pretty Ugly into the world in this standalone picture book form, sadly after Ian’s passing?
I mean, it’s too bad that he’s not around. I was really shocked and saddened to hear that he had died. I don’t think he would have objected to this. Maybe if he were alive, he and I could have sat down and said, “How do we make this better?” [The original story] was just a page or two in the Little Lit anthology. It was challenging to pick up something that was done so long ago and then to think how I could have expanded that on my own, because there weren’t Ian’s drawings to sustain it. But I wouldn’t have had his go ahead if I added a bunch of things. That didn’t seem fair.
I’m very curious to see how it’s received. Like I said, I don’t know about the workings of the children’s book world. I have no idea of how it might do; I have no expectations. I could see somebody buying it for the pictures because they’re great. It’s more than a little bit sad that Ian isn’t here to sit at a table and sign books with. That would have been nice.
An illustration from Pretty Ugly.
In your author’s note, you credit your sister and fellow comedian Amy Sedaris, who you say “makes the world’s scariest faces,” as a key source of inspiration. Could you talk more about her influence?
Oh, well, Amy just has a rubber face and makes a lot of faces, so I guess I was thinking about her. Gosh, usually I write about real people, so I’m taking part of this person and part of that person and fictionalizing them. Like in Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, that was all fiction, but most of those short stories were me—the faults that each of those characters had were faults that I have, that I was magnifying.
There’s also an interplay of humor and horror in the book, in the imagery. Now be honest: do you delight in creeping out your readers?
I mean, I love it. I was just on the elevator with somebody, and he had some kind of... I don’t know, it was just a monstrosity, like eyes were bulging out of its head. I don’t know if it was a French Bull Terrier or something like that. And I said to him, “I know someone whose dog is so inbred that it’s allergic to its own teeth.” And then I remembered as I said it that it was actually a cat. The person was just horrified.
I’m used to reading things out loud. So, a difference here is I’ve never read this book out loud [in front of an audience]. I recorded it for the audiobook—I added “he said,” “she said,” and simple descriptions, so if somebody was just listening, they could kind of understand what was going on. But usually, I read things out loud. And there are different kinds of laughs, and then there’s a groan, and then there’s a “that’s so hideous, I can’t believe it” groan. And I count that as, you know—if you can gross somebody out like that, I think that’s different than offending somebody. Grossing people out—as an older brother, it was my job in the family to do that, and I still think of it as my job.
It’s a very personal connection you have with the audience.
Because again, you’re having them make a sound. I’d never want to get up in front of people and read something that was serious, to have them be quiet. And then you hear them shift in their seats and cough and then at the end they applaud. How do you know you did a good job, if they’re not making some kind of noise? I mean, I get booed every now and then, but then there’s kind of a grumbling that comes from the audience, like “I don’t know about that.” And I love that.
A scene from the book.
In the book, your subversion of standard ideas of beauty and especially the scene with the surgeon trying to fix the girl’s face are reminiscent of that classic Twilight Zone episode, “The Eye of the Beholder.” Was Rod Serling on your mind at all when you wrote this fractured fable?
I didn’t think of it until afterwards. And then I thought like, “Oh, right!” That was such a good episode. That was like one of the best of all time.
There’s that twist ending and that universality in your story, too. But it’s not heavy handed with the moral, “beauty is on the inside.” And there’s the yuck factor.
Well, plus, how many lessons can a kid take?
My publisher sent me all these children’s books a couple of years ago, and they really wanted me to write a children’s book. I’m the only writer I know who doesn’t want to write a children’s book. [Laughs.] So I wrote this little thing and then you know, there were notes like, “you have to be more positive” or “you have to teach them something,” and I’m just not interested in that. And it’s not like those lessons stick. If they stuck, we’d all be perfect.
I just love the idea of somebody turning themselves inside out. I mean, can you imagine what you’d really look like if you turned yourself inside out?
There’s a kind of continuity between your essays, which are filled with, shall we say, vivid descriptions of family dynamics, and Anna Van Ogre’s endearingly grotesque family. Were there any surprises or discoveries in bringing your satirical eye and voice to a children’s book? Or did it happen organically?
You’ve got so little time, just in terms of telling a story; it’s a pretty short book. The parts with the grandparents, they’re just supportive. I think Ian made them interesting with his drawings. It goes to show, it really is a two-person job. He took a flimsy story and made it something with his illustrations. And again, I can’t imagine anybody else could have done it as well as he did.
Do you see yourself revisiting this age group?
Well, I mean, if I could dig Ian up.
I wrote something a couple of months ago, but it is so offensive that no one would ever publish it. I guarantee you. It’s not dirty in any way, but it’s just deeply offensive to everyone. Everyone in the world would be offended by this book. But you know, everyone would be offended by it equally.
Pretty Ugly by David Sedaris, illus. by Ian Falconer. Toon, $18.99 Feb. 27 ISBN 978-1-66266-527-1
David Sedaris's Writing Has Taken a Turn, and Not for the Better
By Nate Parker | Celebrity | November 25, 2023 | 134 Comments
Sedaris4.jpg
I never really got into David Sedaris. As a humorist and satirist, his material fell flat. My ex-wife adored him, but I preferred the less-dry work of Patrick McManus and Dave Barry. Maybe I felt talked down to, or I saw a streak of cruelty not very well hidden in Sedaris’s work. Whatever the reason, I never connected with it. Maybe that’s why his current rightward streak doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
The latest example comes from The Free Press, a rightwing blog edited by Bari Weiss, the former NYT opinion columnist and staunch free speech advocate for everyone who agrees with her. It’s essentially Highlights for Conservative Men. “Punching Down” is a “humorous” piece that’s also a nearly verbatim conversation Sedaris had with Bill Maher earlier this year. In it, he bemoans the evolving rules for comedy that keep certain jokes (racist/sexist/homophobic/etc.) off-limits for certain performers (rich white guys).
Sedaris1.JPG
There’s something sad about a man who endured homophobic slurs as a child wishing today’s kids were okay with the same treatment. Fortunately, Sedaris doesn’t linger too long on the woes of Guys Like Him before moving on to his real complaint: parents don’t beat their kids enough.
Sedaris2.JPG
That last paragraph makes me hope he’s joking. That he’s writing for The Free Press and subtly insulting his pro-child abuse audience in a Kaufmanesque performance. If so, it falls flatter than the top of Ben Shapiro’s head. Sedaris has written many times about his father’s abusive tendencies and how his mother - despite his obvious love for her - let it happen. One sister committed suicide in 2013 after a lifelong battle with depression I doubt was helped by their father’s abuse. I’m struggling to understand how the world was a better place when parents communicated with their children via physical assault. If it is satire, it’s much too subtle for its approving audience. The comment section is one big slow clap from men who will never be allowed to babysit their grandchildren.
Most of Sedaris’s complaints are actually about the parents, who in his view let children run roughshod over the quiet, childfree existence he’s cultivated. To some degree, that’s valid. Letting your kids charge through a crowded restaurant without a care for the staff or other diners is aggressively impolite. On the other hand, the parents allowing such rude behavior were themselves raised by the child-beaters, or perhaps a generation removed, so clearly it didn’t work. That’s not even addressing the fact that the Venn diagram of people who think it’s okay to hit your kids and who also think it’s okay to invade the Capitol building is just a circle.
What is it about human nature that makes so many people want to see our kids suffer in the same ways we did? See them raised exactly like we were, despite the obvious flaws in the strategy? I might not have responded so strongly to this had I not listened to my relatives make the same complaints yesterday. “Why don’t you have a job?” they asked my 12-year-old, only half in jest. The reality that she’s busy up to 14 hours a day, 6 days a week with school and dance had little impact. And then came the inevitable complaints about student phones. Complaints David shares.
If our schools are a mess, it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away.
Why does every 12-and-up child have a phone, David? Maybe so they can let their parents know plans have changed without bothering a school administrator. Maybe so a parent can let their student know they’re running 10 minutes late. Or maybe, since we live in the United States where pro-child abuse adults ensure every unstable adult who wants an AR-15 gets one, so they can text their parents goodbye before they’re ripped to shreds in math class.
The 60-and-up crowd love to critique modern parents the same way their own parents criticized them, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Sedaris would take issue with the same social dynamics as his peers. But I don’t remember him being so reactionary, like when he came out as “straight” last year because he didn’t like how someone else defined “queer.” Maybe I’m the one who’s changed, in the 15 years since I last read Sedaris’s work. Probably. I know I’m more tolerant of little kids who break down in public since I had my own children, and that I welcome parenting critiques from the deliberately childless like I would a case of the clap. I’m allowed to say some kids are too soft, spoiled, and selfish because I’m raising a couple. Sedaris has the same experience with children as I do orangutans; from a distance, and behind glass.
David Sedaris On The Life-Altering And Mundane Pages Of His Old Diaries
MAY 31, 20171:13 PM ET
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Terry Gross square 2017
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David Sedaris lives in West Sussex, England, where he's known for picking up trash along the side of the road.
Ingrid Christie/Little, Brown and Company
Humorist David Sedaris admits that his latest work, Theft by Finding, isn't exactly the book he set out to publish. It was originally meant to be a collection of funny diary entries, but then Sedaris' editor had a suggestion that changed its course.
"My editor said, 'Why don't you go back to the very beginning and find things that aren't necessarily funny and put those in as well?' " Sedaris says. "Soon those [entries] outweighed the funny ones, and the funny ones seemed almost over-produced, so I got rid of a lot of them."
The result is a collection of moments pulled from the diaries Sedaris wrote between 1977 and 2002. Theft by Finding includes major turning points in Sedaris' life: the NPR broadcast of excerpts from his SantaLand Diaries collection, meeting his longtime boyfriend, Hugh, and the death of his mother. But most of the entries are quieter moments in which Sedaris writes about cleaning houses for a living, doing drugs and observing patrons at IHOP.
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'Let's Explore': David Sedaris On His Public Private Life
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
'Let's Explore': David Sedaris On His Public Private Life
Though Sedaris has published personal stories and books based on his journals before, the idea of pulling from decades-old diaries took some getting used to.
"Publishing a first draft of something you wrote when you were drunk and 21 — I'll do it if it works and it's inviting on the paper, but a lot of the entries in this book, they're like three lines long," he says. "I might've written four pages that day, but of those four pages the only thing that might be of interest to someone else are these three lines."
Interview Highlights
On wanting to be a successful writer
I really don't think anybody could've wanted it more. ... I was picturing exactly the life that I have today. Exactly the life that I have. ...
A lot of people don't know what they want, or they're just kind of vague about it. I was never vague. I knew exactly what I wanted.
David Sedaris
I recently saw that movie La La Land on a plane and it made me think about people who didn't have dreams. There are plenty of people I know in my life who — I don't mean to suggest in any way that they're failures — but I don't know that they ever wanted things, like were very specific about what it was that they wanted. ...
A lot of people don't know what they want, or they're just kind of vague about it. I was never vague. I knew exactly what I wanted. That doesn't mean that you're going to get it, but it's scary ... because what if that doesn't happen?
On how reading helps teach people how to write
There are folk artists out there who live in the woods, who have never been to a museum, who can create artwork that will move you, right? But there's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. I don't mean you have to go to school for it, but if you pay attention you can learn it by reading books.
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On how he met his boyfriend Hugh
Theft by Finding
Theft by Finding
Diaries (1977-2002)
By David Sedaris
We met through a mutual friend, borrowing a ladder. That's just such a nice story. I meet so many [couples] and I [say], "How did you guys meet?" and they say "OKCupid" or "Grindr," so it sounds so very old fashioned to meet someone over a ladder. At least ladders still exist.
