Old Town Crier July 2022 - Full Issue

THE LAST WORD

MIRIAM R. KRAMER

Happy-Go-Lucky

I

n the last twenty-five years the writer David Sedaris has gained what could oddly be called a mainstream cult following not only in the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries, but also all over the world.

After starting out reading essays on NPR in the 1990s, Sedaris continued with books such as Barrel Fever, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Calypso.

With his extensive book tours followed by long, conversational book signings, he has even made his self-promotion fun and collaborative. We long-time readers consider ourselves honorary members of his family, who are often the subject of his satirical essays. So where has his mordant wit taken us in Happy-Go-Lucky, his most recent release?

In this case, you should judge a book by its cover.

Happy-Go-Lucky features a shudder-inducing clown and cheerful little girl on its book jacket and even in its electronic versions. The cover is peak Sedaris.

He has always been interested in the unusual and freakish aspects of human nature, and somehow makes them acceptable and accessible to a mass audience. His public follows his lead in enjoying, or at least experiencing, a frisson of weirdness and distaste from looking at the bizarre. In this book, he takes a sobering look at life in the pandemic and late middle age, but leavens it with the appreciation of the absurd and grotesque, along with the superficial lightness that gilds much of his work.

With the recent publications of his two collections of diary entries, Theft by Finding and A Carnival of Snackery, he allowed readers to trace the evolution of his writing from 1977 to 2020. Sedaris is no longer the edgy young New York City writer who lives downtown and cleans houses or moves furniture 12 July 2022

to support his writing. He has not been that in a long time. You could say that with his residences in England, New York City, and North Carolina, he is now fully encapsulated in an upscale bubble that prevents him from ever becoming more practical.

If Sedaris has a target demographic, it is a middleclass, liberal-educated audience that has grown older and more affluent with him. While commercially successful, it never seems like he has written according to a commercial formula. We see other people through his cock-eyed, sharp, and yet often child-like vision. He never virtue-signals, or at least without realizing that he is doing it, and examines his own foibles and frustrations with the same ease that he does everyone else’s. He used to write in a heady, hilarious, and more stylized way, such as in the classic Me Talk Pretty One Day. Now he makes it easier for his readers to commiserate with his viewpoints by exaggerating less and showing more vulnerability.

The state of the world comes in for more scrutiny these days in his writing. Sedaris discusses how he pays attention to politics differently in the post– Donald Trump era. He takes a bemused look at gun culture in the United States, discussing the time he went for a one-time shooting and gun safety lesson with his sister, Lisa, right before the Sandy Hook school shooting. When I read this chapter, I noted that Happy-Go-Lucky was released a week after the Uvalde mass murder. As he points out, “every school shooting is different but the same. We see the

news footage, the crying children, the flowers and teddy bears in a pile getting rained on. There are reports that the community is ‘healing,’ and then it’s on to the next one.” I wonder how many new mass shootings will have taken place by the time this book review is published. Three? Four?

He and his partner, Hugh Hamrick, buy an apartment in New York City and start settling in as the pandemic arrives. Sedaris writes about the eeriness of walking miles at night across Manhattan seeing no one, and of the uproar of protests and marches there after the George Floyd murder, many sponsored by young white people taking selfies. He dips into the past, remembering what it was like to grow up gay in North Carolina after meeting a gay teenager in France. Hugh, his partner, comes in for his own session of David’s scrutiny for his temper and occasional crabbiness. In the process, the audience sees Hugh, with Sedaris’s knowledge, as a foil to his own sometimes childish and needy self, a flawed but much-beloved boyfriend. Hugh always comes off as the sober grown-up in the relationship.

As usual, David’s siblings are showcased. He shops for bizarre fashions and grotesque objets d’art with the hilarious Amy Sedaris, known in her own right for her comedic acting, appreciation for absurdity, and improvisations. He meets his sisters Lisa and Gretchen, along with his brother Paul, at the Sea Section, a beach house he bought for the family in North Carolina. If you have been reading Sedaris all along, you will be back on familiar terrain, virtually taking part in another Sedaris family summer vacation on Emerald Isle, perhaps participating in their annual tanning contest.

Yet now, even during beloved get-togethers, THE LAST WORD > PAGE 13

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