Book-It '22! Book #23: "Happy-Go-Lucky" by David Sedaris

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Title: Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

Details: Copyright 2022, Little, Brown, and Company

Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask— or not— was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes.

But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he’s stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most. To cope, he walks for miles through a nearly deserted city, smelling only his own breath. He vacuums his apartment twice a day, fails to hoard anything, and contemplates how sex workers and acupuncturists might be getting by during quarantine.

As the world gradually settles into a new reality, Sedaris too finds himself changed. His offer to fix a stranger’s teeth rebuffed, he straightens his own, and ventures into the world with new confidence. Newly orphaned, he considers what it means, in his seventh decade, no longer to be someone’s son."


Why I Wanted to Read It: I've been a fan of David Sedaris's work since I was a teenager. You've heard him mentioned here before. I've read and reread his books so many times he's become one of my most-quoted philosophers. This book was a birthday present to me from the matron saint of this blog, Claudine!


How I Liked It: CONTENT WARNING! THE BOOK DEPICTS SUICIDE, TRANSPHOBIA, RACISM, POLICE BRUTALITY, MURDER, ABUSIVE PARENTING, AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE/HARASSMENT (INCLUDING TO CHILDREN) AND THE REVIEW MENTIONS IT; PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY.

Our favorite things tend to live in a certain time and we generally like to keep them there. We appreciate the comedic genius of Lucille Ball, but we don't really have the urge to see I Love Lucy take on, say, the 21st century ("S8 E9: RICKY AND FRED GET INTO CRYPTO"). But what of living artists that are still with us, still creating, that grow and change? And what exactly does this all mean for the very much still living and creating David Sedaris?

But first! Sedaris takes on the new decade, both in what we all experienced and are experiencing (the coronavirus pandemic, the racial justice protests in the wake of the torture and murder of George Floyd, the 2020 election and failed coup attempt) and what he experienced personally (struggling with both fame and not-fame, his father's decline, death, and legacy, finally properly straightening his teeth). He muses on losing his father (he and his siblings trade turns sitting by his bedside), when his father dies what changes, and life after his father, in particular his father's legacy. He also reflects on his father's legacy in regards to his lost sibling, his estranged sister Tiffany who died by suicide in 2013, particularly some accusations his late sister made about his now-late father.
But more happily, he effuses and explains his most famous sibling, Amy, and their relationship. He also thinks over his long-time boyfriend Hugh (and getting to know him better during the time they're on COVID protective shutdown) and his relationships to both family, friends, and fans.

But the heart of the book is his dissection of his father and their relationship, including the fact Sedaris was literally able to make a career in part due to the material given to him by his father's constant, lifelong behavior towards his son. Sedaris ends the book with an essay about what it's like to travel across America in 2021, in what's seemingly many different countries jammed into one (as has always been the case, but it became far starker and sadder in this new decade).

I'll be honest, I struggled a bit with this review.

I genuinely loved this book. I genuinely love David Sedaris's work as a whole. But there were parts of this book that are genuinely insufferable and unnecessary and that I (wait for it!) genuinely loathed, or at least fervently wish he'd given a few more reads and about which he'd listened to some constructive criticism.

In late 2020, Sedaris made unfortunate headlines for reading an essay that's not in this book, but in his previous (I think; before this book, I was a couple Sedaris books behind), and sadly it captures the tone of the worst of this book.
In the essay, he demands the right to fire unhelpful service workers and gives such examples that would feel right at home in a badly photoshopped graphic on Facebook (complete with misspellings and questionable font and image usage) or perhaps one of those public stories that go around with a profile pic of an American flag (and a TRUMP 2020 banner) about how an entitled participation trophy generation doesn't know how to compete in the real world.

When you contrast this (as many did) with the work that first made Sedaris famous, his Santaland Diaries about his experiences as a Macy's elf during the holiday season nearly thirty years before, it's not only not a good look, it's a long way to fall. SantaLand Diaries were hilarious in part because they were so relatable and were punching up at absurd customers that take workers for granted (and to a lesser extent, absurd corporate policies that don't help anyone). Nearly everyone has worked a service job at one time or another and he captured so much of the rage and frustration service workers feel and the abuse they endure, and he did it hilariously.
By contrast, his essay about "citizen's firings" not only isn't funny, it lacks the relatability of Santaland. We've all had bad customer service experiences, but the snide tone and the sneering suggestion that "This is America now!" (more on that in a bit) make it truly insufferable. Add to that the record homelessness and struggling of service workers particularly in light of the pandemic (more on THAT later, too) and Sedaris is looking a lot like a smug, tiresome, unfunny Marie Antoinette caricature rather than a hilarious, relatable misfit elf spouting wildly entertaining truths.

But isn't some of this inevitable? Sedaris is a multimillionaire who's been topping bestseller lists and breaking records lining fans up for readings for something like twenty-five years now. Just about any book he writes is an instant, critically-acclaimed bestseller, and if it isn't (his flat 2010 Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk revealed a lot of the flaws of his writing: his fiction has never been as strong as his memoir and he's always had trouble with endings) it's remarkable. His work is taught in college courses as an example of exemplary American literature and is so famous as to even have at least one famous rip-off (the unfortunate Augusten Burroughs, probably the most commercially successful Sedaris impression of all time). He also has paved the way for many other memoir-writers and if you think celebrities that get it into their heads to write a book (Chelsea Handler, Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, countless others) haven't in some way been influenced by Sedaris and his style, either consciously or not, you're not paying attention.

So we can't really expect Sedaris not to be changed by fame, wealth, and massive success. He isn't the shamed, recession-stressed struggling writer he was when he took a job as an elf at Macy's and made a career out of it because that was over thirty years (and double-digit bestselling books) ago.

But again, Sedaris has been rich and famous for quite awhile and he's managed to manage it in his writing before. Why the switch now? He's also dabbled in politics before, including a not-terribly-funny-but-at-least-punching-i

n-the-right-direction essay from a fictional TEA Partier (going to march on Washington, she heads for Washington state, unaware of where the capital actually is), and his memoir work in the past briefly touched upon then-current political stances (though he and his sisters are infuriated with former FBI director James Comey for his role in the 2016 election, they are nonetheless impressed when Comey might be vacationing near them after his ousting; in the 2000s neither he nor his sisters want to be near their father's car which they call "the Bushmobile"). His first collection of his diaries, which while they were edited obviously were still slightly different from his memoir work, has Sedaris marveling at the end of the 1980s how anyone can ever vote Republican ever again. But those forays didn't seem to break the distinctive Sedaris brand of memoir voice, so often imitated and never replicated.

More tellingly and possibly most relevant here, Sedaris can handle rough subjects and still be David Sedaris. His Far From Home about experiencing 9/11 as an American overseas hits all the right emotional notes but is still funny and perfectly on brand.

So it's incredibly disappointing to see Sedaris botch so much of the 2020s so badly.
What's more, he's starting to affect the insufferable "Guess we can't say or do ANYTHING anymore thanks to Wokeness™!" stance, which you may recall in any of its previous insufferable forms ("Thanks to the PC Police, we're not allowed to make jokes!" "Thanks to overly offended we can't say anything nowadays!") as it's been a favorite song of bigots and reactionaries for at least thirty years if not much more (it's absolutely been much more).
Whereas the old Sedaris (or even just maybe ten years ago Sedaris) would've been mocking this mindset ("Our rights are being so torn away we can't even be as violently racist in public the way we could in the good old days without someone frowning slightly! I guess I'm old fashioned!"), the 2020s Sedaris embraces it with open arms, opening the book with a curious quote:

Ban everything. Purify everything. Moral cleanse everything. Anything that was bad or is bad, destroy it. Especially in the forest, where you live your life as a tree, wielding an axe.

