Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

I’m so used to breezing by the non-fiction tables at the bookstore that though I have many times seen books by David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked), I never stopped to take a second look. Until now. And I couldn’t be more thrilled to have found this entertaining, witty, insightful essayist. But I also discovered that Sedaris is not in fact new to me—I’ve heard him on NPR, and just now realized that he wrote "The Santaland Diaries," a very funny piece about his experience as a Christmas elf at Macy’s which I saw performed four years ago at Portland Center Stage. (It was a total crack-up, followed by another one-man performance of the heartwarming/heartbreaking story “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote, one of my favorite things to read during the holidays).

Anyway. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a collection of personal essays that parades before readers wise enough to stop at non-fiction tables Sedaris’s self-depracating, sardonic wit. Topics stem largely from his personal relationships, and he spares no one—least of all his nearest and dearest—but is seldom (if ever) actually mean-spirited. On the contrary, pretty well every essay, however cynical and biting it may start out, ends with a moment of raw, exposed human emotion, or some insightful Truth that lends a warm glow of tenderness to the absurdity he’s just trotted out. Take, for example, “Let it Snow.” Young David is in 5th grade, and he and his sisters are snowed out of school. “On the fifth day of our vacation my mother had a little breakdown,” he writes. “Our presence had disrupted the secret life she led while we were in school, and when she could no longer take it she threw us out. It wasn’t a gentle request, but something closer to an eviction. ‘Get the hell out of my house,’ she said.”

After several hours in the outdoors, the kids devise the rather desperate attention-getting plan of getting hit by a car; when they’re ratted out by a well-meaning neighbor, their mother comes to fetch them:

Another car passed and then we saw our mother, this puffy figure awkwardly negotiating the crest of the hill. She did not own a pair of pants, and her legs were buried to the calves in snow. We wanted to send her home, to kick her out of nature as she had kicked us out of the house, but it was hard to stay angry at someone that pitiful-looking.

“Are you wearing your loafers?” Lisa asked, and in response our mother raised her bare foot. “I was wearing loafers,” she said. “I mean, really, it was there a second ago.”

This was how things went. One moment she was locking us out of our own house and the next we were rooting around in the snow, looking for her left shoe. “Oh forget about it,” she said. “It’ll turn up in a few days.” Gretchen fitted her cap over my mother’s foot. Lisa secured it with her scarf, and surrounding her tightly on all sides, we made our way back home.

In “Put a Lid on It” Sedaris describes his nutty sister who trolls garbage bins for anything she can sell (or eat—shudder) and basically lives like an animal, but at the end of the chapter there is a lovely, distilled moment in which he steps back and takes a look at himself, acknowledging that the real problem is not his sister’s unusual lifestyle but his own need to make her into something he can understand, to fix her. There are lots more examples, but this is getting long. So I will just say, do yourself a favor and read something by David Sedaris. His extraordinary, sharp wit made me laugh out loud, but each chapter seems to boil down to some really poignant insight, such as: when it comes to family, forgiveness is automatic (got that from the jacket). Or this, from a chapter called “Who’s the Chef” in which he's frustrated by an argument with his boyfriend Hugh: “Dead or alive, I'd have no peace, and so I let it go, the way you have to when you’re totally dependent on somebody.” Loved that line.