By now, David Sedaris has his system down. First, hang around your relatives as much as possible, as they seem to suggest more storylines than any family since the Sopranos. Second, live overseas, the better to rail against the language and culture barriers shared with your home country, the United States.
Third — and when in doubt — just make some of it up.
Sedaris, the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day, Barrel Fever, Naked, and Holidays on Ice, has made a nice career out of just being himself.
A regular contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life, the New Yorker, Esquire, and a number of other monthlies, Sedaris now knows his own “character” — gay, nicotine-addicted, neurotic and slightly obsessive-compulsive — is well-developed enough to begin probing, Simpsons-like, into the lives of his supporting cast.
In the nearly two dozen essays compiled in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, those that feature family comprise the bulk of the lot.
In “Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post,” Sedaris once again relates the saga of his brother Paul — the estimable Rooster — who has gained a number of pounds and a bride-to-be, but lost none of his affinity for creative profanity. “This shit’s like making love in a canoe,” The Rooster, sipping some weak coffee, tells his brother. “It’s fucking near water!”
In another essay, “Slumus Lordicus,” Sedaris takes on his family, who are following a Carleton Sheets-like TV real estate magnate: “It seemed that by refinancing his house, he had bought seventeen more, which were then rented out, allowing him to snatch up a shopping center and several putt-putt courses.”
Over the next couple of years, his family buys a dozen duplexes on the south side of Raleigh. The younger Sedaris then began working for what he calls “The Empire,” doing odd jobs like “a week of painting or weatherproofing or digging up a yard in search of a pipe.” After a do-nothing tenant named Lance plays the race card — nay, the whole deck — Sedaris’ father refuses to confront the man, even as his “Empire” literally crumbles around him.
The most poignant bits involve his late mother. Whether locking the kids out of the house after one snow day too many, chastising her son for moving next to a trailer-trash family with a needy child named Brandy (“Let’s see,” she says. “Nine-year-old girl named after an alcoholic beverage. Single mother in a neighborhood the police won’t even go to. What else have you got for me?”), or lamenting her rich great-aunt Monie, she evinces the life-is-ridiculous-so-what-else-can-you-do-but-make-fun-of-it worldview that has served her son so well. The reason her son became a star, other than his clean, well-timed prose? He’s willing to save the biggest skewers for the meat of the book: himself.
In “Chicken in the Henhouse,” Sedaris arrives at a hotel late at night after listening to a talk radio show railing against homosexuality. The next morning, a hip young adolescent can’t handle all his instant coffees, so Sedaris offers to help. They take the elevator, but must stop after a floor or so he can smoke a cigarette — the only thing, it seems, that stops his obsessive-compulsive habit of touching people’s — especially children’s — hair. The pair finally makes it to the kid’s room, where the fidgety, “ass-sweating” Sedaris expects to be read the pedophile riot act. In typical fashion, he’s handed a tip instead.
In “Repeat After Me,” Sedaris’ oldest sister, Lisa, implores him to keep her beloved parrot out of a proposed movie based on his writing. Learning that Sedaris is considering a motion-picture deal, she asks, “Will I have to be fat in the movie?”
According to a recent interview, that movie has since been shelved, in part because Sedaris felt like he had little control over the casting of the characters and the subsequent dramatization of his essays.
Which fits. Like the rest of his family, Sedaris has no problems with making fun of his relatives, in-laws, or even the family pets. Let someone else mess with them, however, and you’ve got a whole crew of misfits to deal with.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2004.