--Sigmond C. Monster (pg vii)

This is a quote Sedaris said he culled from an online article about someone being "cancelled". Sigh.
He clarifies in that interview
"To me, it says: if you’re gonna spend your life criticizing other people and trying to take them down for this or that, it’s gonna come and get you in the end."

I'm not saying that there's not too frequently a lack of nuance or the fact some criticism doesn't come from a place of fairness nor striving for a better world or at least clarity about a questionable action or several from powerful figures, but from a sense of pettiness and competition.
But dismissing any criticisms of bigotry (particularly racism, particularly anti-Black racism) as just "spending your life criticizing other people" is not only hypocritical (Sedaris himself has literally spent his writerly life criticizing other people), it's a blatant oversimplification from yet another rich white celebrity.

This is a theme throughout the book.

Before the Sandy Hook shooting, Sedaris and his sister Lisa try a shooting range and Sedaris scopes out the scenery:

In the glass case below the counter were a number of bumper stickers, one of which read, PROSHOTS: PANSIES CONVERTED DAILY.

"That used to be on their billboard until gay people complained," Lisa told me as we walked out the door.

I'm not a person who is easily offended. There's a lot I don't like in this world. There's plenty of stuff that makes me angry, but the only things I can think of that really offend me, that truly affront my sense of decency, are cartoons in which animals wear sunglasses and say "awesome" all the time. That, to me, is crossing the line. It's not because the animals in question-- some rabbit or bear or whatever-- is being disrespected but because it's training children to be mediocre. Calling gay people pansies is just "meh," in my opinion. (pgs 10 and 11)

As a gay man that was an adult for the AIDS crisis, I'm not going to tell Sedaris he "has" to be offended by a homophobic (and nonsensical?) bit of advertising for those who feel their masculinity is threatened. But I'm saying that apparently priding himself for not being offended (and thus not taking any kind of action) by bigotry is not a great look, particularly when such advertising contributes to attitudes about how people treat gay people. You surely don't have to be "offended" by something as though there's a virtue in that in and of itself. But it's something else to pride yourself on not being offended, like that's a virtue in and of itself. It's not. It's kind of a personal thing, your sense of offense. Also, while something might not offend you, if it's a slight against your particular marginalized group, it might be a great idea to make it clear you're just speaking for yourself, lest any bigots decide to say something like,

"Uh, David Sedaris is a gay man and he says HE'S not offended by calling gay people pansies and trying to convert them, so why can't I say exactly that without you people getting all offended?"

(It's this same logic that makes superstars out of certain right wing figures that lovingly empower the very forces that try to wipe them out: Blacks and Latinos for Trump, LGBTQs for Trump, you get the idea. Bigots love holding up "a good one" that makes it okay for them to be bigots.)

In another chapter ("To Serbia With Love"), Sedaris reflects on traveling around eastern Europe in particular.

There's a "You really are still using that particular word? In 2022?" misstep:

QUICK NOTE! SLUR WILL BE CENSORED BY ME IN A WAY IT IS NOT IN THE TEXT.

While we shopped, Ion got into a shouting match with a G*psy. "Second time this month," he said as we climbed into the back seat. "The last one scratched my neck with her sharp, sharp fingernails!" (pgs 130 and 131)

That term is considered a slur and harmful to the Romany people. Please, please just say Romany. If that's what the person identified themselves as (as Romany people still sometimes do), make a note of that and still say Romany.

But most tellingly of the chapter, Sedaris encounters ravaged countries and steps in a staggering lack of awareness:

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there's American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you're in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don't need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need. That sparks you feel when an idea comes to you-- This could work. I can actually make this happen!-- is Western privilege as well. It may not be certainty, but it's hope, and if you think that's worthless, try living in a place where nobody has it. Worse still, try getting a hotel there. (pgs 137 and 138)

Except that white privilege still works in other countries. Except that America privilege is not the same for Black Americans as it is for white ones, and the fact Sedaris could literally write that amongst historically widespread protests against the torture and murder by officers meant to uphold the law of their country of Black Americans is disgusting.

To say nothing of the fact Sedaris is apparently pretty ignorant of class privilege and the concept that "upward mobility" is, to put it mildly, considerably more difficult now than it was before he attained it.

And anyway, if you wanted to talk about the privilege of living in a nation like America and realizing that, fine. But why disparage talk of white privilege and racial justice in doing so? Again, this feels like something the old Sedaris would have heard and privately ripped to shreds ("As the rich white man was adamantly insisting to me that people nowadays have it all wrong, it's not about white privilege but America privilege, I kept getting distracted by the racial justice protests outside. 'You don't need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need!' He smiled, as a sign that said 'POLICE, PLEASE STOP KILLING US!' went by. 'In America we have a little thing called hope, and if you think that's worthless, try living in place without any!' The man finished importantly with a big wink. I watched a young man with a sad expression clutching a sign that had pictures of famous police murder victims and also some not so famous and the words "AM I NEXT?" written beneath and thought about yanking the rich man by his too-small questionable designer suit and holding him up to the window to see the America he'd just dismissed, but decided he'd only marvel at how lucky these people were to be able to march peacefully with only several military-armed cops waiting to injure and possibly kill them, so I didn't. So I just said '...Huh!'").

The worst is the chapter about the racial justice protests, titled "Fresh Caught Haddock" (so named because he reflects that the cries of the racial justice protestors start to sound like the standard cries of street vendors advertising their wares in New York City), which opens with a story because Sedaris, in sort-of evaluating his own past with racism (spoilers: he's a fine, totally normal Not-Racist guy who's made some silly mistakes that he's totally acknowledging and only overly offended little cancellers would even care about and plus they're outweighed by his good stuff for Black people, like dating them!), remembers doing a crossword puzzle on a train and asking the (white) attendant the clue rather than the Black woman sitting next to him, who contributed the answer before the attendant could. Why didn't Sedaris ask the Black woman? Was it because he didn't think Black women were smart or because this particular Black woman had been reading the Bible? Would it be like asking her for a service? Any concern about racist behavior is portrayed as frivolous and silly and navel-gazing.

The opening sentence sets the tone for how Sedaris will handle the racial justice protests:

When George Floyd was killed an seemingly overnight all of New York came to smell like fresh plywood, I thought of Schenectady(pg 163)

(Schenectady, incidentally, was the crossword answer for which Sedaris was searching.) There's no emotional heft towards any of what's happened and happening, no resonance the way 9/11 had for Sedaris, apparently. It's just a Thing that Sedaris is describing. Which perhaps wouldn't be a big deal in and of itself alone, as Sedaris has made a career out of describing Things, but there's a nasty, defensive edge to much of it that would make it repugnant even if he wasn't handwaving racism.

