The last time I read this collection of short stories I was in my early 20s nearing the end of undergrad and still figuring my shit out as a young adult. I’m just over 40 now and it was a wildly different experience. I’m not sure I would’ve revisited it if it weren’t for a virtual book group with some knitting friends that started this year, but I’m glad I revisited it now that I’m done with it.
One thing I will say is that David Sedaris is not for everyone. His writing is dripping with sarcasm (maybe even disdain at some points) and the darkness of his humor pushes some of his stories from dark humor to morbid observations. As I was re-reading this I realized just how differently the stories, especially those that featured his mother, impacted me this time versus last time.
When reading this last time, the cracks in my relationship with my mom hadn’t really started, I was just coming into my own as an independent adult, she was just starting to drift into alcoholism. Nearly 20 years later, she’s passed and so those cracks were absolute chasms prior to her death. This was fascinating during our discussion because the way others viewed Sedaris’s mother in the stories was wildly different from how I viewed her.
In particular, the story “Let it Snow” to me showed his mother as definitely having some sort of substance abuse issue and neglectful, locking her children out of the house for the entire day and ignoring them even when it was snowing and then appearing at the end of the day without a jacket and a missing shoe as if she remembered all of a sudden that she had kids and did need to take responsibility for them, an afterthought. It just rubbed me the wrong way.
There were many other stories that I felt couldn’t truly be appreciated by someone unless you’d experienced something similar especially as a gay man. Many of us are sarcastic and come across as “sassy” or “harsh” because of self-preservationist tendencies. We build walls and fortifications around our most inner child starting at a young age out of efforts to hide or to blend in and that results in barbs or looks that are often interpreted as biting . . . sarcastic . . . mean . . . haughty . . . better than . . . judging . . etc. And this projection of toughness, of impenetrableness, of iciness isolates us and keeps many of us from forming relationships with friends and family that aren’t like walking on glass all out of an effort to hide a part of ourselves until we have the confidence to be ourselves. And at that point re-building relationships is incredibly hard or oftentimes impossible because all people know of you at that point is the diamond tough surface that you used to protect the fragile inner self.
In particular, this came across in some of Sedaris’s more neurotic and darker stories like “Full House”, “Repeat After Me”, “Possession”, and “Nuit of the Living Dead”. Many of these (and others), come across as crass on first read and that’s how I described them. However, as we discussed them in our book group meeting and as I look back on reading them, I realized that Sedaris is just saying the quiet parts out loud. He is the unfiltered voice in your head that has lived however many years as a gay man in the south growing up in the late 60s-70s and he had to survive mentally and physically and of course he’s going to come across as crass. He survived and he took what many might see as a negative and turned into a positive through oversharing and removing the filter painting the harsh realities and truths of his own family.
I’ll end by saying, we do have to ask how much he embellished and what parts are true and we can’t ever really know. His family have talked about some of the stories and every one’s memory is different, but for what it’s worth these are his memories colored by his experience, his identity, his survival, and for that we just have to appreciate them for what they are, not what they could (or should) have been.
Recommendation: I don’t think the entire collection held up well, but I do think there are some powerful short stories in here. Sedaris has a way with fleeting moments that most others would never remember. He takes them and twists them and ties disparate pieces together that expose the thoughts you don’t want to say out loud. There is nothing quiet about these stories and even if you don’t like them, you can appreciate Sedaris’s artistry and dark, often times morbid, humor.
No opening or closing lines as this is a book of short stories.