On how he reacted to friend and fellow writer David Rakoff's illness
You know how, like, when people get sick sometimes you just don't want to acknowledge that they're sick? ... I think about [writer] David Rakoff. The last time I saw David he looked awful. ... He had Hodgkin lymphoma years ago and then he had radiation for it, and then the radiation caused a new kind of cancer.
When I last saw him, I just said, "Alright, I'll see you later." And I knew I would never see him later, but it just seemed like if I had said more than that it was just burdening him. He was so brave and who was I to suggest that he wouldn't get better?
On his sister Tiffany, who took her own life in 2013
My sister Tiffany was child number five. So she was the youngest girl and the second to the youngest child; there were six kids in the family.
It's interesting. Looking back over her life, my mom never really liked Tiffany very much. Tiffany was too much like my mother, and I remember that as a child almost ... I just thought, Ugh, wouldn't want to be Tiffany. ...
The rest of us should've said, "Mom, you need to do something about this, because that's not OK for you to treat somebody that way." But we never said that. We never called our mother on her behavior towards Tiffany. You think, You're 7, what are you going to do? But I wasn't always 7. I was 20 and I was 30. ... Tiffany had a lot of anger at us and a lot of it was really well-founded. We were adults, we could've said to our mother, "This isn't OK." ...
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[Per Tiffany's wishes] nobody [from the family] went to the memorial service. Her ashes went to somebody that she had worked with once, and my sister Lisa called this woman and said, "Could we have just a thimble full to scatter in the ocean behind the beach house?" And the woman said, "No." I understand that. Tiffany didn't want us to have them. The woman was just honoring Tiffany's wishes.
On deciding to quit drinking after years of struggling to admit he was an alcoholic
I was on tour and it was one thing to be drinking like that at home, but it's a lot to take that show on the road. ... I would be on a book tour, and so I'm signing books, and let's say I get back to the room at like 1 o'clock in the morning, and then it's time to start drinking. ... And then you order room service around 4. And then you get high, and, oh look, it's 5:30 in the morning and it's time for your car to come and take you to the airport. ...
Sedaris Bares Body and Soul in 'Engulfed'
AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
Sedaris Bares Body and Soul in 'Engulfed'
I had been wanting to quit for a long time. I was afraid to quit, afraid that I wouldn't be able to write, because I started drinking shortly after I started writing. And then I kind of got it in my head that I needed to be drinking while I wrote. ... I don't know why I was so convinced of it, it's like saying "I can't sing unless I have a blue shirt on."
Radio producers Sam Briger and Heidi Saman and Web producers Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper contributed to this story.
Sedaris, David PRETTY UGLY TOON Books/Astra Books for Young Readers (Children's None) $18.99 2, 27 ISBN: 9781662665271
Beauty (and horror!) is in the eye of the beholder in essayist Sedaris' disgustingly hilarious debut picture book, illustrated by the late Falconer.
Anna Von Ogre is usually a "good" little monster; she talks with her mouth full and stomps on flowers. Unfortunately, she's also prone to "bad" behavior, such as making terrifyingly adorable faces. Though she's been warned that someday one might stick, she ignores this advice, and the unthinkable happens. Stuck with the face of a kewpie doll, Anna is assured by her grandma that "Real beauty is on the inside." But it isn't until she takes that advice literally that she finds a fitting and grotesque solution to her problem. Sedaris shows a keen knack for page turns and timing. Adult readers will recognize hints of Maurice Sendak and William Steig and maybe even a smattering of Tim Burton in this remarkable outsider tale. Anna's solution (to literally pull herself inside out) is rendered in hot pink, much in contrast with the subdued olive green and touches of red in the rest of the book. Be prepared for the shock of this image, sure to elicit both gasps of disgust and barks of surprised laughter. Kids will be transfixed. Adults should feel free to hand this book to anyone who feels picture books are too "safe" these days. Characters have skin the white of the page.
Consider this little monstrosity a much-needed corrective to smarmy platitudes. (Picture book. 4-7)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Sedaris, David: PRETTY UGLY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A777736657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=062088c9. Accessed 15 June 2024.
SEDARIS, David. Pretty Ugly. illus. by Ian Falconer. 32p. TOON. Feb. 2024. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9781662665271.
K-Gr 2--This seems like a familiar, fractured fairy tale at first glance, but pushes its preternatural premise further with an unexpected and welcome narrative thrust. A family of ogres prizes their ugliness above all else, praising their pig-tailed, pointy-eared, wart-nosed daughter Anna for her poor manners and voracious hunger for hardware (she chomps on nails at dinner). Her most uncouth behavior, in their eyes, is making objectively adorable (or horrifying, depending on viewers' aesthetic sensibilities) porcelain doll-like faces. One day, her face sticks like that, and she's left rosy-cheeked and doe-eyed indefinitely, much to her dismay. After locking herself in the woodshed, she comes to that old chestnut of self-understanding: true beauty is found on the inside. In a flourish straight out of a horror film, she literally turns herself inside out, revealing the hot pink, googly-eyed, globby-brained monster lurking just beneath her saccharine exterior. And that's it! This simple story, clearly quirky from the get-go, still manages to shock in its final turn, so prepare readers to be slightly freaked. In his picture book debut, Sedaris's familiar mix of sentimentality and acerbic wit shines through without coming off as self-indulgent. Falconer's sparse, goofily grotesque illustrations leave large swaths of white space for readers to settle into the story, using a calm, sedate visual style to emphasize the contrast of the book's brash neon finale. VERDICT A slightly freaky fable for young readers eager and ready to leave the usually safe world of pictures books behind.--Emilia Packard
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Packard, Emilia. "SEDARIS, David. Pretty Ugly." School Library Journal, vol. 70, no. 3, Mar. 2024, pp. 74+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786340648/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9d63685d. Accessed 15 June 2024.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, by David Sedaris
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In the past five years, David Sedaris has published seven books -- two essay collections; an anthology; two diaries, both more than 500 pages long; a visual compendium to the diaries; and an ebook version of an essay. Can an eponymous fragrance be far in the offing? (''Se-daring. For the imp in you.'')
Depending on your point of view, this onslaught -- particularly given that Sedaris likes to revisit scenarios that he's already written about -- may strike you as either overgenerous or delightful. I fall into the latter camp, partly because ''retention'' is merely a word to me, and partly because I hold that the essential trait of a literary classic is that it is so textured that one can reread it and usually find something new.
Sedaris's last collection, ''Calypso,'' practically destroyed me. Between the accounts of his troubled sister Tiffany, who died by suicide, and those of his father, who was begrudging and abusive to Sedaris throughout his life, I welled with tears four times. I chuckled frequently and projectile-laughed once. Most contemporary comic essayists have honed their powers of self-deprecation into excoriating, and sometimes exhausting, laser beams, but Sedaris is often willing to apply this same level of scrutiny to other people as well -- and to do it without being nasty. For readers this can be eye-widening, and sometimes exciting, and surely is part of what makes Sedaris's work such a sneaky, subversive thrill. Whether he's detailing how his father, Lou, liked to eat food that he'd hidden around the house until it rotted, or he's going off on homeless people in Portland, Sedaris dispenses with the parameters of You Can't Say That like a tween boy scorching ants with a magnifying glass.
In my favorite type of Sedaris essay -- the kind I'll keep rereading -- the author takes an unusual or taboo topic, such as death or incontinence, and then shows us how a group of flawed characters including himself circle around that topic; but then, in the last paragraph or two, he unleashes a blast of tenderness or humanity that catches you off guard. Take the new collection's offering ''Hurricane Season,'' which, mostly set at Sedaris and his boyfriend Hugh's beach houses in North Carolina, is about how spending time with our families can cause us to re-examine our relationships with our partners. Sedaris knows that his siblings are sometimes put off by Hugh: Each of them, at some point, has asked Sedaris, ''What is his problem?'' Hugh, the guardian of manners and tradition among the wild-eyed and heathen Sedarii, is not afraid to snap or dole out punishment when one of them wears a down coat to the dinner table, or calls his chairs rickety, or feeds candy to ants. (Sedaris, the candyman, writes, ''Gretchen patted my hand. 'Don't listen to Hugh. He doesn't know [expletive] about being an ant.''') But by essay's end we find Hugh, after one of his and Sedaris's houses is all but destroyed by Hurricane Florence, holed up in the bedroom, sobbing, his face in his hands, his shoulders quaking. We learn that three of the houses Hugh grew up in had also been destroyed. In such moments, Sedaris's family has no jurisdiction: ''They see me getting scolded from time to time, getting locked out of my own house, but where are they in the darkening rooms when a close friend dies or rebels storm the embassy? When the wind picks up and the floodwaters rise? When you realize you'd give anything to make that other person stop hurting, if only so he can tear your head off again?''
''Happy-Go-Lucky'' has fewer of these beautifully crafted jewel boxes than ''Calypso'' did. However, in addition to being consistently funny, it contains some festive Sedaris occasions for all those who celebrate. We get a seeming resolution to Sedaris and his father's lifelong grudge match when Lou tells David, ''You won.'' We get vivid moments featuring Lou's will and Tiffany's accusations of sexual abuse; Sedaris confesses to offering to pay for a 24-year-old store clerk to have his teeth fixed, and to long ago initiating a bizarre intergenerational family moment while wearing underpants that he'd cut the back out of. We also get the only truly offensive thing, to my knowledge, that Sedaris has ever written: ''I cannot bear watching my sisters get old. It just seems cruel. They were all such beauties.''
Some of the pieces in ''Happy-Go-Lucky'' seem transitional, as if Sedaris, having already secured his place as a chronicler of dysfunctional families and oddball enthusiasms, is casting his net wider by taking on societal issues. This is a promising direction, but I missed Sedaris's personal connection to the topics of guns and school shootings in an essay about those topics. Similarly, his essentially gothic bent, when applied to an ongoing crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, can yield statements that whiff faintly of cabbage. (''The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than 800,000 people have died to date, and I didn't get to choose a one of them.'')
But when you're dealing with a talent as outsize as Sedaris's, even the missteps are fairly negligible -- much like the author's unusual ideas about how to cover the lower part of the body. I refer not to his artisanal underpants of yore, but rather to his penchant for wearing in public the benighted garment known as culottes. Let's be honest here: This could be so much worse. It could be jeggings. It could be a merkin. Rather, the lasting impression of ''Happy-Go-Lucky'' is similar to that of Sedaris's other books: It's a neat trick that one writer's preoccupation with the odd and the inappropriate can have such widespread appeal. As Sedaris once replied to a store employee who'd asked him if he was looking for anything special when gift shopping, ''Grotesque is a plus.''
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, by David Sedaris | 259 pp. | Little, Brown | $29
Henry Alford is the author of six books, including, most recently, ''And Then We Danced.''
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Henry Alford is the author of six books, including, most recently, ''And Then We Danced.'' Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
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PHOTO: David Sedaris (PHOTOGRAPH BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Alford, Henry. "American Gothic." The New York Times Book Review, 5 June 2022, p. 36(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A706020286/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5794b25a. Accessed 15 June 2024.
HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
DAVID SEDARIS
272pp. Little, Brown. 18.99 [pounds sterling] (US $29).
The essays in Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris's new collection, were written between 2018 and 2022--strange years for the writer, as for us all. Climate change arrives with the hurricane that destroys his beach house; school massacres are echoed in a trip to a shooting range; Covid is here too, though sparingly. The most prominent event is the death of David's father, Lou. Across several essays Sedaris recounts the hospitalizations, the "this could be it" moments, the rushing, the waiting, and the anticlimax of death at the age of ninety-eight. In the end we are left with the contradictions of adult orphanhood and the enraging banality of sympathy.