When I was in the seventh grade, I acted as campaign manger for Dwight Bunch, one of the three Black students at Carroll Junior High. He ran for class president-- and won-- with my brilliant slogan "We Like Dwight a Bunch." Two years later our school was desegregated. Fights broke out in the parking lot. My friend Ted had his nose broken with a Coke bottle. In our twenties we both dated a number of Black guys, which I always thought made us the opposite of racists. I didn't have sex with them because of their color but just because they were there and willing. Now I was reading that sleeping with Black guys meant you were racist, that you were exoticizing them.

Everything was suspect, and everywhere you turned there was an article titled "________________'s Race Problem."

It could be about anyone: an actor who'd never had a costar of color, a comedian who used the word Negro twenty years ago. The articles were always written by white people in their early twenties. (pgs 175 and 176)

A lot to unpack here. First

In our twenties we both dated a number of Black guys, which I always thought made us the opposite of racists.

This brings me to something I wondered, a line that Sedaris crosses a lot in this book. Is he purposely portraying himself unfavorably to mock such attitudes, or is this what he genuinely believes?

Given the context, I think he genuinely believes (or at least believed) this, that simply by dating someone of a marginalized group, that means you aren't bigoted against them. That would absolutely be hilarious (you hear that? Misogynists don't have sex with women!) if it weren't so horrifying.

Now I was reading that sleeping with Black guys meant you were racist, that you were exoticizing them.

See, again, people concerned with such things are portrayed as overly offended little critics not living in reality. You absolutely can date Black men (or people of color in general, for that matter) and exoticize them, however unwittingly. You can absolutely date Black men and still be a racist (largely if you bring up dating Black men as proof you aren't a racist). You can also date Black men and not exoticize them. Dating Black men doesn't necessarily mean anything other than that you dated Black men.

It could be about anyone: an actor who'd never had a costar of color, a comedian who used the word Negro twenty years ago. The articles were always written by white people in their early twenties.

This is again how Sedaris has chosen to portray racial justice, as a McCarthyist scourge going after poor, innocent, harmless people. Are there people who were/are overzealous and subject to the same pettiness and competition I mentioned before, devoid of good intentions? Sure! Are there a lot of rich and powerful people that have absolutely done things to cause harm and a trendy "Black Lives Matter" post doesn't solve that? Even surer. And frankly, I think most people pointing it out just want it acknowledged: "I was wrong to do that. That was wrong and I'm sorry."

Sedaris portraying every single instance of calling someone rich and famous out for their racism as "always written by white people in their early twenties" is another unintentionally hilarious line that the old Sedaris would've mocked ("How did he even find time to read all of these articles, let alone look up the author photo and their age? He really read every article calling someone out for racism? And that's what he took away? Doesn't that say more about him? Really, how did he know he read all of the articles? Could he have missed one?"). Needless to say, it's not even remotely true (for one particular example of many, a white actress's racist behavior on set behind the scenes was called out by her Black co-stars on social media) and sounds exactly like what it is, a rich white celebrity defensive of his own previous racist actions and absolutely going about it the wrong way.

When Sedaris gets directly involved with the protests and the movement, it doesn't go any better.

I thought I'd support the movement the way I had become accustomed to: by donating money and then telling people I'd donated twice as much. The moment I sent off my contributions, I saw the protests differently, for now I had done something and could feel superior to those who hadn't. (pg 167)

I get that he's being facetious, but given that people were literally risking their lives for this movement even before you factor in the pandemic, it's not a great look. It sounds a lot like "See, you're involved not because you care about innocent people being tortured and murdered, you just want to feel superior."

He and his sister Amy attend a Black Lives Matter protest out of curiosity, and the protests become so frequent he attends them like buses, eating their offered food and mocking those in attendance:

"Hey, hey / Ho, ho / Racist cops have got to go!" the crowd shouted as Amy and I merged into it. This template has been around since the nineteen fifties and has to be my least favorite. True, it can be easily tailored to any cause, but you always know the word that's going to rhyme with ho will be go. It's lazy. (pg 169)

As the days passed and the marches became ubiquitous, I grew to think of them much the way I do about buses and subways. I'll just take this BLM down to 23rd Street. The people were friendly, the snacks plentiful, and it felt good to walk in the middle of the avenue.

At 23rd I might wait an hour or so before catching another BLM back home, or crosstown to the West Side. While marching, I'd look at the people around me and wonder what they were thinking. It's like at the symphony. I always assumed that the audience was comparing this rendition of, say, Mahler's Second to a superior one. Then I started asking around and learned that people were entertaining the same crazy thoughts I was: How long would it take me to eat all of my clothes-- not the buttons but just the fabric? If I had to do it in six months, could I? If you shredded a sport coat very finely and added half a cup to, say, stuffing, would your body even notice it?

I felt sure that while marching everyone around me thought of racism and of the many Black Americans who have been killed by the police over the years. We who were white likely considered our own complicity, or, rather, we touched on it briefly-- that exposed wire-- before moving on to other people who were much worse than we were. But then the time stretched on, and our thoughts strayed, didn't they? (pgs 170 and 171)

Sedaris has other complaints about the movement:

As the weeks passed, I saw more and more protest signs reading DEFUND THE POLICE. That won't be doing us much good come election time, I thought, worried over how this would play on Fox News: "The left wants it so that when armed thugs break into your house and you dial 911, you'll get a recording of Rich Homie Quan laughing at you!"

Amy worried too. It wasn't taking money allocated for law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services that bothered her-- rather, it was the language and how Trump would use it scare people. He'd already started, and I imagined that, leading up to the election, he would just keep hammering at it. (pg 172)

Too bad that this country is so far to the Right, the protesters could've held "SUPPORT NON-RACIST POLICE!" and right wing media would've portrayed it the same (witness the image of an old conservative white cis het man like Joe Biden, eager to try and work with the current Republican party, suddenly becoming a raving, radical leftist that makes one of their previous bogeymen, Barack Obama, look like Ronald Reagan) and given the way Sedaris portrayed the protests and the protesters, him suddenly clutching pearls about the pragmatism of "DEFUND THE POLICE" is a bit ridiculous.

Sedaris has thoughts about statues coming down too, at least at first.

"I'm not sure the general public really pays all that much attention to statues," I said. "Don't you think you could come in the night and replace General Braxton Bragg's head with that of, say, Whoopi Goldberg, and it would take months for anyone to notice? Don't most of us see a bronze figure on a pedestal and think, simply, Statue?"

Amy guessed that I was right.

"For those few exceptions who pay closer attention, you could keep the monument and change the plaque," I said. "It could read something like CHESTER BEAUREGARD JR.-- UNFORTUNATE BLACKSMITH WHO BORE A STRIKING RESEMBLANCE TO THE TRAITOR GENERAL BRAXTON BRAGG."

My friend Asya, who is Jewish, thought otherwise when I brought up the issue on the phone the next day. "If there were statues of famous Nazis around, even ones with replaced heads and nameplates, I still wouldn't want to pass them every day," she said. "I mean, ugh, what a slap in the face!"

I see her point. To those upset about the monuments that were recently toppled, I guess I'd say, "Look, times change. Jefferson Davis overlooked your godforsaken traffic circle for one hundred years. Now we'll just put him in storage and make it someone else's turn for a while." (pg 173)

But if you thought after that chapter passed, you'd at least be spared any more, strap in.

"Did I tell you we're not allowed to say native plants at work anymore?" [sister Gretchen] asks.

