Sedaris

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

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Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays by David Sedaris | Goodreads

I remember falling in love with David Sedaris. I was staying in a Youth Hostel in the Lake District, having gone there to give a talk on ‘the fantastic fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’ to a room of people who couldn’t hear much of what I was saying. My bedroom was under the stairs, so I could hear people walk up and down throughout the night. But it was nice to get away, and of course it meant plenty of uninterrupted reading time.

One of the books I’d brought with me was Sedaris’s book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I’d picked out of my book group’s lucky dip Secret Santa. I didn’t know anything about the book or the author. Indeed, I thought it was a novel, and for some reason had decided the narrator was a young girl. It got confusing when the cast of characters changed in the second chapter, and when the narrator was addressed as ‘David’.

I pieced it together, of course, and now know that Sedaris is one of the most beloved humorists of his generation – sharing tales from his eccentric family’s eccentric life, sparing no details and no blushes. His parents, siblings, and long-term boyfriend come in for the most exposure, but anybody who crosses his path is likely to be dealt with in excruiating, gloriously witty prose.

And Barrel Fever (1994) was Sedaris’s first book. It is the only one of his books which divides into ‘Stories’ and ‘Essays’. The former are clearly fictional – for instance, the male narrator of ‘Parade’ has an energetic sexual relationship with Mike Tyson, having dumped Charlton Heston- but there is an interesting note in the beginning saying ‘This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.’ Is this the handiwork of a lawyer? Or do all his books have this disclaimer? Sedaris’s style relies on exaggeration and selection, but I would have assumed that his essays are based in at least some truth.

In my copy, there are only four essays – compared to 12 stories. I started by listening to the audiobook, which confusingly has fewer stories, retitles an essay, adds in one from Me Talk Pretty One Day, and cuts the most famous – ‘SantaLand Diaries’. It also had the cover art for Naked, so maybe I should have been forewarned. Anyway, once I’d compiled the audiobook and the print book, I read everything in Barrel Fever and more – and it is already clear in his first book that Sedaris is much better at the comic personal essay than he is at the short story.

‘Diary of a Smoker’ is a funny, short essay about how Sedaris’s family’s history of smoking, and how annoying it is when well-meaning non-smokers try to get you to quit:

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

‘The SantaLand Diaries’ made Sedaris famous, and is about his exploits and annoyances as an elf for Macy’s department store during the Christmas rush. It is every bit as scathing, self-loathing, and ridiculous as you’d expect from Sedaris writing that scenario – hovering just on the right side of good taste, as there an awful lot of innocent young children who are vulnerable to his sharp tongue.

But my favourite is ‘Giantess’, because it is so sublimely Sedaris. It’s very short, following Sedaris as he works as a painter ande decorator, while simultaneously in talks with the editor of Giantess magazine about submitting erotic fiction about abnormally tall or supernaturally growing women.

The editor of Giantess called to say he’d received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himsefl as Hank, saying, “I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you’ll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on, if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I’m talking about here, Dave?” Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall, and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”

It’s not exactly the sort of thing I usually read about, but I loved the specificity which Sedaris gives to the absurd. It’s the unasked-for use of ‘Dave’. It’s the exactitude of the height range, and the mundanity of submitting stories to a publication that doesn’t get any less mundane because of the variety of publication. Sedaris looks at the ridiculous face-on and finds a world-weariness in it.

I also enjoyed reading the stories, I should add. My favourite was the satirical ‘Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter’, perhaps because it is the nearest to Sedaris’s voice – albeit through a depth of distortion. For the most part, though, the stories seem an exercise in creating the most unpleasant people possible. Some are cruel, some are so thoughtless that they ruin other people’s lives, and some are evil to the point of absurdity. Individually, they were diverting – but it grows old quite quickly to simply have dreadful characters doing dreadful things. It’s a trick that obscures the more subtle ways that Sedaris can create character and twist scenarios into something special.

There’s no wonder that Sedaris pursued the personal essay for all his subsequent collections. Who knows how much is fiction and how much is genuine autobiography, but the blend is clearly where Sedaris excels. Barrel Fever is most interesting as an author trying his hand at different styles, and he made the right conclusion for his future books.

David Sedaris and the female David Sedaris

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One of my books for A Century of Books is David Sedaris’s 1997 collection Naked. One of the other books I’ve read recently, albeit not for A Century of Books because 2016 was already taken, is Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman – which I read on the strength of seeing her described as being the female David Sedaris. One might think that Amy Sedaris fit the bill there – or, more accurately, that the description was primarily marketing copy – but it convinced me, and I’m glad it did because Miss Fortune was great.

But Naked first. It’s exactly what you expect to get from David Sedaris, if you’ve read anything by him before. Like all his books, it has funny, bizarre, moving, and self-deprecating stories from across his life. I assume everything in all the collections has at least a foot in the truth, and I don’t quite know how one life has fit all of this in.