Lou Sedaris was not a good dad. In "Lady Marmalade" the author describes a shallow and eccentric man whose behaviour crosses into the Trumpishly inappropriate: "'If only I were thirty-five years younger' he'd moan at the sight of [his daughter] Amy in a bikini". Another daughter is undressed at the dinner table so Lou can mock her first bra; a few years later she's harassed for topless photos. Lou has young David strip and bend over for anal inspection on the flimsiest excuse. "It wasn't that he violated our bodies. He just wanted us to know that they were as much his as ours." Sedaris tells us all this in the context of doubting his late sister Tiffany's accusations of sexual abuse: "In the wake of #MeToo I know how brutal this sounds, but it was hard to believe much of what our sister said".
Lou lived long enough to become a character ("what you call a massively difficult person once he has reached the age of eighty-five"). Longevity redeems him. In his mid-nineties the tyrant becomes a "gentle gnome" who laughs at his son's jokes and admits his failings. "You won", he says.
Sedaris's regular readers, acquainted with the key players in his life, will find parts of Happy-Go-Lucky familiar, particularly the story of Tiffany's suicide. But the retreading of territory is necessary for newcomers and, in this collection, helps to mark out different kinds of grief. In particular, Sedaris guides us through the conflicts inherent in mourning those whose deaths are liberating for us. We may be glad if our parents live to a ripe old age, but it's still "disfiguring to be a child for that long".
There is more than enough absurdity in mortality for Sedaris's purposes. (Amy catches him note-taking at their father's funeral.) But the collection also offers light relief in the form of Sedaris's adventures as a touring author, and reassuring glimpses of life with his partner, Hugh. The two men have been together for thirty years, but Hugh remains an outsider to the Sedaris family ("You people, my god"). Between the lines you see him rolling his eyes at David and Amy. Still, I can't say I've encountered anything more maturely romantic this year than the impatience Sedaris expresses thus: "Don't people who feel vaguely unfulfilled in their relationships just have too much time on their hands?" Unless it's his worry that someday incontinence will keep him from sharing a bed with Hugh.
Sedaris was raised in North Carolina, but has lived in Europe most of this century, and in Sussex more recently. His expat life is only alluded to here, though Horsham libraries now refer to him as a "local author". His essays may start abroad ("It's July in West Sussex", "I was in Paris, waiting to undergo what promised to be a pretty disgusting medical procedure"), but soon enough they find their way back to New York for lockdown, or to a nursing home in North Carolina. It's jarring, then, halfway through, to find Sedaris and friend in tourist mode ("To Serbia, with Love"). The vignettes from eastern Europe feel sprawling and unfocused alongside the pinpoint accuracy of Sedaris's dispatches from the home front.
Among the essays is "A Speech to the Graduates", delivered at Oberlin College in Ohio in 2018. It counsels graduands not to buy scented candles until they can afford the good ones, and to "choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling". Some will find David Sedaris distasteful. The feeling may be mutual. When he inscribes a rude woman's book with "You are a horrible person", she simply laughs. "That's the drawback to writing humor", he says. "People always think you're kidding."
Lynne Murphy is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, and the author of The Prodigal Tongue: The love-hate relationship between British and American English, 2018
Caption: David Sedaris, 2022
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Murphy, Lynne. "He's not kidding, you know: Finding humour in family sadness." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6222, 1 July 2022, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709819671/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=394e6057. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Sedaris, David HAPPY-GO-LUCKY Little, Brown (NonFiction None) $29.00 5, 31 ISBN: 978-0-316-39245-7
Sedaris remains stubbornly irreverent even in the face of pandemic lockdowns and social upheaval.
In his previous collection of original essays, Calypso (2018), the author was unusually downbeat, fixated on aging and the deaths of his mother and sister. There's bad news in this book, too--most notably, the death of his problematic and seemingly indestructible father at 96--but Sedaris generally carries himself more lightly. On a trip to a gun range, he's puzzled by boxer shorts with a holster feature, which he wishes were called "gunderpants." He plays along with nursing-home staffers who, hearing a funnyman named David is on the premises, think he's Dave Chappelle. He's bemused by his sister Amy's landing a new apartment to escape her territorial pet rabbit. On tour, he collects sheaves of off-color jokes and tales of sexual self-gratification gone wrong. His relationship with his partner, Hugh, remains contentious, but it's mellowing. ("After thirty years, sleeping is the new having sex.") Even more serious stuff rolls off him. Of Covid-19, he writes that "more than eight hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn't get to choose a one of them." The author's support of Black Lives Matter is tempered by his interest in the earnest conscientiousness of organizers ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated. (He refers to one such person as a "snacktivist.") Such impolitic material, though, puts serious essays in sharper, more powerful relief. He recalls fending off the flirtations of a 12-year-old boy in France, frustrated by the language barrier and other factors that kept him from supporting a young gay man. His father's death unlocks a crushing piece about dad's inappropriate, sexualizing treatment of his children. For years--chronicled in many books--Sedaris labored to elude his father's criticism. Even in death, though, it proves hard to escape or laugh off.
A sweet-and-sour set of pieces on loss, absurdity, and places they intersect.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Sedaris, David: HAPPY-GO-LUCKY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698656181/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=96d92bb2. Accessed 15 June 2024.
A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries: Volume II
by David Sedaris
Little Brown, [pounds sterling]25, pp. 576
These aren't diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren't diaries at all, beyond the fact that each entry records an event and has a date and place attached. If a diary is a conversation with yourself, A Carnival of Snackery is a conversation with a crowd, because the observations it contains were written as material for David Sedaris's shows.
The entries, which begin in 2003 and continue to Christmas 2020, are therefore, as Sedaris admits, over-polished, and what we hear on the page is a spoken rather than a written voice. There are many other voices besides, because the book is a record of what we say to one another when we can't, as Sedaris says of himself, 'figure out what to say to people'--which describes most of us much of the time and Sedaris all of the time.
The theme is communication and mis-communication, and the material comes from exchanges overheard on public transport and exchanges between Sedaris and his drivers, readers, friends and family. Here is a conversation with Lou, his homophobic father:
Dad called last night saying, like always, 'David? David, is that
you?' We started talking about Christmas and when I asked him what he
wanted, he answered: 'I want for you to get a goddamned colonoscopy.'
'So for Christmas you want for someone to shove a pipe up my ass?'
'You're damn right I do.'
The entries are largely gathered as the author goes about his work, and the most striking aspect of the book is what that work involves. Who else has a life like Sedaris? He tours the world like a rock star, flitting between Bulgaria, Arizona, Dublin, Dubai and Tokyo, reading aloud from his books to audiences who then queue deep into the night for him to sign their copy, because it is now that the show really begins. Not for him the quickly scrawled signature followed by the brush-off. Sedaris asks his readers for jokes ('I been waiting for five hours,' says one woman. 'How's that for funny, asshole?').
Back home in Sussex, Sedaris pursues his hobby of cleaning up the neighbourhood rubbish. Taking his long-handled litter-picker, he makes his way through the lanes and byways of the South Downs in search of discarded condoms and nappies. In recognition of his achievement, Horsham County Council has named a waste vehicle Pig Pen Sedaris, and he couldn't be more proud. There's not much difference between picking up our litter and recording the garbage we say to one another: Pig Pen Sedaris is a collector of detritus.
There is a great deal that Sedaris doesn't say, most of which is the kind of stuff we expect to find in diaries. There is no mention, for example, of the boredom of travel--the hours waiting around, the delays, the jet lag. And beyond their petty spats, Sedaris keeps Hugh, his partner, out of the picture. After his sister Tiffany kills herself in 2013, Sedaris does not record his long-term grief. 'It's like the door to the rest of my family's life has been opened,' he says, when he hears the news, 'and I can see that everything on the other side of it is horrible.' The accumulation of what goes unsaid creates a melancholy undertow which reaches its climax during the pandemic, when Sedaris loses his audience and is forced to ask Hugh to applaud him when he comes into the room.
While his talent is unquestionable, the wild popularity of Sedaris is hard to explain. A Carnival of Snackery will sell more than a million copies and will be translated into the usual 25 languages, but Lou, who died earlier this year, will suffer no further indignities at the hands of his son. 'When I die,' Lou regretted, 'the Sedaris name dies with me.' '"Speak for yourself," I told him. "Mine is on, like, nine million books."' And on the side of a garbage truck.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Wilson, Frances, and David Sedaris. "A snappet-up of unconsidered trifles." Spectator, vol. 347, no. 10075, 2 Oct. 2021, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678261306/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0674b742. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Sedaris, David A CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY Little, Brown (NonFiction None) $32.00 10, 5 ISBN: 978-0-316-55879-2
The second volume of diaries by Sedaris (after Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002), who navigates the early 21st century wealthier but still bemused.
The flashpoints of the modern era—the Iraq War, Ferguson, Trump, Covid-19—pop up throughout these entries, but mainly so the author can sail past them with his usual irreverence. For example: “When the pandemic hit, my first thought wasn’t Oh, those poor dying people but What about my airline status?” His bottomless capacity to make everything about him doesn’t read as selfishness or ignorance, though; as with all good comics, the particulars of his life are stand-ins for everybody’s foibles and frustrations. Traveling the world for readings, Sedaris takes note of every culture’s peculiarities, from spitting on the street in Tokyo to offensive insults to language quirks—e.g., Tagalog is like “English on quaaludes.” Sedaris treats his own life as a kind of foreign country, too. After moving from his longtime home in France to England, he began his hobby of picking up litter (documented in Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls), and the reactions of his neighbors, not to mention the trash itself, provide comic fodder. Family matters were trickier during this period: His troubled sister, Tiffany, killed herself, and his elderly but resilient father still treated him like a failure. Because Sedaris traveled all over the world during this stretch, the tone and form of the diaries shift; he’s sometimes glib, sometimes contemplative, sometimes content just to catalog funny stuff he overhears. So for better or worse, he’s a humorist who’ll go anywhere. This book contains one of the best jokes about the Crucifixion you’re likely to hear, along with a few subpar quips: “To honor the death of Marcel Marceau I observed a minute of silence."
A rich trove for hardcore Sedaris fans, though no more personally revealing than his well-shaped essays.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Sedaris, David: A CARNIVAL OF SNACKERY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671782919/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5dcbe422. Accessed 15 June 2024.
THE BEST OF MEBy David Sedaris
I began reading ''The Best of Me,'' David Sedaris's new collection, on an airplane over the Atlantic. I was covered in prophylactic measures and heavily dosed on sleeping pills, which might explain the curious notes I have since discovered in the margins. ''I had a brother-in-law named The Rooster'' is one poignant example, but what is one to make of the terrifying scribble, ''AH FEAR!,'' I ask you? Or, most mysterious of all: ''348263947'' -- either a stranger's passport number or the combination to a bank vault. Was I planning a false identity? A heist? Perhaps we shall never know, so let us rely instead upon my final note, which reads: ''This is the best thing Sedaris has ever written.''