A horticulturist for the city of Raleigh, she's the only one in the family with a real job, meaning a boss she has to report to and innumerable, pointless meetings that eat up her valuable time. Gretchen talks about work at lot, but I'm always happy to hear it. "What did you say when they told you that?" I ask.

"Nothing," she tells me. "I just walked out. I mean, it's ridiculous!"

A minute later, Amy joins us.

"Now people are calling for gender-neutral toilets in the city parks," Gretchen is saying. "There's not enough in the budget to build them, so most likely the few bathrooms that already exist will wind up being labeled as unisex. I guess this solves the problem, but I like having a separate women's room." She crushes her cigarette. "Men's bathrooms always smell like shit."

"And the women's smell like vomit," Amy says. (pgs 228 and 229)

Saying common terms is racist! (I'm not calling Gretchen Sedaris a liar, but I will question given a quick look ("city+of+raleigh+horticulture+native+plants") whether or not that's accurate. And of course, a shot of transphobia, because why not. Damn trans people (in this case, nonbinary) have gotten a free ride for too long!

Speaking of transphobia, no reactionary insufferability in the 2020s is allowed to exist without some.
I feel the need to note Sedaris's somewhat unfortunate grumbling at various death euphemisms includes his ire at the (frankly eye-roll-inducing) term "transition" (presumably meaning the deceased is transitioning to the afterlife):

My father did not pass. Neither did he depart. He died.

Why the euphemisms? Who are they helping? I remember hearing a woman on the radio a few years back reflecting on where she was the moment that Prince, the musician, "transitioned."

Really? I thought. And when exactly did he become a woman? Days before his fatal drug overdose? (pg 194)

But far worse to me is a truly tone-deaf story about teenagers at his book-signings:

When a teenager came to my book-signing table, my first question was no longer "When did you last see your parents naked?" but "Do you have a job?"

Nine times out of ten, before the kid could speak, his or her mother would take over. "Tyler is too busy with his schoolwork," or "Kayla just needs to be seventeen now." On several occasions the person would be genderqueer, and the mother would say, "Cedar is taking some time to figure themself out."

There was a Willow as well, and a Hickory. I guessed that was a thing now, naming yourself after a tree.

One woman I met, a mother of three, told me that none of her teenagers held jobs and weren't likely to anytime soon. "Why should they bust their butts for seventeen dollars an hour?"

"Um, because it's seventeen more than they get by sitting at home doing nothing?"

"I grew up having to work and don't want to put my kids in that headspace," the woman said.

Dear God, I thought. America, as I knew it, is finished. Aren't you supposed to have a shitty job when you're a teenager? It's how you develop a sense of compassion. The three oldest kids in my family worked in cafeterias, while Amy was a supermarket cashier. Tiffany worked in kitchens; Paul too. We made $1.60 an hour and, dammit, we were happy to get it. That's the way this country ran. If, at age sixteen, you wanted a bong, you went out there and worked for it. Now i guess your parents just buy it for you and probably give you the pot as well. (pg 249)

Firstly, "I guessed that this was a thing now, naming yourself after a tree" doesn't even make sense since these are the names the children's parents gave them (an editor would've caught this error, I feel like).

Note that clever "his or her" and how Sedaris picked up the word "genderqueer" and "themself", portraying nonbinary gender orientation as a fad for a spoiled generation.

And about that spoiled generation!

I now generally try to avoid generational conversation as I think it's gotten ridiculous, overused, and blind to the fact it's meant to be a generalization, not an end all/be all qualifier (and lest you forget, most of the times when you're talking about a generation, you're talking about Americans of that generation).

But David Sedaris is a Baby Boomer. So are most of his siblings (his brother Paul, at least, is an early Gen-Xer). The economy that was in place for them has been dead for at least twenty years. The concept of working crummy jobs as a teenager and early twenty-something before you graduated to your assured "real" work (and were not flattened by historically unprecedented wage stagnation, crushing equally historically unprecedented student loan debt, and soaring inflation to name but a few) has not existed in this century the way it did for Sedaris's generation. Therefore, it's understandable that late-Gen-X or Millennial parents (or parents of any age that are paying attention) would not be in a big rush to force their teenagers into a thankless miserable job when there will be plenty of time for that when they're older.

Not to mention from a historical perspective it's pretty rich to hear from a member of the generation that enjoyed the longest period of general prosperity in American history complain about the spoiling of the generations that followed that are absolutely not enjoying the same.

Sedaris's whole tone sounds like he's trying to appeal hard, from the nostalgia goggles of the Good Old Days™ ("That's the way this country ran.") to the survivorship bias ("We made $1.60 an hour and, dammit, we were happy to get it. ") to the transphobia ("Cedar is taking some time to figure themself out.") to the MAGA crowd, who wouldn't touch him with a "LGBTQ+/Queer-People-are-Groomers-and-Predators" star-spangled, made-in-China, ten-foot-pole before you could say "France", "long-time boyfriend," or "260 page book not written by a Fox News personality."

When he reflects on the the scarred America he finds in 2021 touring, it's telling the slogans that stand out to him:

The America I saw in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked. Its mailboxes bashed in. All along the West Coast I saw tent cities. They were in parks, in vacant lots and dilapidated squares. In one stop after another I'd head to a store or a restaurant I remembered and find it boarded up, or maybe burned out, the plywood that blocked the doors covered with graffiti: EAT THE RICH. FUCK THE POLICE. BLACK LIVES MATTER. (pg 256)

The people responsible for those tent cities and failing infrastructure aren't the ones chanting "EAT THE RICH," "FUCK THE POLICE," and "BLACK LIVES MATTER,", sir.
They're the ones chanting "TRUMP 2020!", "LOCK HER UP!", and "It's important to appeal to the fascists' sense of democracy and try to make a deal with them because of 'bipartisanship'."

And another big story of the 2020s, the coronavirus pandemic, goes similarly, with Sedaris showing some truly unfortunate behavior.
Again, I wondered is he mocking this type of behavior or is this something he actually did/actually believes? Given how it's usually framed, it seems to me it's unfortunately something he actually believes, at least usually.

It wasn't strangers I was worried about, though. If COVID were to get me, it would have come from a friend or acquaintance. Throughout the height of the pandemic, Hugh and I had dinner parties-- at least two a week, and sometimes up to four. When questioned, I'd explain that the guests we invited were members of our bubble. But it wasn't true. Anyone willing to leave their house was welcome. (pg 148)

Yup. No pesky social distancing for him!

Everyone was angry and looking for someone to blame. Trump, Fauci, China, Big Pharma. This had to be somebody's fault. (pg 149 and 150)

This is more "both-sidesing" (and there's more of THAT to come). The wave of anti-Asian hate crimes that struck because racists/Trump supporters saw the authoritarian government of China as the same as Chinese-Americans, or frankly just any east Asian-American in the United States is one thing. The people that claimed the virus was a hoax cooked up by Big Pharma and infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci is another, similar thing.

But blaming then-President Trump, who knew the virus was transmitted by aerosol germs as early as February 2020 and said he purposely was playing down the severity for political reasons and who completely unnecessarily politicized this virus so we still have a horrible swath of the country that refuses to wear masks, get vaccinated, and otherwise do anything to prevent and stop the pandemic in addition to Trump's dismantling of several crucial government agencies, ignoring the warnings from outgoing Obama administration's pandemic response team, and basically having no federal response whatsoever isn't so much blame as rationally pointing out failed leadership. But that's just looking for someone to blame, right!