Then again, perhaps it is just his talent for turning the ordinary into the quirky and unusual. He writes about living with his injured grandmother, about finding a dirty book, about working in a cafeteria. Quite a few are about hitchhiking, at times with a quadriplegic friend. Each has its bizarre moments that Sedaris frames with deadpan sardonicism. Nobody could call him cheerful. His persona is mildly grumpy and cautiously optimistic – only to hit brick walls of people everywhere he goes.

Here’s a good example of how he writes – in this instance, about his experiences while experimenting with mime as a child:

I went home and demonstrated the invisible wall for my two-year-old brother, who pounded on the very real wall beside his playpen, shrieking and wailing in disgust. When my mother asked what I’d done to provoke him, I threw up my hands in mock innocence before lowering them to retrieve the imaginary baby that lay fussing at my feet. I patted the back of my little ghost to induce gas and was investigating its soiled diaper when I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-coloured velveteen blazer with matching slacks.

I think my favourite Sedaris remains Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, but that is chiefly because it’s the first one I read – and I think there is a lot to say for the first time one discovers his humour. It’s such a joy (without being remotely joyful in tone) that happening upon it is something to treasure. Naked was written a while before Dress Your Family, but the tone and the world are unchanging.

And what about Lauren Weedman? Well, I can certainly see why she is described as the female David Sedaris – she definitely has his way with a pithy sentence (“You know what bothers me about the idea of death? It’s so hard to look forward to, and I love planning”), shrugging at the absurdity of the world and contributing her own heavy doses of ridiculousness. In Miss Fortune (subtitled ‘fresh perspectives on having it all from someone who is not okay’), she focuses mostly on her the past decade of her life, with a few jumps further back in time. And that part of her life is dominated by marrying, gaining a stepson and a biological son, and getting divorced when her husband has an affair with the babysitter.

One of my favourite chapters/stories was about a stranger on Facebook contacting her to say that he’d killed nine people and would she write his life story. She takes this in her stride – getting in touch with their mutual friends to find out how likely he was to murder her, and then engaging in an occasional conversation with him. Like Sedaris, she refuses to sound too surprised.

It has been three days since Scott entered my life, and I can think of nothing else. “What would you do if someone told you that they had killed nine people?” has replaced “How much sand can a kid eat before it becomes a medical emergency?” as my opener in all social situations.

There’s also a lot about being pregnant and having a baby, about struggling as an actress, and about body image. Almost all of these stories – not so much the pregnancy ones – are, indeed, things I could imagine Sedaris writing about. She also writes about being adopted, and having two mums (since she reunited with her birth mother) – there is relatively little about this, and I think it might have been covered more thoroughly in her previous book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman’s Body. I have to say, this snippet about her (adoptive) family makes me want to read much more about them:

My mother and father had decided that instead of leaving us money after they died, like nice parents do, they wanted to spend their money while they were still with us. Our inheritance would be the memories we created together of touring vanilla bean factories and learning how to make a coin purse out of a coconut.

All in all, I think the Sedaris comparison is warranted and isn’t undue praise – indeed, I actually liked Miss Fortune even more than Naked. Her comedic balance of a sentence is exemplary. I guess the book is confessional, though with so much observational humour that you only realise afterwards that it has been confessional. It’s certainly extremely funny, and I hope she writes a lot more.

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

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Back in the days when I’d only dimly heard of David Sedaris, the book I had heard of was Me Talk Pretty One Day. Based on the title alone, I was under the assumption that it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems. It was perhaps that which led to me getting an embarrassingly long way into Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim before realising that it was not a novel about a young girl. But now, on my third Sedaris book, I’m in the swing of things – he writes humorous essays about his own life.  But you probably know that already.

This collection is (I believe) his bestselling title, and it is extremely funny. The focus is not so much on his family as it was in the other two books I read, although the first few stories do take place among those many brothers and sisters. They’re anecdotes, really, more than stories – about how David’s father forced them all to play instruments, with the misguided idea that they would become almost instantly proficient; about his overly-invested speech therapist; about tanning competitions on the beach. His eye for an anecdote is perfect. Sedaris is endlessly dry, self-deprecating, and able to find the humour in any experience – often through the throwing in of a bizarrely specific detail or unlikely piece of dialogue. Are all his reminiscences accurate? One assumes not. They are exaggerated at the very least. But that doesn’t matter a jot.

The two main sections of Me Talk Pretty One Day deal with Sedaris’ student years and his experiences trying to learn French. I’m always amazed at how many things Sedaris has crammed in his life, and one of those is a period during which he thought he’d try his hand at performance art. It is all extremely amusing (as that topic is more or less set up to be), even given my discomfort at reading about drug-taking. What makes it so brilliant is the dry, eye-rolling narrative that subtly looks back on disaffected, youthful David from the vantage of disaffected, middle-aged David. And when it comes served with sentences like the following, what more could you want? He is the master of putting together a sentence that neatly wraps up the ridiculous without making a song and dance about it:

I enrolled as an art major at a college known mainly for its animal-husbandry programme.
But the most sustained theme I’ve seen in the three books I’ve read so far is, as mentioned, his attempts to learn French and live in France (thanks to the French-dwelling of his partner Hugh). It is these experiences that give the collection its title – with a sort of oh-I-see sense that eluded me with Dress Your Family in Corduory and Denim and Let’s Discuss Diabetes With Owls. From his first venture to France, knowing only the French for bottleneck, to his intense lessons with an aggressive teacher, to living fairly confidently off phrases cribbed from medical audiobooks… His lessons sounded brutal, but also led to some amusing moments (of course), and this one gives a good example to Sedaris’ style for those who haven’t read him:

“And what does one do on the fourteenth of July? Does one celebrate Bastille Day?”