In the non-narcotic light of day, I stand by it. Strange, since ''The Best of Me'' is a collection of writing. Ordinary readers (and I am the most ordinary of readers) will be expecting a flamboyance of favorites, from his leap to NPR stardom with ''Santaland Diaries'' and his quarter-century rock-star journey from 1994's ''Barrel Fever'' to 2018's ''Calypso.'' Ordinary readers, however, will be wrong. This is not some Sedarian immaculate collection; instead, as he himself writes in the introduction, the pieces ''are the sort I hoped to produce back when I first started writing, at the age of 20.'' They are what he hoped he would be. They are the best of him. Has Sedaris included ''Santaland Diaries''? He has not. Has Sedaris included ''The Motherless Bear,'' a work of fiction that elicited a great deal of hate mail, including entreaties to donate to bear-rescue organizations? He has. Is Amy here? Yep. His mom? His dad? The Rooster who becomes The Juicester? Bien sur. In fact, this book is all about his family and ... all right, I'll say it: love.
No point planning a heist; Sedaris has opened the vault himself. The genius of ''The Best of Me'' is that it reveals the growth of a writer, a sense of how his outlook has changed and where he finds humor. In his early fiction -- the hilariously petty tyrants of ''Glen's Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2'' and ''Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol'' -- Sedaris finds it in cruelty: ''In the role of Mary,'' Thaddeus remarks in his review of Sacred Heart Elementary's Christmas pageant, ''6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.'' That cruelty continues in Sedaris's pseudo-autobiographical work, but the monster we are seeing through is ''David Sedaris.'' In ''The Incomplete Quad,'' he imagines his family envying his life: ''Me, the winner.'' Paragraph break, next paragraph: ''I was cooking spaghetti and ketchup in my electric skillet one night. ...'' It is a delicious pleasure to understand an obliviousness that Sedaris (supposedly) does not. ''There weren't many people I truly hated back then,'' he tells us about his prepubescent self in ''Memory Laps,'' ''30, maybe 45 at most.'' The subject, in many of the pieces Sedaris has selected, is the judgment and pain we inflict on one another, and by ''we'' Sedaris does not mean people in general. He means him. And he means you. And he means me.
Then, after the wicked glee of finding humor in pain (and I recommend reading the first volume of Sedaris's diaries, ''Theft by Finding,'' to see how true this is to his nature), we arrive at a series of grace notes. The dangers of taking chances for gay men in a previous era, and the loves thereby lost, are movingly described in ''A Guy Walks Into a Bar Car,'' and for those obsessed with the character of Hugh, there is much of him as well, appearing almost in reverse: as a front-seat passenger in ''Possession'' and a dubious boyfriend in ''Dentists Without Borders,'' until at last, 300 pages in, he and David are introduced. But it is the Sedaris family that carries the book: from childhood -- when David persuades the toddler Tiffany to lie down in front of cars to cause grief to their mother, who has locked them out in the snow for being insufferable -- to adulthood, cackling over bestiality magazines with Amy -- to growing old, with its concomitant sorrows and, most surprising of all, happiness. ''Happiness is harder to put into words,'' Sedaris writes in ''Leviathan,'' one of the final essays. ''It's also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow.'' It is miraculous to read these pieces placed close together, the earliest written without any knowledge of where things would lead, the last guffawing at the ridiculousness of where they did. ''Look how our lives turned out!'' he imagines himself and his sisters thinking as they shop for absurd clothing in ''The Perfect Fit.'' ''What a surprise!''
Not everything turns out OK. If you have not read all of Sedaris, then I will not spoil the grief, or the joy, of his family's arc. And if you have read all of Sedaris, well, then you have probably spent the intervening years entering the cartoon contests in the back of The New Yorker and baking prune challahs and pickling your children in adoration and rage and have therefore forgotten everything. Time to start again. You must read ''The Best of Me.'' It will be a new experience, knowing that enough time has passed to find humor in the hardest parts of life. More than ever -- we're allowed to laugh.
Andrew Sean Greer's most recent novel, ''Less,'' won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. THE BEST OF ME By David Sedaris 338 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.
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PHOTO: David Sedaris (PHOTOGRAPH BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Greer, Andrew Sean. "Sedaris Studies." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Dec. 2020, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A644811359/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b0731bd4. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Sedaris, David THE BEST OF ME Little, Brown (NonFiction None) $30.00 11, 3 ISBN: 978-0-316-62824-2
A welcome greatest-hits package from Sedaris.
It’s not easy to pick out fact from fiction in the author’s sidelong takes on family, travel, relationships, and other topics. He tends toward the archly droll in either genre, both well represented in this gathering, always with a perfectly formed crystallization of our various embarrassments and discomforts. An example is a set piece that comes fairly early in the anthology: the achingly funny “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” with its spot-on reminiscence of taking a French class with a disdainful instructor, a roomful of clueless but cheerful students, and Sedaris himself, who mangles the language gloriously, finally coming to understand his teacher’s baleful utterances (“Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section”) without being able to reply in any way that does not destroy the language of Voltaire and Proust. Sedaris’ register ranges from doggerel to deeply soulful, as when he reflects on the death of a beloved sibling and its effects on a family that has been too often portrayed as dysfunctional when it’s really just odd: “The word,” he writes, “is overused….My father hoarding food inside my sister’s vagina would be dysfunctional. His hoarding it beneath the bathroom sink, as he is wont to do, is, at best, quirky and at worst unsanitary.” There’s not a dud in the mix, though Sedaris is always at his best when he’s both making fun of himself and satirizing some larger social trend (of dog-crazy people, for instance: “They’re the ones who, when asked if they have children, are likely to answer, ‘A black Lab and a sheltie-beagle mix named Tuckahoe’ ”). It’s a lovely melange by a modern Mark Twain who is always willing to set himself up as a shlemiel in the interest of a good yarn.
One of the funniest—and truest—books in recent memory and a must-have for fans of the poet laureate of human foibles.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Sedaris, David: THE BEST OF ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643410858/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b3091af8. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Calypso
by David Sedaris
Little, Brown, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 272
Hits and Misses
by Simon Rich
Serpent's Tail, 10.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 226
Since the 17 th century, a 'humourist' has been a witty person, and especially someone skilled in literary comedy. In 1871, the Athenaeum said that Swift had been 'an inimitable humourist'. But in modern usage the term seems to describe a specifically American job title: someone who specialises in writing short prose pieces whose only purpose is to be funny. The current king of humourists is David Sedaris, and his books are essentially scripts for his sell-out reading tours. But is he funny?
On a line-by-line basis, he sure can be. He helps push someone's broken-down car, 'and remembered after the first few yards what a complete pain in the ass it is to help someone in need'. He watches a reality TV show in which people write letters to their addicted loved ones: 'The authors of the letters often cry, perhaps because what they've written is so poorly constructed.' He comes over as rather like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, hilariously and inexhaustibly intolerant of the tiny outrages that other people constantly perpetrate.
Lots of pages also go by, though, without anything funny happening or being said. Being a collection of occasional magazine pieces, Calypso is quite repetitive, especially when it comes to what is really its main concern: houses. There is the house in West Sussex where Sedaris lives with his partner; there are other people's houses, and there is, repeatedly, the beach house he buys in Carolina, and names 'Sea Section', where he hangs out with his father and siblings. 'Another thing I love about the beach is sitting in the sun,' he tells us, unnecessarily.
Perforce less funny is Sedaris's account of his youngest sister's death by suicide in 2013, and the description of his mother's slide into alcoholism, which are flintily unsentimental passages. Indeed the publishers classify Calypso as 'memoir', which is an interesting hedge: when it came out a decade ago that Sedaris's 'non-fiction' stories were embellished and partially invented, National Public Radio in America decided to classify them instead as fiction. Did he, as he recounts in this book, really have a benign lipoma excised from his body by a Mexican doctor he met at a show, and then feed the tumour to a turtle? Is he really the awful man he gleefully describes himself to be, compulsively telling grim lies to strangers for what is supposed to be comic effect? Perhaps, in the world of humour, it doesn't really matter.
No such worries attend the stories in Hits and Misses (classified as 'fiction') by Simon Rich, who is also a comedy screenwriter. They are plainly fantastical squibs, either short stories or the kind of wry surrealism you get on the 'Shouts & Murmurs' page of the New Yorker, which is indeed where many of them started out. A writer discovers his unborn son is already composing the great American novel in the womb (starting with a pencil, and moving on to a hipster manual typewriter). A woman who was once in a band starts composing music again: aghast, her family and friends stage an intervention and send her to rehab for recovering artists. A writer (yes, another one) meets a succession of his past and future selves.
Rich likes deluded or unexpected characters. One story is narrated by a medieval jester, who recounts:
One question I am often asked is: 'How did
you become the royal jester?' or 'How is it
possible that you're the royal jester?'
Another piece is a faux-GQ magazine interview with Adolf Hitler, which is perhaps a mild parody on the 'normalisation' of Donald Trump by the American media. (Hitler likes French fries, and is studying Brazilian jiujitsu while working hard on his next genocide.)
The most obviously satirical piece turns on a shamelessly elaborated pun: an ageing comedy writer (again!) who is out of touch with what young people think is also, literally, a dinosaur. He cracks jokes about killing people with his mouth. This tends, the showrunner tells him regretfully, to make his colleagues feel 'unsafe' and 'uncomfortable'. Now sacked, the dinosaur vows to get his own back against 'political correctness', like so many other middle-aged males who aren't actually fearsome reptiles. Another story, meanwhile, is narrated by a horse, who does not use definite or indefinite articles. Is he supposed to be a Russian horse? Perhaps, in the world of humour, it doesn't really matter.
Much of this is amusing and diverting, along with the inevitable damp squibs. In my favourite piece, a funny and touching miniature, a Hollywood agent manages to sign Death himself, who speaks in all capitals. So, I remembered, does Death in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Was he a humourist, or something more?
Caption: Stretch Limousin
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
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Poole, Steven. "Every man in his humour." Spectator, vol. 337, no. 9909, 28 July 2018, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A550014105/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=000a99a8. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Calypso
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown, $28, 272 pages ISBN 9780316392389, audio, eBook available
If you're ever stuck in an elevator or airport, just pray for David Sedaris to appear. Time passes quickly with this national treasure of a storyteller.
Reading Calypso, Sedaris' latest collection of essays, is like settling into a glorious beach vacation with the author, whose parents, siblings and longtime boyfriend, Hugh, feel like old friends to faithful readers. Family gatherings at Sedaris' North Carolina beach house are featured frequently in this collection of 21 essays, and at the Sea Section (his chosen moniker for his beach house), games of Sorry! become delightfully vicious and the clan gets gleefully nosy when James Comey is said to be renting 12 doors down.
Another favorite topic, not surprisingly, is aging. Sedaris, 61, observes that sometimes life at the beach feels like a Centrum commercial, and soon enough, he and his siblings will join the seniors they see zooming by on golf carts. "How can that be," he asks, "when only yesterday, on this very same beach, we were children?"
While Sedaris is laugh-out-loud funny in his brilliant, meandering way, it's his personal reflections that will stay with you. He writes of his sister Tiffany, who killed herself in 2013, admitting that he asked his manager to close the door in her face the last time he saw her. He describes scattering the ashes of his late mother in the Atlantic Ocean, writing, "My mother died in 1991, yet reaching into the bag, touching her remains, essentially throwing her away, was devastating, even after all this time." Sedaris laments how he and his family never confronted his mother about her drinking, and he worries over the health of his 94-year-old father, who can't be talked into moving to a retirement home.
Sedaris freely shares all, explaining, "Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words."
REVIEW BY ALICE CARY
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Cary, Alice. "Life's a beach and then you die." BookPage, June 2018, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A540052013/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cd258d1e. Accessed 15 June 2024.
THEFT BY FINDING Diaries (1977-2002) By David Sedaris 514 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.