Again, this is the type of behavior that the old Sedaris would've hilariously ripped to shreds.

"Back off!" a certain type of person would snarl if you stood only five feet and eleven inches away from them.

"Your mask isn't completely covering your nose," a middle-aged woman informed a much older one in my neighborhood Target one afternoon. "Miss," she called a second later to the cashier, "Miss, her mask isn't completely covering her nose!"

It was a golden era for tattletales, for conspiracy theorists, for the self-righteous. A photographer came one afternoon to take my picture. I was standing in the middle of East 70th Street, posing as instructed, when a woman with silver hair approached. She was on the sidewalk, a good twenty feet away, but still she left the need to scold me. "Cover your face!" she screeched.

"Oh, for God's sake, this is for the Times!" I shouted back.

I saw a guy in a T-shirt that read, DEADLIEST VIRUS IN AMERICA: THE MEDIA.

I saw a woman in a T-shirt that read, YOU'D LOOK BETTER WITH A MASK ON.

"You know who I hate?" I said to Amy over water buffalo Swedish meatballs that night. "Everyone." (pg 150)

Did I say "BOTH SIDES"! I seriously wish the most horrible plague rats would've harassed Sedaris (the people who not only won't wear a mask, but have a fit if you wear one, the ones that actually coughed on people out of spite) so at least then he'd have better material. Seriously, this is ridiculous. It's literally a deadly pandemic and he's treating the people who took it/are taking it seriously the same as those who laughed/are laughing it off.

Sedaris makes many trips to his property in North Carolina, on Emerald Isle and notices quite a difference from New York City in how the pandemic is handled.

"The coronavirus never happened on Emerald Isle," I told Amy. "Or, OK, it almost didn't happen. At the grocery stores hardly anyone had a mask on. Same at the Dairy Queen. Coming from Manhattan, where we can't leave the house without our faces covered, it was a real..." I'd planned to say shock, but what came out instead was vacation. (pg 165)

Come on, really? Yeah, it's lovely to imagine a place where the pandemic doesn't exist. It's something else to actually practice that, particularly at the expense of other people's lives and your own.

All those people just swimming in their deadly germs and denial of reality, infecting any one they can. What a vacation!

But I didn't get sick. This is remarkable, because I was incredibly reckless. Most nights I removed my mask for the book signings and pushed aside the plexiglass shield that should have stood between me and the person I was talking to. Otherwise it was too hard to be heard or to hear. I rode in crowded elevators and in cars with drivers whose mouths, like my own, more often than not weren't entirely covered. There were venues that strictly enforced the mask policy, which was fine unless they were enforcing it with me. I liked a situation in which I took no precautions and the rest of the world was made to double up. I liked to be in a red state, maskless and complaining about how backward everyone around me was. (pg 254)

I never thought I'd be this person, but damn, after this insufferable attitude, it's somewhat hard to feel bad for Sedaris indeed getting the virus (along with his long-time partner, Hugh), presumably through his irresponsibility, or perhaps the very irresponsibility he's cheering on in others. At least when he got the virus, he was vaccinated, presumably has no underlying conditions save for his age, and is rich enough to afford medical healthcare, something he can't say for all of the people whose lives he put at risk.

On top of his attitude over a pandemic that has killed millions of people and is still actively killing millions of people and making life considerably more difficult, Sedaris's classism is staggering.

More irritating still was the new spirit of one-downsmanship that seemed to have taken hold. A year earlier, had I written in an essay, "I woke up and washed my face,' no one would have thought anything of it. Now, though, I would immediately be attacked as tone deaf and elitist.

"Oh, how nice that you can just 'wake up and wash your face,'" someone would write in the comment section or tweet. "And in New York, no less! I, meanwhile, don't even have a face anymore. I had to sell it so I could feed my family during the worldwide pandemic you obviously never heard about. Now, when I try to eat, the food falls onto my lap because I don't have any cheeks to keep it in my mouth with. Think of that when you're holding your washcloth, you fucking privileged prick!" (pg 149)

This bit might've landed considerably better were it not for the fact the gap between rich and poor in the United States alone is at a historic gap we haven't seen in decades and it got worse during the pandemic (and no amount of millionaire celebrities badly warbling an overplayed John Lennon song helped, shockingly) and Sedaris is no longer a struggling writer and hasn't been for some time now.
He's a multi-millionaire world-famous bestselling author who owns double-digit homes around the world, and given his attitudes in this book alone, he absolutely deserves to be attacked as tone-deaf and elitist.

A previously beloved talk show host began broadcasting from her home, and people went nuts. "Hold on a minute, she lives in a mansion!"

"Well, yes," I wanted to say. "A mansion bought with money that you gave her." (pg 149)

Except that people's problems weren't with Ellen DeGeneres living in a mansion, it was her saying that her having to stay in her mansion was like prison at a time of record homelessness. The fact that it spiraled into revealing that DeGeneres herself is actually pretty bad with a long history of a toxic workplace and shabby treatment (some of it on air) to various people came out later.

Toward the end of my tour the New York Times ran an article about the many schools that were instituting virtual Fridays. Parents were up in arms, as now they'd have to find sitters or stay at home themselves that day. "Well, I think it's much needed," said every teacher I spoke to. "Our jobs are really stressful." Everyone was saying that now. Being a claims adjuster, heading an IT unit, publicizing eye shadow: "It's really hard work that takes a real toll on me!" (pg 250)

Those ridiculous free-loading teachers! Lazy! Get back in your petri-dishes, you glorified babysitters! God, just the same as eye shadow publicists! No one wants to work and everyone thinks their work is hard! Good thing that a millionaire author knows hard work by not being able to go on tour during a pandemic!
Seriously, no one read this other than Sedaris? Is he so renown that that just doesn't happen anymore, he doesn't have editors and the publisher has no notes?
So much of this just sounds like Sedaris is so certain that anything he says will be beloved and applauded that he's setting out to be the most insufferable human being he can. Oof.

So all that's pretty rough.

What redeems this book, if anything?

Why did I also love it, as well as loathe it? It may not have the belly-laughs or the "delightedly read annoyingly aloud to other people until they beg you to stop" quality of some of Sedaris's other work, but it still has some of the Sedaris charm and while I haven't read his book before this one yet, I'd say this might be his most introspective book ever, at least as far as his family is concerned.

Sedaris's family, who have become characters (somewhat controversially at times) in their own right in his writing have faced ugly cracks in the happy-quirky-family-façade before. After all, aren't the ugly cracks kind of a part of who they are? Aren't the ugly cracks kind of the whole point?
But this book more than any other has a sinister undertone. Sedaris has written about his father throwing him out of the house for being gay (and lest you try to claim that it was just the era, Lou Sedaris tried to set his son up with a woman as late as at least 2005, despite his son being with his boyfriend for over a decade at that point). Sedaris has also written about his father's physical punishments and lifelong undermining of his oldest son (and the various inappropriate remarks he's made to his daughters). We also know Sedaris's mother probably had some issues with alcohol, to put it mildly. Probably most tragically, we know that his sister Tiffany, who once threatened Sedaris to never write about her, then begged him to and when he did (and published only after her approval, according to him), gave interviews decrying Sedaris and claiming to have approved nothing, died by suicide in 2013 after a life rocked by substance abuse, mental illness, and a stint in the notorious Élan School from which she reportedly never recovered.

