II will admit that my heart was a little saddened by the prospect of reading a new volume of David Sedaris’s essays, some of which were first published in The New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier output, seem to me increasingly shaky and dependent on anecdotes far below their weight. (From the essay Little America: “Few things drive me more crazy than people stepping on furniture.”) After nine previous volumes, Sedaris appears to be suffering from a problem that eventually befalls all writers, and especially memoirists, which is a lack of useful material. What could possibly be left out of Sedaris’s backstory that the author hasn’t already explored?
Well, as it turns out, there’s still a lot of usable stuff out there, plus some editors can put down a red line, although Sedaris, who has sold more than 16 million books, can consider himself part of the post-editing elite. (I was reminded of this when reading a line from a profile of JK Rowling many years ago, referring to The Casual Vacancy, which said, Ian Parker wrote: “A few sentences lead you to a short still, the Brown editor begins dialing Rowling’s number, then slowly puts down the handset.”) And maybe it doesn’t matter; As long as Sedaris has superfans flocking to both the books and the events, why mess with the formula? However, for less committed followers, reading Sedaris is a more difficult experience than ever.
The new collection consists of 28 short pieces that Sedaris collected from everyday experiences with her husband, Hugh, her siblings, and her friends, in New York, England, and on the road. He is constantly touring and, as far as the essays are concerned, this is where Sedaris comes to life, guaranteeing a certain amount of material arising from conversations with drivers, fleeting interactions at airports and encounters with the general public-saying the funniest things to readers who have come to see him. If the scope is narrow, Sedaris’ vocal is still charming, even if it advances into a state of hoarseness that makes him look like a gay Larry David. He writes, “I’m in a tough phase of getting older – the part where everything annoys you.” No joke, and if Curb Your Enthusiasm can get away from an episode dedicated to the hell of plastic packaging, Sedaris deserves to do the feet-on-furniture thing.
That said, when it’s good, it’s still good. In his essay The Hem of His Garment, he writes about people “who are not in show business, but are dazzling nonetheless”, and points to his endorsement of Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas (and mother of Planned Parenthood’s late Cecil Richards), which is an example simultaneously so random, so absurd, and yet so on the money in this context that I laughed out loud. Other laugh-out-loud moments include Sedaris’ experience at the No Kings protest against Trump, in which he finds himself baffled by his fellow protesters’ lack of focus. “Go to a protest now,” he writes, “and within seconds you’ll be looking at the person next to you, thinking, ‘Globalize the intifada? I thought we were here to protect Masterpiece Theatre!”
This is low-hanging fruit, but I enjoyed Sedaris’s image around the protests in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and saw some aesthetic parallels between the No Kings protesters and the Tea Party kooks around Obama’s first term. Focusing on “a bearded man playing the accordion”, Sedaris writes that the protesters “offer the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: ‘Join us! We folk-dance!'”
Which makes us feel as if the author is sometimes adopting the clichés of a grumpy-old man. When he makes fun of saying “mothering person” instead of “motherfucker”, or when describing someone he asks, “Are you allowed to say that black colored Any more?” It’s so lame, so ridiculous, so beneath Sedaris’s status as a writer that it triggers a real-you-kidding-me moment. Sedaris is only 69; he lives in New York and Europe and travels constantly around the world; this Kids-Today-eh thing is wrong and should have been scrapped.
The strongest sections, meanwhile, are not riffs on modern life, but rather observations about people close to him or others, and in which Sedaris has always been the smartest and most powerful. If one feels a little tired when starting another sentence with the phrase “my sister Amy,” it is always difficult to write about one’s mother. In the essay Cool Mom, a cascade of memories is triggered when he sees a fifty-year-old woman at the Denver airport in a T-shirt that reads: “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.” What follows is Sedaris at his best, proving that he can write about his family forever and never be wasted: “Who our mother was to us is so complex and important that it could never fit into a sweatshirt. It would take a whole mountain for one person, and then some.”
It is these memories that draw me back to his earlier books and remind me how enduring some of Sedaris’s images are: the time when his mother locked him and his siblings out in the snow; That time when she asked him to give his Halloween candy to some loser kid who came trick-or-treating on the wrong day. The essay In the Ashes, from his second collection, Naked, describes his death, a beautifully written piece in which his mother is smoking while thinking about her end and neither of them knowing what to do.
Beneath the cynicism, Sedaris has always had a cruel side, and an even more deeply buried layer of emotion. In the same work, Cool Mom, one sees where Sedaris’s writing voice comes from. Referring to the culture of the family in which he grew up, he writes: “Nothing was made fun of more than honesty.” And yet, as is the case with many Pro Condition, the impression one gets of Sedaris after reading him is of someone who feels things deeply and is perhaps, fundamentally, a nasty man. I love this article about his oldest and closest friend, Don, he writes, “dresses like a Swiss” and “smells like a cardboard box”. (I laughed out loud at that, too.) Or the piece in which Sedaris learns of the death of a childhood friend he hadn’t seen or thought about in decades. “I’m 67. This is my life, but different now, because Dan Thompson, who was at the beginning of it and who made it so meaningful, has died.”
After newsletter promotion
In the essay A Long Way Home, Sedaris and Hugh give a stranger a lift back to town from Maine after their flight is cancelled, an account of a seven-hour drive with a woman named Susan Du, who I found wandering around unaccounted for. “Hugh and I, 10 blocks away from our own apartment, waited with the engine running until she was safely through the front door of her building and up to the elevator.” If these essays can sometimes seem light, here is a moment in which the strange poignancy of a glimpsed encounter, like one seen through a lighted window and for some reason always remembered, finds its fullest expression.