Starve and Struggle. Feast. Bloat.
These are the three stages that all artists -- with some variation -- go through in their careers. People on far ends of the spectrum in the same field of artistry can end up with eerily similar stages. Elvis Presley went from lean Hillbilly Cat to Famed Icon surrounded by a moat of enablers to Bloated Junkie Corpse. GG Allin, seemingly Elvis's feces-flinging punk-rock opposite, went from lean Hardcore Punk to Infamous Icon surrounded by a scrum of enablers to ... Bloated Junkie Corpse.
Starve and Struggle. Feast. Bloat.
The Bloat stage can be avoided only if it's acknowledged, winked at and muscled through. There are third acts in the arts. There is movement and vitality after success and comfort.
So it's encouraging to read 25 years of David Sedaris's diaries, and not just because he manages to defeat Bloat. It's helpful to see that a voice as original, hilarious and sometimes as infuriating as his was put through the same Struggle and Starve meat grinder that most of us go through. So, first, ignore his modest plea in the introduction:
''I don't really expect anyone to read this from start to finish. It seems more like the sort of thing you might dip in and out of, like someone else's yearbook or a collection of jokes.''
A yearbook or a collection of jokes doesn't have the elliptical, weirdly addictive narrative of ''Theft by Finding.'' So, again, disregard the above recommendation by the author about his own work. In this case he doesn't know better. Start from the beginning: Sept. 5, 1977, in Sacramento. A 20-year-old Sedaris gets a ride to the California State Fair, where Shari Lewis is performing. He sleeps, that night, under the stars, next to the American River.
And then keep reading until the final entry, 25 years later -- Dec. 21, 2002, in London. Sedaris, five days away from his 46th birthday, is confused about the threat of terrorist attacks during the Christmas shopping season: ''Don't they know the Christmas shopping season is essentially over? The time to strike was last weekend, not this one.'' In two days he travels back to his home in Paris. And, presumably, continues the diary for the next 15 years -- the second volume of which we're going to have to wait for.
In between those events, the Three Stages.
There's David Sedaris in his 20s, dealing with piecemeal jobs, aggressive bills (Jan. 4, 1982: ''I wondered why the rent and bill situation always has to be so desperate. Then I realized I made it desperate. I am desperate'') and survival strategies. The entry for March 15, 1982, when he's so broke he has Cream of Wheat for dinner, gave me a rueful smile. I had many a dinner of Cream of Wheat in my 20s. Even cheaper than ramen noodles. And more iron. Do people in their 20s even know this trick anymore?
There are also the ominous warnings about the future, remembered as fleeting distractions (''July 3, 1981, Raleigh. There is a new cancer that strikes only homosexual men. I heard about it on the radio tonight'') and fleeting distractions that must have felt, emotionally, like permanent scars (June 18, 1982: ''I called the number Brant gave me, and it was made up. Then I called all the dorms at Louisburg College and was told there is no Brant. Tricked again'').
Throughout the Starve and Struggle years of ''Theft by Finding'' we spend time with a David Sedaris who's doing what everyone does in his 20s. Specifically, realizing the core of who he is (gay), picking up habits that don't seem harmful then (drinking), and making the first tentative steps toward what he'll become (a writer). The gayness seems to have always been there, but for the first couple of years he's coy about stating it simply in the diary. In the American South of the '70s, was there fear in even seeing the word ''gay'' in your own hand on the page? The heavy drinking doesn't feel like alcoholism at the time because anyone who has imbibed in his 20s knows you can ingest oceans of booze and recover the next morning as if you stepped into a time machine right before going to sleep. And writing as a vocation -- despite keeping a diary -- has to elbow its way past odd jobs, favors-that-end-up-paying, retail wage slavery and, for a short period, art. An entry from Oct. 28, 1985, features a critique of David's paintings by a classmate: ''We do not enter their space, they enter ours.'' Which, if you're familiar with any of Sedaris's writings, is an exact opposite description of the effect his essays and humor pieces have on a reader. Painting was not to be, thankfully.
Once Sedaris reaches Chicago, the diaries shift and mutate. In the '70s and early '80s, still in Raleigh, they function as a stress vent. Now they feel like limbering-up exercises for the kind of writing he's going to do. The entries about the IHOP he frequents, and the rotating cast of flinty waitresses and damaged customers, feel like tracks off an early EP of a beloved band. I felt another warm jolt of camaraderie when I read how Sedaris was happy to discover that David Lynch used to eat at the same Bob's Big Boy in Los Angeles for years. I remember discovering that same nugget of information about Lynch, and how it somehow justified my eating nearly every breakfast during the '90s at the House of Pies in Los Feliz.
And then it's the fall of 1990, and Sedaris has moved to New York. Every ''lad in the city'' memory comes rushing back when you experience Manhattan through his Chicago-by-way-of-Raleigh eyes:
''I took a cab from Penn Station, and Rusty was waiting at the apartment when I arrived. It's much bigger than I'd imagined. The neighborhood is too beautiful for me. I don't deserve it. Or, O.K., my block I deserve. It's more industrial than the ones around it, and we look out at a parking lot for trucks. Two short blocks away, though, it's perfect. Tree-lined winding streets, restaurants and coffee shops. It's enchanting. I can't picture myself in any of those places, but still. How did I get to live here? Rusty says that some of the apartments in the area are going for a million dollars. I'm not sure about that, but I do know that a ginger ale costs three dollars. Three dollars!''
The Feast is about to start, only Sedaris doesn't know it yet. More odd jobs, intrusive neighborhood crazies (Sedaris is a primo hassle-magnet, a trait that he constantly spins to his advantage when writing about his collisions with the Broken) and a stint working as a Santa's elf at Macy's Herald Square. At this point the diaries evolve from emotional vent to limbering-up exercise to full-on rough drafts for Sedaris's writing. The entries about Macy's are the equivalent of bonus scenes from ''SantaLand Diary,'' the essay Sedaris wrote based on these entries. ''SantaLand Diary'' aired on NPR's ''Morning Edition'' on Dec. 23, 1992.
It was his first big break as a writer, and it set him on the road to becoming ''David Sedaris.''
Know how you can tell, just from reading the diaries? Because the chapters for 1993, '94 and '95 are blink-and-you'll-miss-'em short. Stuff's starting to happen. You go from Struggle and Starve to Feast -- you're not tapping on the window of the buffet restaurant. They wheel the buffet out to you, and you can't tell how long it'll be there. So you grab grab grab for a while. ''Yes!'' to every offer. To any offer -- because you've never been offered. Anything.
Part of David Sedaris's Feast was moving to Paris. By the late '90s he's making a serious effort to learn French. This lets us read bonus scenes from ''Me Talk Pretty One Day'' (''Today the teacher told us that a ripe Camembert should have the same consistency as a human eyebrow''). We also get a hilarious entry for April 6, 1999, when this occurs:
''The inevitable finally happened, just as I knew it would. My French teacher faxed Andy at Esquire to say my article has had the effect of a bomb at the Alliance Francaise.''
Being an observant, acidic writer has its hazards, especially when it splashes onto your life in real time:
''In my story I failed to mention her wit, and her skill as a teacher. That is what I have to apologize for, my laziness.''
But 14 days before this entry, when Sedaris is back in Chicago, Bloat has begun to seep into the narrative:
''I haven't had a drink in 48 hours. This is not an accident but a concerted effort, and a very difficult one. I'd have to double-check, but I'm pretty sure I've been drunk every night for the past 18 years.''
No one escapes Bloat, but many survive it. Maybe not with the grace, whining, hilarity and eye-rolling that Sedaris does. But through all 25 years of ''Theft by Finding'' -- of soap opera addictions and spider feeding, family kookiness (Sedaris notes the day Charles Addams dies; it feels like the passing of a baton) and language lessons -- Sedaris's developing voice is the lifeline that pulls him through the murk. In the last year of the diaries, with Sedaris a now-established best-selling author and world traveler, the prickly Southern wit is still intact and sparkling:
''Jan. 28, 2002, Florence. Florence often smells like toast.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: A place at the feast: David Sedaris (PHOTOGRAPH BY INGRID CHRISTIE)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Oswalt, Patton. "Him Write Pretty One Day." The New York Times Book Review, 4 June 2017, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A494210692/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=084fdc7f. Accessed 15 June 2024.
MEMOIR
In Theft by Finding, David Sedaris, best known for his eight bestselling books as well as his contributions to "This American Life," The New Yorker and Esquire, offers a glimpse into the most unruly of writing: his diaries from the years 1977-2002. Sedaris notes in the introduction that he does not expect readers to plow through this 528-page tome in linear fashion, but instead to dip in at random. I suspect he would approve of my own manner of reading the book, which was to see what Sedaris was up to on my birthday each year.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
However, his (edited) diaries are too interesting to limit oneself only to birthday entries--I wound up reading the whole thing, laughing frequently and earmarking many memorable passages. These diaries reveal the development of Sedaris' aesthetic, filled with rich and unfailingly sharp observations--portraits of people he saw on the street, overheard snippets of dialogue, accounts of interactions with everyone from cabdrivers to his irrepressible siblings.
For Sedaris fans, the diaries offer a backstage tour of books like Me Talk Pretty One Day (his initial observations of his French teacher, essays he wrote in response to homework prompts) and Holidays on Ice (accounts of locker-room exchanges between men working as Macy's holiday elves). There are moments of sadness, such as the unexpected death of his mother and the slow decline of his sister Tiffany, who would later commit suicide. But this is not a sad book; instead, it's a gloriously weird one. Sedaris lists Christmas presents received every year, shares recipes and constantly suggests to the reader to keep going, just for one more page.
"If nothing else, a diary teaches you what you're interested in," Sedaris writes. This is a diary that shows us how Sedaris' powers of observation and his intense investment in his own perspective have enriched his life and, by extension, ours.
REVIEW BY KELLY BLEWETT
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Blewett, Kelly. "Journaling to the heart of it all: Theft by Finding." BookPage, June 2017, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A492899147/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=49b61847. Accessed 15 June 2024.
LET'S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS: ESSAYS, ETC.
David Sedaris
In previous books, Sedaris has mined his childhood and early twenties for amusing anecdotes, leaving many fans to wonder if there's anything left to say. There is. Plenty. His latest essays sparkle with newness and the confidence of a writer hitting middle age. Sure, fans will recognize the cast of characters--his boyfriend, Hugh, his sisters, his country home--but this familiarity only enriches reading about Sedaris's neurotic flailing. Success has given him more resources and, with this book, everyone benefits.
Sedaris begins the collection with "Dentists without Borders," a hilarious American counterpoint to the aria of dental misery in Martin Amis's memoir Experience. Sedaris's signature anxiety undermines his jet-setting lifestyle, leaving us free from jealousy to savour stories that could stultify if told by another. He puts his usual unexpected twist on the mundane--getting his passport stolen, waiting in line for coffee at a Marriott. He feels "Titanically gay" at a Costco. He describes Australia as Canada in a thong. Turning 50 has only added to Sedaris's arsenal of life experiences to lampoon, like his colonoscopy. Occasionally, things get political. The gay marriage issue, Sedaris quips, is "like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas."
Stories of Sedaris's father are peppered throughout the collection and are, predictably, unflattering. Young David was belittled by his dad, made to feel second fiddle to a local swimming champ, and even Donny Osmond. Sedaris couldn't get his father's approval even after writing a book that landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Jeez. There is a shocking moment of score settling with his dad that is so emotionally complicated it made this reader impatient for Sedaris's next seemingly light-hearted book of amusing anecdotes. It's funny--funny like a spade to the face.