But mostly, Sedaris's examinations of his family's dysfunction have been the humor of dysfunction. So when possibly the most favored subject of Sedaris's dysfunctional humor about his family, his father, dies, a whole nest of worms is up for examination, including the fact that Sedaris's father was actually pretty awful all around to his children, if good for material.
While his mother's and sister's deaths sent him into a black pit (he recalls sobbing to his father on the phone after his sister's suicide and his father's staggeringly nonchalant response: "'Don't let yourself get all upset over it,' he told me. 'She's had a rotten stinking life. Everyone crapped on her, but what's done is done.'" pg 210), his father's death is something else altogether:

That said, it was easy to celebrate my mother. Effortless. With my father, I'd have to take a different tone. "I remember the way he used to ram other cars in the grocery store when the drivers-- who were always women-- took the parking spots he wanted," I could say. "Oh, and the time he found seventeen-year-old Lisa using his shower and dragged her out naked." (pg 101)

It's not just the eulogy, it's the funeral:

Greek Orthodox funerals, like Catholic ones, are essentially Masses. My father's took place at Holy Trinity-- the church we grew up in-- on a Tuesday morning. Paul lives in Raleigh, and Gretchen works there. They could have easily driven to the service from their homes, but instead we all checked into a hotel, a very expensive one, in the town of Cary, and really pushed the boat out, charging everything to the estate: room service, drinks-- the works. The staff thought we were attending a wedding, that's how merry we seemed as we headed to the church in our dress clothes. "Can you take our picture?" Amy asked one of the doormen as she handed him her phone. She looked like she was going to a ball thrown by Satan. The dress she wore was black but short, with comically massive sleeves. It was textured like a thick paper towel and was definitely not mournful. Paul, by contrast, looked like he worked at an ice cream parlor. (pg 235)

As she pulled out her phone to make a note, it rang and she answered with a luminous, "Hi, Dad!"

She said it so brightly and naturally that I honestly believed for one crazy moment that this had all been a prank, that the body we'd seen at the church had indeed been a double carved out of makeup, and that our father was still alive. And I thought, Fuck! (pg 237)

Following my mother's death, had a sorceress said, "I'll bring her back, but--," I'd have said, "Yes!" without even waiting for the rest of the sentence. And if Mom and I had twenty more years together, her being herself and me being, say, a deaf mouse who had to live in her underpants, I'd still have counted it a fair exchange.

My father, though, was a different story. One of the things I'd heard again and again at the church that morning was "Lou was a real character."

A character is what you call a massively difficult person once he had reached the age of eighty-five. It's what Hitler might have been labeled had he lived another three decades, and Idi Amin. But there's a role you have to play when a parent dies, so I'd said, each time I'd heard it, "Yes, he certainly was unique."

"I know you're going to miss him terribly" was another often repeated line.

"Oh, goodness, yes," I'd say-- not a lie, exactly. I think I'll miss him the same way I missed colds during the pandemic, but who knows how I might feel a few years down the line? (pg 237 and 238)

Particularly chilling is the fact that his sister Tiffany accused their father of sexual abuse, even threatened to go public with it (with two famous siblings and a father made famous by her famous older brother's stories, it would've been quite something) but provided almost no specifics. Sedaris goes through some questionable to truly horrifying memories involving both he (when faking sick to get out of school at ten or eleven, his father made him strip down and bend over, showing his anus, so his father could check him for hemorrhoids, something he did at least twice more, to the point where Sedaris came to fear his father doing it) and his sisters and their father:

My father was strange in a lot of ways. When my sister Lisa, who was the oldest, got her first bra, he called her to his spot at the head of the table. Then he stood up and-- again, [dressed only] in his underpants-- slowly undid the buttons on her blouse.

"Ha ha," we all said. "Lisa wears a bra now!"

"Oh, Lou," my mother scolded. (pg 199)

When Gretchen and I were in high school, our parents took us to New Orleans for a weekend.
[...]
My dad and I were on Bourbon Street, waiting for Gretchen and my mother, who had ducked into a souvenir shop. "Lady Marmalade" was drifting out of a bar, and as they emerged and walked toward us, he said of my sister, who was tottering on platform shoes, a straw hat on her head, looking, I'd later realize, a lot like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, "God, she's got a great set of pins!"

I didn't know what pins were, and when I later learned that they were legs, I thought, Well, That's a nice thing to say about someone. In general, I mean. If that person isn't, you know, your daughter. His voice in that moment had been different, wolfish, and the first word of his sentence-- God-- suggested regret. Like too bad Gretchen was related to him and he couldn't pursue her. (pgs 199 and 200)

Back in Raleigh a few months later, Dad asked Lisa, who was seventeen, if she would go with him into the woods behind our house and pose topless. "I want to take a few pictures," he told her. "It's art photography, not smut. I have a magazine I can show you. I mean, this is strictly professional."

I'd seen the magazine he was referring to. We all had. Popular Photography, it was called. He started subscribing after he got the fancy Nikon camera he hardly ever used. Most of the articles were technical: how to light beef, what exposures to use at dusk. There were usually photos of nature in it-- an eerie close-up of a bee or a termite; a colorful male hummingbird stabbing a daylily, his wings a frenzied cape-- that kind of thing. There were bold landscapes and portraits. Then there was the sort of art photos Dad was referring to: nudes, always of young women. The difference between these pictures and the ones I'd scowl at in the Playboys he kept hidden in his closet was that, in the former, the subject's eyes-- if not closed-- gazed dreamily beyond you, to the far distance, where hope and freedom lay. In Playboy, on the other hand, the young women engaged you. Like what you see? they seemed to say. I like you too! Often their fingers were in their mouths.

Lisa understood the kind of photos my father meant. Posing topless in the forest for him would not involve the "Look into the camera!" and "Smile, dammit!" that he barked as he snapped our annual Christmas pictures, but still she said no way.

"But you're beautiful!"

"Yeah, right," she said.

Scorned, he told her not to get too stuck-up about it. "All you've really got is your long hair." (pgs 200 and 2001)

There were umpteen other things our father did an said over the years. It wasn't that he violated our bodies. He just wanted us to know that they were as much his as ours. The comments he made-- we just brushed them off or else laughed at him. "if only I were thirty-five years younger," he'd moan on the beach at the sight of Amy in a bikini.

"That guy," we'd say. "What a creep!"(pg 202)

He continued to constantly make sexual comments to his daughters presumably up until his death. It wasn't just his daughters, it was nearly all women, including college-aged tenants of the apartments he bought near the local university, coming in at all hours, witnessing them in sexual intimacy, and one woman stepping nude out of her shower.

While Sedaris struggles with his late sister's allegations, he notes some counterpoints. After their estrangement, she accused Sedaris himself of physical abuse and said she'd always been afraid of him, which to his bewilderment he thought his behavior was only typical sibling teasing, and never ventured into anything serious (he stuck pins in her chair when he was about ten and mocked her for her buckteeth). He notes that among his sister's papers, his family had found a letter to their father in which Tiffany apologized for killing herself and thanked him for all he had done for her (he financially supported her towards the end, but it was barely enough for her to scrape by; she died living in a group home with two men who didn't even notice that her body was smelling up the residence for five days after her death).

He also stumbles into some truly unfortunate territory when examining his father's physical abuse of his children.