It was my second month of French class, and the teacher was leading us in an exercise designed to promote the use of one, our latest personal pronoun.

“Might one sing on Bastille Day?” she asked. “Might one dance in the streets? Somebody give me an answer.”

Printed in our textbooks was a list of major holidays accompanied by a scattered arrangement of photograph depicting French people in the act of celebration. The object of the lesson was to match the holiday with the corresponding picture. It was simple enough but seemed an exercise better suited to the use of the pronoun they. I didn’t know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.
I love that sort of pay-off at the end of that; the detail that is curiously specific and off-kilter, but carefully within the world that Sedaris has created. This world isn’t the real world, and isn’t a fictional universe, but it’s a beautiful, bizarre, grumpy, and very amusing realm that Sedaris has both created and made his own.

Oh, and I forgot to say – Liz very kindly gave me this copy; thanks so much, Liz!

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris

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Ok, confession time.  I’ve often seen David Sedaris’s book Me Talk Pretty One Day in bookshops, and thought it was a good title.  At some point along the way, this noticing must have developed into delusion, because for some reason I was sure it was a novel about a girl with mental development problems.  Erm… nope.  Turns out it’s memoir.

A similar thing happened with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) which I received from my friend Laura in a book group Secret Santa in 2011.  I took it up to the Lake District with me, thinking it was a novel.  Indeed, I was about thirty pages into it before someone referred to the narrator as David, and I suddenly realised that (a) the narrator wasn’t a woman, and (b) it was autobiographical.  I felt somewhat justified in my false assumption, though, scouring the blurb, because nowhere does it say that it’s autobiographical.  Lots of talking about him being a humorist par excellence (more on that anon), comparing him to Woody Allen and Oscar Wilde (because they have so much in common…), and talking about ‘his world’, which I suppose is a clue, but could equally apply to the world created by a novelist.  Eventually, in tiny letters by the barcode, I found the word ‘autobiography’, and all was solved.

As when I read Ali Shaw’s The Girl With Glass Feet and only discovered halfway through that Ali was a man, it was an instructive lesson in how such things influence my reading.  When I thought it was a novel, I was quite enjoying it; when I discovered it was a sequence of autobiographical essays, I started to really like it.  And I wouldn’t be able to tell you quite why that was, except that true events don’t need to be as sparklingly innovative or well-structured – they have the virtue, instead, of being true.

Many of the anecdotes do have the ring of fiction, though – truth stranger than fiction and all that.  I found the tales of Sedaris’s life in his first apartment away from home rather unnerving, with the kleptomaniac young girl next door – then there is the time he is mistaken for an erotic cleaner.  As you are.  But the word ‘family’ is in the title for a reason, and it is Sedaris’s vivid depiction of his family which makes this book so extraordinary (and, one presumes, the same is true of his other memoirs – indeed, I don’t know how he had this many stories left to tell after publishing all those other essay collections).

Don’t go thinking this is Swiss Family Robinson or Little Women, though – Sedaris’s family is a pretty bizarre bunch, with many unpleasant elements.  And Sedaris doesn’t sugar coat.  His sporty, brash, vulgar brother is no treat; there is more affection when he discusses his sister Lisa, and her feelings about potentially being portrayed in a film of his books.  There is, of course, an irony in publishing an essay about choosing to shield his family from intrusion, but it is still a beautiful moment nonetheless.

There are a couple of misfires in the collection.  I could have done without his story of manipulating children to undress and sit on his knee – not (to my mind) wholly redeemed by the fact that he was also a child at the time.  The vignette of house-hunting and finding the ideal home in Anne Frank’s attic was a one-line dark joke which didn’t work as an essay.  But that is not a bad hit rate, out of 22 essays.

What makes these essays special, and wonderfully readable, is Sedaris’s eye.  He lets us into his family circle – with every blemish well known, and every annoying trait magnified through repetition, but also with a glow of affection – sometimes, for Sedaris, reluctant – which cannot truly evaporate.  How he gets this into words, and through the most eccentric anecdotes, I have no idea.  But it works brilliantly.  I am far from the first to discover the wonder of Sedaris’s tone, but perhaps I am not the last – and I want to encourage you, particularly if you are in the US where his books are everywhere (why didn’t I buy any when I was there?!) to pick this up and see what you think.  The good personal essay, the expertly wry memoir, are seldom found.  My thanks are due to Laura, for giving me a copy of this at a Secret Santa and giving me a chance to find an excellent practitioner of that rare form!