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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 St. Joseph Media
http://www2.macleans.ca/
Source Citation
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Latimer, Joanne. "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays, Etc." Maclean's, vol. 126, no. 17, 6 May 2013, p. 67. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A329066559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0279569d. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
by David Sedaris
Abacus, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 275, ISBN 9780349121635
David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker . Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he's not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He's no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Which is not to say that there isn't at least a chuckle or two and usually a guffaw in each of the 26 pieces that comprise this book. While studying Life in the UK in order to apply for Indefinite Leave to stay here, Sedaris learns much that the rest of us do not know: 'I learned that people below the age of 16 cannot deliver milk in the UK, but I don't think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices.' This is wonderfully dry and clever and made me snort.
He is a staunch anti-Republican. It is not that he doesn't share many conservative prejudices (he hates litter, obscene T-shirts, Chinese standards of hygiene, graffiti), but that he doesn't share the extreme ones, and his assumption is that anyone who votes Republican must have them. This is odd, because one of Sedaris's appeals is his dispassionate observation of himself and his own foibles.
His popularity (he has sold in millions) is partly explained perhaps by his willingness to write with honesty about his family. Peaceful lives require us to be diplomatic in our familial relations. Sedaris undoes his own can of worms with the sharpest of openers. You can hear the tin screech as the serrations tear through it.
His principal target is his father, whom he seems intent on punishing in print in the way the boy David was punished with spoken word and occasional deed. And while a desire for vengeance is not a likeable quality, it does seem justified, and what it produces is often very funny.
As with Mark Twain, Sedaris uses exaggeration for comic effect (and to make a point), and the reader is never entirely sure when fiction has relieved fact of its obligations to the truth. In 'Now Hiring Friendly People' the reader is entitled to wonder whether the impatient narrator is Sedaris himself. At the same time, the narrator's impatience is justified by the behaviour, in a queue for coffee, of the tediously logorrheic Mrs Dunston. The name is made up. The whole thing may be made up. The whole thing is instantly recognisable as a common experience.
In 'Day In, Day Out' Sedaris reflects on his own diary-keeping. He cannot leave a hotel without writing in his diary: 'I'd feel too antsy and incomplete to enjoy myself.' He finishes with the record of a moment at a zoo where a child mistakes guinea pigs for hamsters, and 'evokes Jesus as a weather-beaten adult would ... I knew I needed to keep the moment forever.' He does this not with memory, but with pen and paper, and thereby reveals himself as a compulsive, obsessional recorder .
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Wheldon, Wynn. "Forever moments." Spectator, vol. 321, no. 9635, 27 Apr. 2013, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A327728602/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=643eda1f. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary
David Sedaris
Illustrations by Ian Falconer
Since his first book, Barrel Fever, in 1994, author David Sedaris has been blushing his way into readers' hearts. His likable musings-often torn from the pages of his diary, performed on National Public Radio and published in collections of short stories-go straight to the heart of topics like sibling rivalry and sexual identity. Nothing is sacred. That's why, a couple of years back, when Sedaris announced he would stop writing things that could hurt his family or friends, his fans thought, "Good luck with that, David." His best work is his most caustic.
That explains his cunning new book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. In it, Sedaris airs no dirty laundry. It's comprised of 16 fables that lampoon human nature. The cast of characters is drawn exclusively from the animal world, except for the odd mention of a farmer and his wife. Most of the stories are two-handers ("The Squirrel and the Chipmunk") that send up racism ("It's not that I have anything against squirrels per se," says the Chipmunk's mother), homophobia, bigotry, infidelity and vigilantism. Sedaris is careful not to hit the same note with every story. Cautionary tales are intermixed with unexpectedly touching stories \ about a cat joining Alcoholics Anonymous ("Hello Kitty") and a bear nursing her grief for her dead mother ("The Motherless Bear"). Sedaris reminds us that you can't fool Mother Nature ("The Mouse and the Snake") and that positive thinking is only so useful when you're a lab rat ("The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat"). Every story is wryly amusing, especially "The Migrating Warblers," who fly to Guatemala each winter and complain about the lazy, superstitious locals.
Because of Sedaris's fame, it's easy to overlook artist Ian Falconer in this collaborative effort. But Falconer's illustrations are essential, underscoring that Sedaris is talking through animals to highlight human foibles, like all good fables. The stories can be dark and mean, but at least nobody's feelings get hurt. Where, we wonder, will he go from here?
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Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 St. Joseph Media
http://www2.macleans.ca/
Source Citation
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Latimer, Joanne. "David Sedaris talks through the animals." Maclean's, vol. 123, no. 40, 18 Oct. 2010, p. 84. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A240016806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d0b1a7d3. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.
By David Sedaris. Illus. by Ian Falconer.
Oct. 2010. 160p. Little, Brown, $21.99 (9780316038393). 813.
The ancient Greeks had Aesop, seventeenth-century French people read the fables of La Fontaine, and now we, jaded inhabitants of the modern era, possess the distinct privilege to enjoy the beloved Sedaris' first collection of short animal tales. The appeal of this aesthetically pleasing little volume is inherent, as the American ambassador of the comedy memoir, human division, turns now to creatures of the hoofed and winged variety to make us laugh and, perhaps, learn a lesson. Illustrations by Falconer (of the Olivia children's books) are a perfect pairing for Sedaris' stories (both writer and illustrator have been published extensively in the New Yorker). In Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, foibled fabular heroines are given the opportunity to, finally, display all those humanlike thoughts and behaviors they've been banned from for ages. There's the motherless bear who alienates herself with her incessant, self-centered solicitations of pity, and the potbellied pig who, no matter the diet, just can't lose his breed-inherited descriptor. It's impossible to imagine the brainstorm that conjured up these absurd, animated tales, but readers will certainly be grateful that they rained from Sedaris' pen.--Annie Bostrom
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sedaris' name creates its own buzz and will continue to do so even with this quirky little book.
Bostrom, Annie
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Bostrom, Annie. "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary." Booklist, vol. 107, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2010, p. 14. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A239266582/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ed03834d. Accessed 15 June 2024.
HOLIDAYS ON ICE
By David Sedaris
166 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $16.99
Along with watching clips from ''The Daily Show'' on YouTube and eating organic vegetables lugged home in reusable canvas sacks, having a shelf full of books by David Sedaris has become a requisite part of American middle-aged, upper-middle-class urban life.
Thousands of people buy them, according to this very newspaper's best-seller list. So why do I suspect few have actually read them, cover to vaguely macabre Chip Kidd-designed cover?
Maybe because it's so easy just to dabble in David Sedaris. His pieces are often broadcast on ''This American Life,'' to which he is a regular contributor (imagine the yards of Prius upholstery ruined as his many fans snort latte out their noses, convulsed by his apercus). Others are printed in The New Yorker, trailing a faint whiff of the exotic: Sedaris was raised in suburban North Carolina but has long lived in and worked from France, like some post-World War I expatriate daubing at a canvas. He draws enormous, worshipful crowds to his performances and has also written plays, some with his sister Amy(best known for her role as Jerri Blank on the late, lamented Comedy Central program ''Strangers With Candy'' and for churning out cheese balls in copious numbers from her West Village apartment).
Still, it's David's half-dozen essay and story collections that have fixed him in the public imagination, at almost 52, as the country's pre-eminent humorist -- that starchy, unfunny word. Back in 1997, before he was quite the blockbuster draw he is now, his publisher released a Christmas-themed collection called ''Holidays on Ice'' that included Sedaris's seminal ''SantaLand Diaries,'' a probing expose of the ritual pilgrimage to visit Mr. Claus at Macy's, based on his observations as an elf-for-hire. It was at once hilarious and profoundly depressing. There was also a spot-on spoof of those annual family bulletins distributed by mothers-in-law the land over, its excitable punctuation sugarcoating the bad news -- in this case, that a baby has mysteriously expired in a washing machine (''he died long before the spin cycle''); and a caustic and unsparing review of an elementary school Nativity play (''6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin''). Children do not as a rule fare well in the Sedaris oeuvre; perhaps that's why breeders embrace the author so enthusiastically: he allows them to air their darkest, most abominable hostilities in the anodyne fluorescent light of the Barnes & Noble aisle.
Rounding out this satisfying sampler was ''Christmas Means Giving,'' the story of a competitive suburban couple who donate their vital organs in an effort to one-up their neighbor's charitable giving (their kids meet a grim end in a ''motorized travel sauna''); a less than mesmerizing mock-sermon from an executive television producer; and a slice of life from the author's own eccentric family called ''Dinah, the Christmas Whore.'' That essay culminated with the titular prostitute standing in their kitchen, interrogated by the starry-eyed Sedaris siblings as if she were St. Nick himself.
Like ''A Charlie Brown Christmas'' before it, though with a good deal more swear words, ''Holidays on Ice'' was a dry indictment of our nation's seasonal kitsch and thoughtless consumption: the shiny crosshatched hams, the corny artificial snow, the ultrasuede basketballs under the tree. Open the closets of ordinary-looking citizens, Sedaris seemed to be saying, and any number of curios -- material and emotional -- will tumble out.
Now the author has decided to take this bitters-soaked little fruitcake of a book, tack on a few extra stories from his more recent publications, garnish it with one that is entirely fresh and wrap the whole thing in a shiny new jacket. Well, pardon me for feeling as if I've been regifted!
It's not that there isn't much to enjoy in this fortified parade of sad sacks; though there's a certain irony in a New and Improved makeover for a book sending up American shopping habits. The classic stories are still relevant and funny -- even under the looming shadow of the credit crisis. The new contribution, an ''Animal Farm''-esque fable about a cruel cow and a doomed turkey locked in a game of Secret Santa, is amusing enough.
But the other added material -- the stuffing, if you will -- undermines rather than improves the book. Not all holidays pack the satiric punch of Christmas, it turns out. Reading ''Us and Them'' and ''The Monster Mash,'' both about Halloween, feels a bit like eating marked-down candy. ''Jesus Shaves,'' borrowed (in slightly different form) from ''Me Talk Pretty One Day,'' is a lame yarn about how the Easter Bunny translates into French. When Sedaris strays from our shores, playing detached cultural reporter rather than fully committed participant, he is arguably less effective, as in ''Six to Eight Black Men,'' a phoned-in bit about Christmas customs in Europe recycled from the collection ''Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.''
Sedaris has long mined the big December festivities for comic gold; these days, it appears, he and his admirers are content to smother it with tinsel.
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PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNE FISHBEIN)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Jacobs, Alexandra. "The Funniest Elf." The New York Times Book Review, 7 Dec. 2008, p. 43(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A190166088/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bd63e412. Accessed 15 June 2024.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
David Sedaris
Little, Brown, 320pp, [pounds sterling]11.99
David Sedaris is clearly a man who spends a lot of time at home, alone. "It's funny how objects convey a certain message," he notes in "Memento Mori", one of the essays in his sixth collection. "The washer and dryer...remind me that I'm doing fairly well. 'No more laundromat for you,' they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, 'Well, he must be doing something. My numbers are off the charts.' The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary and says only one thing: 'You are going to die.'"
The skeleton, which belongs to Sedaris's boyfriend Hugh and hangs in the couple's bedroom, appears to have had a considerable influence on When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In one essay, "The Monster Mash", Sedaris spends a gruesome week visiting the autopsy suite at a medical examiner's office, all the while writing himself a long list of reminders: "Never fall asleep in a Dumpster", "Never underestimate a bee" and, more pointedly, "Never get old". This last helpless fate befalls a few characters: one neighbour, the odious Helen, ends a lifetime of aggressive rudeness muted by a debilitating series of strokes; another, an elderly French child molester whom Sedaris is too embarrassed not to be polite to, fades quietly away from cancer. The prospect of a similar fate prompts Sedaris to quit smoking; that task is the subject of the collection's final, 80-page essay.
