2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
PHOTOGRAPH BY SANDY CARAWAN
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FAMILY MAN a review by Randall Martoccia David Sedaris. Calypso. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
RANDALL MARTOCCIA works in the English Department and serves as NCLR Assistant Editor at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, and has an MA in creative writing. His fields of interest include contemporary literature, screenwriting, filmmaking, and film criticism. In 2004, Martoccia created a short film entitled “Charlie-Go-Round” through his company Lawn Chair Productions. He has also gone on to create several shorter films including two zombie movies, a movie full of continuity errors, and an adaptation of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour.” Humorist DAVID SEDARIS was born in Johnson City, NY, but grew up in Raleigh, NC. In addition to his numerous books, he is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. Sedaris generously shared a recording of his essay “The Ship Shape” (read by him) for the 2008 NCLR Mirth Carolina Laugh Tracks CD. Read more about his North Carolina connection in Brian Glover’s essay “De-Located Yankees: David Sedaris and Growing Up Northern in the South, 1965–1983), published in Southern Cultures in 2018.
Since 1992, when he premiered “Santaland Diaries” on National Public Radio, David Sedaris has published well over one hundred essays in nine collections, and together these essays constitute an autobiography. Readers have come to know Sedaris in these three and half decades as David the awkward child, the isolated teen, the bohemian, the expatriate, the boyfriend, the brother, the son, and the elf. In his latest collection, Calypso, Sedaris takes on a new role, David the family patriarch. Calypso has twenty-one essays, some of which cover recent events, such as the ascendency of Donald Trump and the legalization of gay marriage. Other topics include his obsessive experience with a FitBit, his partner Hugh’s prolific sexual history, his own diminutive status, and language quirks of those in the travel industry. These topic-driven essays tend to be self-contained. The book coheres around the half dozen essays set in David and Hugh’s Emerald Isle house, The Sea Section. These stories feature Hugh; David’s father, Lou; and his siblings Gretchen, Lisa, Amy, Paul, and
Tiffany – all of whom longtime readers will recognize as recurring characters. The first of these Sea Section essays, “Now We are Five,” takes place in the days after the family learns of his sister Tiffany’s suicide. The toxicology report tells them that she had suffocated herself with a bag. Sedaris considers the family’s blame: “Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?” (30). He concludes “A House Divided” with imagining the thoughts of someone passing by their beach house’s “gaily lit windows” and wondering “what we had done to deserve all this” (65). He is being ironic here with “this” referring to the sadness and confusion and possible family guilt. Note the first-person plural. If blame is cast, it is to be shared with the family. Only much later in the book – in the essay “The Spirit World” – do readers learn a reason for his personal guilt. When Tiffany visited him at a Boston reading, Sedaris had a security guard remove her. Sedaris writes, “[The guard] shut the door in my sister’s face, and I never saw her or spoke to her * Jina Moore, “Sister in a Glass House,” Boston Globe 15 Aug. 2004: web.