What our sister came to call "physical abuse," the rest of us just thought of as punishment-- not fun, certainly, but far from exceptional, at least in that era. It wasn't uncommon for my mother to slap one of us across the face. She didn't go wild, but maybe once a year the cobra would strike, and, hand on your red-hot cheek, you'd find yourself saying, incredulously, as if you might be wrong about this, "Did you just slap me across the face?"

My father once clamped his hands around my neck, lifted me off the ground, and pinned me to a wall. My feet were off the floor, and until the laundry room was painted fifty-five years later, you could still see the smudges my shoes had made as I struggled in vain for purchase. He would hit me with paddles. He shoved me into trees and whacked me over the head with heavy serving spoons, but I still wouldn't say that he abused me, maybe because, if I ever have children myself-- which is unlikely-- I reserve the right to similarly rough them up should the situation call for it. "Damned kids, going through my pockets and taking all my change," I'll thunder. "I reached in for a quarter at the grocery store today and pulled out nothing but a paper clip!"

I always dreamed of saying to my father in such moments, "Keep your pants on for ten goddamn minutes and maybe we wouldn't paw through them for money." (pgs 205 and 206)

It's troublesome to tell someone that they were a victim of abuse if they don't think they were (and they clearly do not want to be). But it's even more troublesome to dismiss behaviors as "of the era". Certainly, like anything, there were forms of parenting done with good intentions but bad to horrible outcomes and we know better now. Also, "of the era" is extremely subjective.

While it doesn't seem out of place for a mother in the United States to slap a child in the 1960s or 1970s, I'm going to venture that a father choking his child to point that Sedaris himself was choked would be seen as at least objectionable. While this opens another can of worms, for example, there are enough stories about stars and other witnesses looking askance at Joan Crawford's behavior with her children in the 1940s for it not to be entirely dismissable as "of the times".

I don't know why some people can look back at such things and laugh while others can't. Tiffany wanted a reason why her life was such a mess, one that didn't involve the depression and mental illness that have plagued both sides of our family for generations and will unjustly infect one person but not the next. As the years passed and parenting became a verb, behavior that was once normal enough-- calling your child a loser, whipping them with a belt or a switch-- was seen in a different light. We who were beaten and belittled often reflect upon it with something akin to pride. It speaks to our resilience and our ability to forgive. Not Tiffany, though. To her it was criminal. (pgs 206 and 207)

This ventures close (and probably crosses the line) to dangerous territory. It's one thing if you can look back on something terrible a certain way, particularly when it meant your survival. It's quite another when you impugn other people for the way that they saw it, which given the evidence Sedaris himself gave us, it was criminal, or at least bordered there, even by the standards of the time (asking your underage daughter to pose nude so you can photograph her would've been frowned upon by most people in the 1970s, I'd wager).

And I don't know if I'd call them nostalgia goggles, but Sedaris's sense of history is more than a bit eschew here. Parenting was a verb long before he and his siblings were abused (or "experienced their father's actions"). Parenting, particularly of the Baby Boom generation, warranted no small amount of consideration (thus the popularity of figures like Dr Spock). He's correct that what was once considered an appropriate way to raise your child (strict and harsh physical discipline and repeated verbal harassment) is now seen as detrimental, not beneficial, at least by reasonable people.

But I suspect realizing and embracing the fact a form of parenting you endured is detrimental isn't a welcome or wanted prospect to many. Also, I'm leery of ascribing positive traits to any form of abuse or trauma, as too often it's seen as a positive character development that happened because of something awful you endured, not despite it.

He goes on to mention his sister vehemently objecting to any kind of child abuse, and challenging a stranger for hitting her child, offering to watch the child for her for awhile. She suggests to Sedaris that if everybody did that, people wouldn't have to grow up as they did.

Sedaris scoffs at his sister's "grandiosity" suggesting her "stand-back-while-I-save-the-world" attitude didn't come out of concern for the child's welfare, but her own sense of importance.

Ultimately, tellingly, Sedaris does not (and cannot) exonerate his dead father of his dead sister's accusations, and reflects

In the wake of her death, we still think of her accusation. Our father could certainly be inappropriate, especially when held to today's standards, but that didn't necessarily make him a pedophile. That said, his behavior didn't help his case any. To the rest of us, it was, if not normal, then at least him-- the way he'd take us to McDonald's, for instance, and say to the counter girl if she was overweight, "Well, hey there, Porky."

"Dad," we'd say, so embarrassed.

He'd just laugh. "She's out of shape, and someone needs to tell her as much." (pg 211)

Never mind that Sedaris's "today's standards" defense doesn't quite wash for the reasons I went into (seriously, the nude pictures alone and that's one of the examples he gave). The most heartbreaking aspect is possibly the ending of the essay.
Sedaris reflects on how his father prided himself on having attractive daughters and getting compliments from country club members when his family was out to dinner.

Recently in a hotel dining room, Sedaris spots a family with a mother, father, and four kids "ranging in age from twelve to eighteen, all nicely dressed and groomed, none of them on their phones, all of them lively and engaged." (pg 212)
Sedaris offers to them "What a beautiful family you have," (something he wished his family had been told, rather than noting his sisters' attractiveness) and "times being what they are and afraid I had crossed some line, I hurried, awkwardly, out of the door and back to my room."

His father's abuse could have been Just the Times, for Sedaris, maybe.

But as far as his treatment of his oldest son alone, Sedaris (in another essay) is startlingly frank about one of his most frequent recurring characters:

As long as my father had power, he used it to hurt me. In my youth I just took it. Then I started to write about it, to actually profit from it. The money was a comfort, but better yet was the roar of live audiences as they laughed at how petty and arrogant he was. (pg 238 and 239)

He also relates a story about being asked to give the baccalaureate address at Princeton. Sedaris admits he never enjoys those types of experiences ("The audience is always exhausted, it's always unbearably hot out, and on top of it all, you're forced to wear a dark, heavy robe and what looks like a cushion on your head." pg 239) but knowing his father's penchant for "Ivy League stuff", Sedaris tells his father if he'd accompany him, he'd do it. His father is thrilled and eagerly agrees.

Before the ceremony, Sedaris meets with the president of the university and his father informs the president that she had made a terrible mistake, that actually the person she really wanted was Amy Sedaris. He extols her virtues to the president and finishes "Amy's the ticket, not David."

The president politely thanks him and changes the subject, asking Sedaris about his recently finished lecture tour, but his father won't let it drop, lobbying hard for his famous daughter to replace his famous (but not to his father) son.

Afterward, Sedaris asks his father if that's why he came here with him, and his father scoffs that the woman needed to know she could've done better.
It's worth noting that at the time he was asked to give the address as now, Sedaris was one of the most successful and influential American authors, and was already well into "Everything is a bestseller" mode.

I was fifty years old at the time, and what hurt were not my father's words-- I was immune by this point-- but the fact that he was still trying to undermine me. I never blamed Amy when things like this happened. It wasn't her fault. Likewise, I never blamed Gretchen when I had an art show and he told whoever was in charge that the person they really needed was his daughter Gretchen. "She's got the talent, not him." (pg 240)

However, in his father's actions, Sedaris discovers an upside to his relationship to his siblings and his family dynamics as a whole.