The skeleton looms over a mixed bag of stories, all of them "realish", according to an author's note. The material that made Sedaris famous in the first place-savagely funny tales about his upbringing-still gets a mention: considering the similarities between his childhood Halloween costume of choice, a hobo, and his adult wardrobe, he mentions offhand that his sister Amy usually trick-or-treated as a "confused prostitute". But most of the stories are about his adult life with Hugh, about whom he is (probably wisely) much kinder.
Sedaris lives in France and travels to Tokyo to give up smoking, so most of the stories take place outside the US. Much of his humour comes from pointing out the absurdity of normal situations, which means that writing about life abroad has its pros and cons: his take on the world around him is less nuanced, but then again he has on tap one of the richest natural sources of comedy: translation. A Frenchman tries to explain that he has a metal plate in his head but "his pointing back and forth between his temple and the glove compartment only confused me. 'You invented glove compartments? Your glove compartment has ideas of its own? I'm sorry...I don't...'" In Japan, even household objects have to be translated: a friend explains that the rice maker is signalling that it is ready for use, but the bathtub is "just being an asshole and waking us up for no reason".
Because Sedaris's books are classified as autobiography, he has come in for criticism over his "realish" source material. One of the essays, "Of Mice and Men", offers an apt (in fact, suspiciously apt) anecdote on the subject. In an attempt to make small talk, Sedaris tells a cab driver a story from a newspaper: a snippet about a Vermont man who fumigates his house to get rid of mice, then gleefully sets the now extra-flammable escapees on fire-only to see one run straight back into the house and burn it to the ground. It's a great story, but the taxi driver is not impressed by this tale of just deserts, and calls him a liar. Only when an outraged Sedaris gets home and rereads the clipping does he realise that the cabbie was right: the headline, "Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze", fits with Sedaris's version, but the report features only one mouse, no fumigation and a shack in New Mexico. Still, he points out that "despite my embroidery, the most important facts hold true". More to the point, his version is a much better read than the newspaper original.
As with the rest of the book, a sense of mortality lurks in the background. Even the slick oneliners hint at it: "a bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection"; "turn down a drink in the US and people get the message...in Europe, you're not an alcoholic unless you're living half-naked in the street, drinking antifreeze from a cast-off shoe". Still, Sedaris's wry, often visceral humour is so incessant, there is no time for the essays to descend into gloom, and his habit of finishing on a poignant note stops them from becoming harsh. In the end, even the skeleton softens up, hesitantly telling him that "you are going to be dead...some day".
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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McDonald, Alyssa. "Domestic violence." New Statesman, vol. 137, no. 4907, 28 July 2008, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A182932205/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=424945f5. Accessed 15 June 2024.
WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES
By David Sedaris.
323 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
Even if you disregard the van Gogh cover sketch of a skeleton smoking a cigarette, it's difficult to miss that ''When You Are Engulfed in Flames'' is a book about David Sedaris's midlife crisis. He was in his 30s when he was discovered by Ira Glass of NPR, and ever since he has presented himself as a childish genius perpetually late to the literary scene and forever mini-crisis prone. Even as he was transformed into publishing's Dave Matthews -- with four best sellers, endless paid lecture opportunities and 30-city tours -- it's taken his 50th birthday to alert Peter Pan to the onset of maturity. ''I've been around for nearly half a century,'' he moans, later adding, ''In another 25 years I'll be doddering, and 25 years after that I'll be one of the figures haunting my Paris bedroom.'' He tallies up the last 25 years, the prime of his life, and isn't impressed by the sum: ''How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly,'' he writes, ''and how can I keep it from happening again?''
As usual, Sedaris has lots of answers to the first question but not many to the second in this delightful compilation of essays circling the theme of death and dying, with nods to the French countryside, art collecting and feces. Assuming the book is nonfiction -- Sedaris calls the events portrayed ''realish,'' and in a recent interview suggested his work was ''97 percent ... true'' -- he has been passing the time in the fashion one imagines: lollygagging in Normandy feeding insects to spiders; neurotically managing a flock of chaffinches that have conspired to attack his windows; and plotting revenge on a rude airplane seatmate, in whose lap he has inadvertently spit a throat lozenge. There are sidesplitting essays here, like the baccalaureate address he gave at Princeton University in 2006 and a primer on masculine style that includes wearing an external catheter called the ''Stadium Pal.'' He even deigns to include a few ''Naked''-era grotesques: a cussing neighbor who forces him to retrieve her dentures from a planter outside their building; a stinky baby sitter named Mrs. Peacock, who lies facedown on his parents' bed while instructing the Sedaris kids to rake her with a back-scratcher; and a French ex-pedophile whom he befriends, in a sad, moving story, until his neighbors' disapproval makes him ashamed.
It's hard not to feel a tiny pang of regret as the family retreats into the background, replaced by Sedaris's partner, Hugh Hamrick, a happy homemaker who has never provided the same comedic mileage. They are ''two decent people, trapped in a rather dull play,'' Sedaris admits. The main stage is occupied by a mix of highly pixelated memories, chance meetings with freaks and scenes of Sedaris fretting over his eventual demise. A punk-rock attitude toward death used to be a staple of Sedariana, one of many taboo subjects he enjoyed throwing in the face of the squares, like his crystal meth addiction. As a kid, he dug up the bodies of buried hamsters; as an adult, he studied an encyclopedia for forensic pathologists, decorated his apartment with taxidermy specimens and spent 10 days, including Halloween, in a medical examiner's office on assignment for Esquire.
He recalls that experience in a smooth, speedy story, ''The Monster Mash,'' but these days he's not sure he liked it too much -- the disembowelings, the coolers of brains, the stench of decomposing corpses (''the smell of job security,'' as one pathologist puts it) terrify him. ''This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe,'' he writes. ''The world is not manageable. The trick-or-treater may not be struck down on Halloween, but sooner or later he is going to get it, as am I, and everyone I have ever cared about.'' He's equally freaked out by the human skeleton, bought as a present for Hamrick, that suddenly begins talking to him. ''I'd be sitting in my office, gossiping on the telephone, and the skeleton would cut in, sounding like an international operator.'' It says only one thing: ''You are going to die.'' (After he pleads for mercy, the skeleton revises this statement to: ''You are going to be dead ... someday.'')
With Sedaris in this state of mind, the centerpiece of the book should have been an obvious gimme: a diary of his quest to quit smoking. Even in a more frivolous mood, Sedaris on kicking the habit -- he smoked Kool Milds for about 30 years, and his mother died of lung cancer -- should be pretty much the best thing ever, like Evelyn Waugh returning to tell us his thoughts on MySpace. Sixteen of the 22 stories in this volume were previously published in The New Yorker, which doesn't detract from the overall experience since Sedaris is better on a second reading. But in the case of ''The Smoking Section,'' the deft abridgment in the magazine last month was almost more satisfying than the original. Here the 83-page story is cut into three parts -- before, during and after -- and while the first section zooms off the page, once Sedaris stops smoking it's as if he has lost his muse. He travels to Tokyo for a couple of months, for reasons that are murky, and the alienating setting isn't right for the narrative. Virtue proves less interesting than vice, as he casts around for a sustainable joke -- signing up for another language class, reading labels at the supermarket and, naturally, having a random encounter with feces.
It would take more than quitting cigarettes to make Sedaris bland -- he's not ready to chill out and open a yoga studio yet. He knows death always wins, but he's chosen to believe that if he doesn't smoke, he might beat it and extend his youthfulness for another quarter-century or so. ''I never truly thought that I would die the way my mother did, but now I really, really don't think it,'' he says. ''I'm middle-aged, and, for the first time in 30 years, I feel invincible.'' The fighting instinct is a sign that there's more excellent work to come: without a struggle, Sedaris would die as a writer, which is his true mortality.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY JOE CIARDIELLO)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Grigoriadis, Vanessa. "Up in Smoke." The New York Times Book Review, 15 June 2008, p. 5(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A180114272/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7766aad2. Accessed 15 June 2024.
David Sedaris
Little Brown/$25 99
ISBN 978-0316143479
Hardcover, 336 pp.
I first read David Sedaris' new collection. When You Are Engulfed In Flames, three weeks ago. I had the luxury of a long airplane flight's worth of down time and the misfortune of The Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep--a saccharine children's chronicle of the Loch Ness monster's improbably cutesy origins--as the in-flight movie. Like Sedaris, I've never been a fan of the fantastic: His jolly undermining of commercialized Christmas hogwash in "The Santaland Diaries" remains a career high point. Maybe Sedaris should consider embarking on his own investigative mission to the Scottish bogs and write a piece. "Nelly and Nessy," he might call it.
Why, with a brand new volume at hand, am I harkening back to a piece Sedaris wrote in the early '90s and fantasizing about what he might write in the future? Because less than a month after reading his latest work very closely--I made notes in the margins and chuckled aloud several times--I sat down this morning and realized I could hardly remember anything about it. Engulfed In Flames had disappeared like a puff of smoke.
The collection's longest piece at over 80 pages--a quarter of the book--is called "The Smoking Section." It finds Sedaris and longtime partner Hugh moving from Paris to Tokyo for a three-month stay, during which time Sedaris abstains from cigarettes (There's a modicum of fresh new humor in that subject). Just as prominently, though, the piece chronicles Sedaris experiences as a fish out of water and student of a foreign language: To anyone who's read Me Talk Pretty One Day--in which Sedaris and longtime partner Hugh move to France--this is likely to register as second-hand smoke.
Despite fine sentence-by-sentence prose and pacing, the first three-quarters of When You Are Engulfed in Flames also suffer from over-familiarity. There are short essays on the eccentric adventures of the Sedaris clan (the children are left with a strange babysitter when Mom and Dad go away on vacation; the parents collect odd art). creepy-comedic sexuality stories (friends of his brother interrogate Sedaris as to whether he or Hugh is "the woman" in their relationship: while hitchhiking, he is propositioned by a tow-truck driver), and a few bits on odd things French. This is well-trod terrain for Sedaris, and with the exception of a couple anecdotes in which his affection for Hugh--and the hard-won comforts of sustained coupledom--come through with a more palpable warmth than in his previous work, the material seems less substantial than in the past.
There's been great pleasure in witnessing Sedaris feast upon the mundane dysfunctions of his childhood and earlier adulthood, but reading this new book, it feels as if he's combing the tablecloth for stray crumbs. Our second most celebrated contemporary gay memoirist, Augusten Burroughs took a similar--and far more precipitous--tumble in his rushed-to-market collections Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects. Sedaris' saving grace is a distinctively wry, uncluttered prose voice, which he's tailored more and more to match his speaking voice over the years, editing his pieces based on audience response to live readings. That said, one might enjoy When You Are Engulfed In Flames more as an audio book than in its printed format.
What makes "The Santaland Diaries" and Me Talk Pretty One Day stand out amidst his work is that they mine humor from recognizable details of everyday experience while simultaneously offering readers the opportunity to share altogether novel experiences that transport them beyond the quotidian: Most readers have never picked up their lives and moved abroad: virtually none have experienced Sedaris' Christmastime degree of elf-awareness.
