I’ll confess my heart sank slightly at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of them previously published in the New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier output, strike me as increasingly shticky and reliant on anecdotes too thin for their weight. (From the essay Little America: “Few things drive me crazier than people who put their feet up on the furniture.”) After nine previous volumes, Sedaris would seem to be suffering from a problem that comes to all writers in the end, and memoir writers in particular, which is a dearth of useable material. What can there possibly be left in the Sedaris backstory that the writer hasn’t already mined?
Well, as it turns out, there is still lots of useable stuff, as well as some an editor could have put a red line through, although Sedaris, who has sold more than 16m books, may well consider himself part of the post-editing elite. (I was reminded while reading of a line from a profile of JK Rowling several years ago in which, referring to The Casual Vacancy, Ian Parker wrote: “Some sentences cause you to picture a Little, Brown editor starting to dial Rowling’s number, then slowly putting down the handset.”) And perhaps it doesn’t matter; as long as Sedaris’s superfans keep coming, both for the books and events, why mess with the formula? For less committed followers, however, reading Sedaris is a glitchier experience than it was.
The new collection contains 28 short pieces that Sedaris has harvested from everyday experiences with his husband, Hugh, his siblings and his friends, and while in New York, England and on the road. He is continually touring and, as far as the essays are concerned, that’s where life gets in for Sedaris, guaranteeing a certain amount of material generated by chats with drivers, fleeting interactions at airports and the-general-public-say-the-funniest-things encounters with readers who have come to see him. If the scope is narrow, the Sedaris tone still charms, even as it advances to a state of crankiness that makes him look like a gay Larry David. “I’m in the hard part of getting old – the part where everything irritates you,” he writes. No kidding, and if Curb Your Enthusiasm can get away with an episode devoted to the hell of plastic packaging, then Sedaris is entitled to do the feet-on-furniture thing.
Which is to say, when it’s good it’s still good. In his essay The Hem of His Garment, he writes about people “who aren’t in show business but dazzle nevertheless”, and points for support to Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas (and mother of the late Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood), 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’s experience at a No Kings protest against Trump, in which he finds himself baffled by his fellow protestors’ lack of focus. “Go to a protest now,” he writes, “and within seconds you’re looking at the person next to you, thinking, ‘Globalize the Intifada? I thought we were here to defend Masterpiece Theatre!’”
It’s low-hanging fruit, but I enjoyed the image of Sedaris looking around the protest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and noting certain aesthetic similarities between the No Kings protestors and the kooks of the Tea Party circa Obama’s first term. Focusing on “a bearded man playing the accordion”, Sedaris writes that the protestors seem to offer “the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: ‘Join us! We folk-dance!’”
Which brings us to what feels like the writer’s occasionally too rote adoption of the grumpy-old-man trope. When he makes a joke about saying “mothering person” instead of “motherfucker”, or asks, while describing someone, “are you allowed to say swarthy any more?” it’s so lame, so unfunny, so beneath a writer of Sedaris’s standing that it triggers a real are-you-kidding-me moment. Sedaris is only 69; he lives in New York and Europe and constantly travels the world; this kids-today-eh stuff is off the mark and should’ve been nixed.
The strongest sections, meanwhile, aren’t riffs on modern life but observations about people, close to him or otherwise, and in which Sedaris has always been at his shrewdest and most powerful. If one suffers a slight sense of weariness when he opens yet another sentence with the phrase, “My sister Amy”, the writing about his mother always hits hard. In the essay Cool Mom, a cascade of memories is triggered when he sees a fiftysomething woman at 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 the point that he could write about his family for ever and never run dry: “Whatever our mother was to us, it’s too complex and momentous to ever fit onto a sweatshirt. A person would need a whole mountain, and then some.”
It is these reminiscences that send me back to his earlier books and remind me just how lasting some of Sedaris’s images are: the time his mum locked him and his siblings out of the house in the snow; the time she made him give his Halloween candy to some loser kid who came trick-or-treating on the wrong day. In the essay Ashes, from his second collection, Naked, there is that account of her death, a beautifully written piece in which his mother is smoking while contemplating her own end and none of them knows what to do.
Beneath the whimsy, there has always been a savage side to Sedaris, and an even more deeply buried layer of sentiment. In that same piece, Cool Mom, one sees where Sedaris’s writing voice comes from. Referring to the culture of the family he grew up in, he writes: “Nothing got made fun of more than sincerity.” And yet, as with so many pro curmudgeons, the impression one gets of Sedaris after reading him is of someone who feels things deeply and is probably, at root, a soppy guy. I love the piece about his oldest and closest friend, Dawn, who, he writes, “dresses like a Swiss person” 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 boyhood pal he hadn’t seen or thought of for decades. “I am 67. This is my life, but different now, diminished, because Dan Thompson, who was there at the start of it and who made it so very worthwhile, has died.”
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In the essay A Long Way Home, Sedaris and Hugh give a stranger a lift back to the city from Maine after their flight has been cancelled, an account of a seven-hour drive with a woman called Susan Du that I found unaccountably moving. “Hugh and I, 10 blocks now from our own apartment, waited with the engine running until she was safely through her building’s front door and well on her way to the elevator.” If these essays can sometimes feel slight, here is a moment in which the strange poignancy of a glancing encounter, like someone seen through a lighted window and for some reason always remembered, finds its perfect expression.