He was always trying to pit his children against one another, never understanding the bond we shared. It was forged by having him as a father, and as long as he was alive, it held. (pg 241)

Sedaris concludes

Saul Bellow wrote, "Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces." I felt like I'd collected all the big, easy-to-reach, obvious ones. The splinters, though, will definitely take a while-- the rest of my life perhaps. I could feel them beneath my skin as I paused with my sisters in this cool, shady glen, orphaned at last among the pussytoes. (pg 241)

But it's not just his now-deceased father that's up for examination. His most famous sibling who in the course of Sedaris's own writing career has matched him for fame (if not in some quarters surpassed him), he deconstructs that very public image in a sweet and heartfelt way.

When we were young, my sister Amy and I used to pretend that we had a hospitality show.
[...]

She was at ease in front of the nonexistent cameras, while I tended to freeze up, qualities that would continue into our adulthood when the cameras became real. I go on talk shows and look like a hostage, my hands twisted in my lap, my eyes darting this way and that, counting the seconds until the host releases me. Amy, on the other hand, appears completely at home. People who watched her on Letterman, or see her now on The Late Show or Later Than Late or Now It's So Late It's Actually Early, think of her as bubbly. The word quirky gets tossed around as well, but she's neither of those things. In real life, Amy is thoughtful and low-key, more apt to ask a question than answer one. (pg 73)

The writer Douglas Carter Beane hired by sister to act in one of his plays and was later heard to say, "What do you call it when Amy Sedaris recites one of your lines? A coincidence."

"What the hell was going on out there?" I'd ask after a performance, more astonished than angry, really. I can never get angry with her.

"Well, people laughed," Amy would say, referring to something she'd improvised.

"Yes, but when your character says something like that, it completely undermines..."

"Oh, come on. It was funny."

And, of course, it was. I've never seen audiences laugh the way they did at those plays. Movies and TV can't capture what's special about Amy. She's not an actress, exactly, or a comedian but more like someone who speaks in tongues. As opposed to myself, and just about everyone I've ever known, she lived completely in the moment. "What was that funny thing you said yesterday when we say that old blind woman get mowed down by a skateboarder?" I'll ask.

And she'll have no memory of it. When Amy gets going, it's like she's possessed. (pgs 76 and 77)

Speaking of siblings, we'd touched on Sedaris's deceased sister Tiffany before, but she comes up unexpectedly in brutal ways. Much like with Jenny Lawson's mix of comedy and tragedy, the so-casual reminders pack a huge punch:

"Let me see," Amy said. I handed her the phone and she, in turn, passed it to Lisa. It then went by the spots where Tiffany and Gretchen would be if Tiffany hadn't killed herself and Gretchen hadn't fallen asleep at her boyfriend's house earlier that evening, and on to Kathy, and then to my niece, Maddy, and back to Paul. (pg 102)

It's telling of just how his sister's death still weighs on him.

The book is both beautiful and heartfelt and abominable and frustrating. Can David Sedaris's style, at least this David Sedaris, who often it feels a lot like the old David Sedaris would've mocked to ribbons, survive the 2020s? Hopefully he'll make a turn and this book might be an awakening. Or more likely, you'll still get people like me reading him and being displeased with this new Sedaris, still hoping for the voice of a different time.


Notable: Sedaris reflects on fame more here than I can remember him ever doing. Which may be apt, because his star has steadily risen.

Pre-Sandy Hook shooting at the gun range with his sister Lisa, the man running the show is unfamiliar with Sedaris's work apparently, and somehow mistakes his name for "Mike", not "David":

Not getting the "Wait a minute-- the David Sedaris?" I have come to expect when meeting someone was bad enough, but being turned into a Mike of all things. (pg 8)

When Sedaris is visiting his dying father, he's recognized by the staff. Well, sort of.

A few moments later, another aide walked into the room. "Excuse me," she said, "but are you the famous son?"

"I'm a pretty sorry excuse for famous," I told her. "But yes, I'm his son."

"So you're Dave? Dave Chappelle? Can I have your autograph? Actually, can I have two?"

"Um, sure," I said.

I'd just joined Hugh in cleaning the easy chair when the woman, who seemed slightly nervous, the way you might be around a world-famous comedian who is young and Black and has his whole life ahead of him, returned for two more autographs.

"I'm the worst son in the world, " I told her, reaching for the scraps of paper he was holding out. "My father fell on April seventh, and this is the first time I've visited, the first time I've talked to him, even."

"You put yourself down too much," the woman said. "Just pick up the phone every so often-- that's what I do with my mother." She offered a forgiving smile. "You can make that second autograph to my supervisor." And she gave me a name. (pgs 19 and 20)

My sister-in-law Kathy, had outdone everyone, stopping by sometimes twice a day, taking Dad to lunch, rubbing lotion into his feet. I was the only exception. Me. Dave Chappelle.

"Do you think we can get a few pictures together?" one of the nurses asked me on my way out.

"Oh, wait, I want one too," another woman said, and another after her.

"Look," I imagined them telling people afterward, "I got a photo of me with Dave Chappelle."

"No, you didn't," they'd be told.

Of course, I'd be long gone by then. Like always. (pg 21)

If you don't know him well enough to know he's not Dave Chappelle and you don't know Chappelle well enough to know he's not David Sedaris, why would you want a pic with either? Such is the lure of the concept of fame!

I assumed at first glance that this was written pre-Chappelle's desperate attempt to remain relevant by attacking gay and trans people, among other things, otherwise the description might be different. Reading the rest of the book, though, I'm pretty sure Sedaris would leave it.
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Sedaris is rewarded in audience participation with various stories of people shoving things up their anuses.

By the time a nurse told me about a patient who had inserted an electric toothbrush inside himself, and another who'd managed a two-liter bottle of Diet Mtn Dew, I was so inured that I said only, "Wait a minute. Diet?"(pg 121)

What's up with the spelling of Diet Mountain Dew? I wonder if it's some sort of avoidance of copyright issues? Somehow?
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"Oh my God!" my fellow guests cried, as if it were a baby panda they had stumbled upon. "How adorable are you?" One woman announced that she had two fur babies waiting for her at home.

"It must kill you to be separated from them," the whore who set the plate on the carpet said.

"Oh, it does," admitted the jism-soaked hag who had started the conversation. "But they'll see Mommy soon enough." (pg 257)

Sedaris, who opens the book with a heavy-handed quote about "cancelling" and sniffs constantly about judgemental people (so long as you're judging for bigotry, particularly racism), sure has strong feelings about a grown woman bringing her small dog in a hotel and feeding it from her plate.

Also, this reads not only as hypocritical (you shouldn't spend your life criticizing other people for bigotry, you should spend your life criticizing other people for harmless but annoying things that don't affect you), it reads as considerably nastier ("jism-soaked hag") than his previous snarks at annoying behavior. I'm sure it's trying to read as funny, but after the rest of the book, he's sort of lost his bid at a relatable voice.



Final Grade: Sometimes, particularly for a long-dead author and/or a book from decades ago, I'm willing to cut slack. Sometimes I'll even do it for more recent work.
But like Where the Crawdads Sing, a recent book with "questionable" content and a controversial author (although what Delia Owens has allegedly done is not exactly comparable) that was written within the past five years and topping bestseller lists, I'm not able to separate the bigoted content from the rest of the book. Sedaris's attitudes espoused about everything from the pandemic to racial justice to service workers and trans people, I don't feel comfortable handwaving. With that in mind,

NO GRADE