As he lights out for the Japanese territories in his new book's final section, one senses that Sedaris is conscious of the need to lift his gaze from navel and nest to generate fully engaging new material. He doesn't travel far enough from familiar templates to make genuine artistic progress here, but the effort suggests that When You Are Engulfed In Flames may prove to be a brief smolder before a new spark, rather than a case of burnout.
Jim Gladstone is the author of the novel. The Big Book of Misunderstanding.
Gladstone, Jim
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
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Gladstone, Jim. "When you are engulfed in flames." Lambda Book Report, vol. 16, no. 1-2, spring-summer 2008, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A184550258/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e69a038d. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules EDITED BY DAVID SEDARIS, READ BY SEDARIS, MARY-LOUISE PARKER ET AL. Simon & Schuster Audio, unabridged stories, three CDs, 3.5 hrs., $19.95 ISBN 0-7435-5019-6
This recording of five stories from Sedaris's longer print collection of the same name is a brief but delightful audio treat. The stories vary widely in theme and style, but each is powerfully emotive and paired with an excellent narrator. Of particular note are Cherry Jones's rendition of Patricia Highsmith's farcical "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out," and Parker's take on Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." In the former, Jones perfectly captures the well-intentioned but ill-fated preparations of a woman who has moved to Manhattan from Ohio and is awaiting a visit from her perfectionist sister, and in the latter, Parker delivers a poignant performance of a friend's bittersweet musings on the death of her friend. Hearing Sedaris read an offbeat, deeply personal story not his own is another of this audio's many pleasures. While Sedaris has grown famous for his reading style, his earnest portrayal of youthful admiration and his spot-on characterization of a quirky substitute teacher in Charles Baxter's "Gryphon" demonstrate his range as a storyteller--and show that much more than his high pitch makes him such a distinctive voice in modern literature. Simultaneous release with the S&S paperback. (Apr.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules." Publishers Weekly, vol. 252, no. 23, 6 June 2005, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A133109578/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6731da4a. Accessed 15 June 2024.
DRESS YOUR FAMILY IN CORDUROY AND DENIM
By David Sedaris.
257 pp. Little, Brown. $24.95.
BY consensus, David Sedaris is now America's pre-eminent humorist. Right away we have a problem. He doesn't like the word. It ''suggests cardigan sweaters,'' he once complained. Cast around for a useful precedent for what Sedaris does, and you quickly get lost. On the covers, flyleaves and outer packagings of the various David Sedaris-branded items in my possession, Sedaris is likened to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, William Trevor, Nathanael West, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Mark Leyner and Voltaire. He has also been called a ''caustic mix of J. D. Salinger and John Waters'' and the love child of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber. These kinds of comparisons may be a compliment to a young writer's promise; but they're an insult to the established writer's originality. Over the last decade, Sedaris has crept into his own eminence and is now a pledge-drive superstar for public radio and a regular presence in The New Yorker. He wins awards -- the Thurber Prize for American Humor, in 2001 -- and sells books by the metric ton. The time has come to admit it: David Sedaris is nobody's hypothetical love child but his own.
Sedaris is a little like Woody Allen -- he is physically small, self-obsessed, and has spun from his own humiliations a charming, and very marketable, persona. But Sedaris's first medium was radio; and as the sine qua non of radio is companionability, Sedaris has cultivated a far cozier and ingratiating aura than Allen's. Sedaris first emerged with a story he told on NPR's ''Morning Edition'' called ''Santaland Diaries,'' which recounted his experiences working as an elf for Macy's during the height of its holiday crush. The story was an immediate hit, generating more listener requests for cassette reproductions than any NPR story except the network's coverage of the death of Red Barber. In expanded essay form, it was later collected in Sedaris's first book, ''Barrel Fever,'' and more than 10 years later it still pops off the page as a terrific piece of writing -- funny, fresh, beautifully observed and above all, savage in its appraisal of a culture lashing itself miserably to its annual rites of good cheer. This was good, curdling satire in the Nathanael West vein; but the element Sedaris picked up on in ''Santaland Diaries,'' and has expanded over his wildly successful career, was the dual character of Sedaris himself: a hapless, arty, go-nowhere lifer (Sedaris was 33 when he put on the elf tights), counterbalanced by the invulnerable self-possession of the voice on the radio, whose poise announced: this is my medium, and I have arrived.
It's that voice his fans find so addictive: nerdy on the surface, like a Cabbage Patch doll hitting puberty; underneath, cool and adamantine in its many frank appraisals. To nourish it better, Sedaris's work is now all directly autobiographical, drawing upon what feels like seven or eight lifetimes worth of anecdotes from a peculiarly inexhaustible past. As a child, Sedaris suffered from a debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he detailed in one of his finest essays, ''A Plague of Tics,'' from his collection ''Naked'' (1997). He went on to be a pariah in high school, an art school flunky, a dismal performance artist, a speed freak for a turn, then one of the untold zillions who move to New York, looking to make good on their vainglory, only to end up stuck in the menial labor force. On top of all that, he has been blessed with a family that, in the telling anyway, seems to be composed entirely of black sheep. In ''Me Talk Pretty One Day'' (2000), Sedaris hit upon the perfect recipe for humiliation leavened by redemption. He found love -- not to mention the perfect fixer-upper in Normandy -- but his life of endearing self-degradation continued unabated, since he did not speak a word of French. Life in France turned out to be a ''second linguistic childhood,'' as the squib on my 14-CD David Sedaris box set puts it. It was also a gold mine. ''Me Talk Pretty One Day'' was his biggest chart-topper to date.
In his new collection of essays, ''Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,'' the basic formula remains unchanged. There's the gentle dementia of the Sedaris clan; his many years wandering in obscurity; his life in France with his boyfriend, Hugh. But the ingredients have been tinkered with. As happiness and success are more in evidence, they find themselves balanced against a strange, new attitude of self-reckoning. The opening piece, ''Us and Them,'' is written in that style of quasi-oracular coldness typically reserved for exposing the spiritual emptiness of the suburbs. Sedaris describes the fascination that overtook him when he discovered, as a young boy, that a neighboring family didn't watch TV. ''They had no idea how puny their lives were, and so they were not ashamed that a camera would have found them uninteresting,'' he writes of the Tomkeys, as if coming upon a lost tribe. ''They did not know what attractive was or what dinner was supposed to look like or even what time people were supposed to eat.''
This is played for laughs, but becomes a source of introspective horror. The Tomkeys, who had been away on Halloween, come trick-or-treating a day late, and in order to cover up the stiflingly awkward moment, Sedaris is forced by his mother to relinquish some of his own candy. Sedaris decides to wolf it down instead -- the chocolate bars, the wax lips, the candy necklaces -- before his mother can take it away. When she, rightfully appalled, asks him to ''really look at yourself,'' the adult Sedaris gives us this rendition of what the young Sedaris saw: ''He's a human being, but also he's a pig, surrounded by trash and gorging himself so that others may be denied.''
The voice must stay balanced: as if to compensate for his plush new life as a publishing-world rock star, Sedaris has perfected the quick, tidy, sermonical soul-search. Touring Anne Frank's hideout in Amsterdam, Sedaris can think of the experience only in terms of a real estate open house. He admires the kitchen -- an ''eat-in with two windows'' -- and wonders, ''Who do I have to knock off in order to get this apartment?'' Sedaris is a careful writer, with a no-muss, no-fuss style that rarely misfires. He surely knows he is being offensive here, and the payout comes at the story's conclusion, when Sedaris spies a quotation from Primo Levi on the Anne Frank museum's wall. His conscience duly pricked, Sedaris starts wondering to himself: ''Having already survived two years in hiding, she and her family might have stayed put and lasted out the war were it not for a neighbor, never identified, who turned them in. I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing, and caught my reflection staring back at me.''
What is with the ''storyteller, heal thyself'' act? (In another essay here, he expresses anguish for how he's used his family for raw material. He ends the piece by imagining himself training his sister's parrot to repeat the words ''Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.'') Like Pepys, Isherwood and Bridget Jones before him, Sedaris is essentially a diarist. Diary keeping is meant to be -- or at least to seem -- furtive; and the reader of the diary cannily made public is meant to feel a little like a snoop. The effect his stories have on listeners and readers would be blunted considerably if they weren't true. This is why his recent confessions -- in a new piece, ''Slumus Lordicus,'' that storytelling's nature is to beget untruth; and in an NPR interview, that ''I exaggerate a lot'' -- are big news in Sedariana. Something more important than strict verity is at stake here. Sedaris's genius has always been his ability to sell comfort food under the label of angst. For a too-cool-for-school generation, the Sedarises are basically the Waltons: a family prevailing -- albeit in their own slightly macabre way -- over a depressing decade. (John-Boy came of age in the 1930's; Sedaris in the 70's.)
Should the balance between hapless Sedaris and rock star Sedaris get out of whack, that comfort proves harder and harder to retail as genuine angst. As we learn in ''Dress Your Family,'' he is now routinely asked to address college students, and a Hollywood director has optioned the story of his life. His French has improved, his backstory is now pretty well picked over, and a third linguistic childhood -- in Slovakia, say -- is presumably out of the question. With nothing left to bite himself with, he has resorted to his own conscience.
CAPTION(S):
Drawing (Drawing by Andre Carrilho)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Metcalf, Stephen. "Exercises in Humiliation." The New York Times Book Review, 20 June 2004, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A118413746/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=44418d2a. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Byline: Allison Block; Special for USA TODAY
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown, 257 pp., $24.95
---
Few writers can elicit shrieks of delight from the detailed description of a drowning mouse, but David Sedaris does it in "Nuit of the Living Dead," one of the essays in his new collection, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
Sedaris, humorist and author of the best-selling Me Talk Pretty One Day, once again exhibits his knack for spinning unsettling experiences into pure comic gold.
The title of the book, his fifth, has absolutely no significance, says the North Carolina-reared Sedaris. The collection features essays that originally appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker and on NPR's This American Life.
The topics include a humiliating strip poker game, a pet parrot with a pitch-perfect imitation of a milk steamer and an eyebrowless 9-year-old named after an alcoholic drink.
Though Sedaris, 47, may be inclined to embellish, his characters are real: His sister Tiffany really does Dumpster-dive for frozen turkeys, then cooks and eats them. And his mercurial mother once locked her children out of the house on a snowy winter day because she wanted to be alone.
Also in the spotlight is his sister Amy, an actress and brilliant mimic who has collaborated with her brother on numerous stage plays. "My family isn't really all that different from anyone else's," Sedaris says. Then, pausing to reconsider: "Well, maybe they're a bit more entertaining."
Among the collection's most memorable essays is "Rooster at the Hitchin' Post," Sedaris' raucous rendition of his brother's wedding. Readers of Sedaris' previous works will remember Paul, the humorist's only male sibling, whose expletive-strewn tirades have earned him the nickname "The Rooster."
After nuptials presided over by a psychic, David hopes to engage in a poignant family moment as he and Paul take Paul's dogs for a walk. Instead, to his chagrin, he observes a slick canine trick guaranteed to disgust the American Kennel Club.
A housecleaning gig that takes a turn for the tawdry. A wealthy great-aunt with a mink coat and orthopedic shoes. It's all fodder for the delirious Sedaris, who dives headfirst into the pool of human weirdness, a wild, acid world where only the twisted dare tread.
* Read an excerpt of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim at life.usatoday.com
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PHOTO, B/W, Hugh Hamrick
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
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"David Sedaris' 'Corduroy and Denim' will have readers in stitches." USA Today, 15 June 2004, p. 05D. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A133488662/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6ebe55ff. Accessed 15 June 2024.